Liberals are becoming uneasily aware that the dictum that poverty equals Communism states only half the truth, and that there may be even less truth in its so widely accepted corollary—namely that all America has to do to win the “cold war” is pour enough money into backward Asia, Africa, and South America. Geoffrey Francis Hudson, one of the keener analysts of the Far Eastern situation and no newcomer to these pages, here takes a few moments to cast a cool eye on the warmhearted recommendations contained in the writings of a noted advocate of this policy, Stringfellow Barr, whose Let’s Join the Human Race (University of Chicago) and Citizens of the World (Doubleday) have provided many handy slogans for the critics of present American foreign policy.

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From time to time in history philosophers rediscover certain facts about human nature which have always been known, but have been for a while, owing to some special circumstances or fashion of thought, ignored and forgotten. A striking example of this has been the new recognition within the last twenty years of the potential importance of the will to power as a motive in human affairs. The 19th century was extremely unwilling to admit that the desire for power could be of any significance as a determinant of action in comparison with incentives definable in purely economic terms. On the one hand there were held to be the profit motives of individuals competing in a system of private enterprise; on the other, the economic interest of classes which could only be advanced through some kind of collective organization. The foreign policies of nations seemed to reflect the same ruling purposes; nationalism and imperialism were explained as emanations of economic man. Even altruistic motives, insofar as they were admitted, were in a sense economic, for the aims of the altruist were assumed to be material betterment of his fellow men. There were certainly some dissidents, such as Nietzsche, who saw mankind in a very different light, but they were dismissed either as lunatics—and Nietzsche, after all, died insane—or as romantic reactionaries yearning for an impossible heroic past. The prevailing habit of thought held that all human beings who mattered sought first a higher “standard of living,” whether for themselves alone or for groups of which they were members.

The First World War somewhat disturbed this outlook and the influence of Freud also had an unsettling effect. But it was only in the late 3O’s, when the shadows of Hitler and Stalin had begun to loom darkly across an increasingly anxious world, that at least a section of opinion began seriously to question the dogma of economic man as the 19th century had conceived him. In 1938, the year of the Anschluss, of Munich, and of the last phase of the Yezhovshchina in Russia, appeared Bertrand Russell’s highly significant book entitled Power: A New Social Analysis, which boldly challenged the assumption of the paramountcy of economic motivation. In his introductory chapter Russell wrote:

The orthodox economists, as well as Marx, who in this respect agreed with them, were mistaken in supposing that economic self-interest could be taken as the fundamental motive in the social sciences. The desire for commodities, when separated from power and glory, is finite, and can be fully satisfied by a moderate competence. The really expensive desires are not dictated by a love of material comfort. . . . This error in orthodox and Marxist economics is not merely theoretical, but is of the greatest practical importance, and has caused some of the principal events of recent times to be misunderstood. It is only by realizing that love of power is the cause of the activities that are important in social affairs that history, whether ancient or modern, can be rightly interpreted.

This was the response of a philosophical scientist to a world situation brought to crisis by violent tyrannies which did not at all fit into schemes of political behavior based on postulates of rational economic calculation. Eleven years later, after another world war had been fought and the “cold war” had succeeded it, a novelist painted a picture of an entirely totalitarian world in which the power of a party-state had become absolute, without even the remote competition of a liberal society. In Nineteen Eighty-four George Orwell makes the party boss explain to his victim who has been tortured in the “Ministry of Love”:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. . . . We are the priests of power. . . . The old civilizations claimed that they were founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—everything.

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The inability of believers in the primacy of economic motivation to recognize the hypertrophy of the will to power in modern systems of totalitarian dictatorship has been a major factor in the failures of democratic government to arrive at a realistic estimate of the character of these regimes before bitter experience taught what should have been obvious from the beginning. Assumptions which are more or less valid for liberal societies were applied to the interpretation of totalitarian policies for which they were entirely misleading. The impulse to power is of course operative in a political democracy—it was, after all, a veteran parliamentarian, Aristide Briand, who once said that “there is no pleasure that can be compared to power” —but it is checked and restrained by the habits of constitutional government and by a diversity of autonomous group interests. Even in the old-fashioned type of royal autocracy governmental power was limited by the traditional vested interests of propertied and priestly classes. It is only with the arrival of the modern totalitarian state that political power has, as it were, really come into its own, overriding all economic interests and exploiting the unprecedented opportunities of domination provided by new developments of technology and state organization. Democratic publicists and statesmen, however, long persisted in trying to explain the unfamiliar phenomena in terms to which they were accustomed, and expected the new race of dictators to behave as if they were businessmen in disguise. The British appeasement of Hitler was largely due to a fixed idea that what the Nazis were really after was a more equitable share of international markets—a belief fostered by the Nazis themselves with their pathetic propaganda about Germany’s tribulations as a “have-not” country. This idea lost its influence after Hitler’s march into Prague, but it was soon replaced, both in Britain and even more in America, by the no less fatal delusion that the only aim of the Communist rulers of Russia was to carry on the peaceful economic development of their country in order to raise the living standards of the Soviet peoples. The new faith was expressed by Joseph Davies in a wartime supplement to his Mission to Moscow:

In my opinion, the Russian people, the Soviet government and the Soviet leaders are moved, basically, by altruistic concepts. It is their purpose to promote the brotherhood of man and to improve the lot of the common people. They wish to create a society in which men may live as equals, governed by ethical ideals. They are devoted to peace. . . . The British Empire, the Americas and Russia, along with China, are the great complementary powers of the earth. Their interests, their governmental ideas and purposes do not conflict.

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If Ex-Ambassador Davies had been right, there would have been no serious obstacle in the way of cooperation between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union. The policies of the American and British governments in 1945 were indeed guided by convictions basically similar to those of Davies, and it was only Russian actions which finally forced statesmen in Washington and London reluctantly to revise their estimates of the situation. Even then there were those who persisted in attributing every manifestation of Soviet aggressiveness to some Western provocation, such as delay in opening a second front during the war or the abrupt termination of Lend-Lease in 1945. But the course of events was too strong for them, and the picture of One World united in effort to keep the peace and improve the lot of the Common Man was replaced by that of the Two Worlds, with “containment” as the West’s counter to the “Iron Curtain,” and rearmament as an urgent need for nations which had hastily disarmed after the war in the belief that peace was assured.

It would be remarkable, however, if this great change in opinion, both at official and popular levels, had entirely put an end to the way of thinking which underestimated both the motives and effects of violent power in human affairs. Moreover, once the delusion of Soviet good intentions had been discarded, the pendulum swung from one extreme to the other, so that many who had seen the problems of the postwar world in almost exclusively economic terms now came over to the view that armaments and alliances alone mattered. The tendency to forget about wartime projects for world reconstruction under the stress of the new coldwar tensions provoked opposition from groups of internationally-minded idealists who were not Communists, but had visions of a world crusade against poverty and claimed that a policy of merely military containment could not even achieve its purpose of stopping Communism. This outlook has recently crystallized into a specific point of view which may conveniently be called “Point Fourism.” Its most notable exponent in the United States has been Stringfellow Barr, whose pamphlet, Let’s Join the Human Race, and book, Citizens of the World, have presented his case with a high degree of polemical competence. Closely associated with him is Justice William O. Douglas, who has contributed a preface to Barr’s book, and whose own travel record, Strange Lands and Friendly People, is full of the sympathetic observation and large humanitarian feeling from which Point Fourism draws its greatest strength. In Britain views of a similar type are characteristic of the Bevanite section of the Labor party and find expression in Bevan’s political manifesto, In Place of Fear.

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The case of Point Fourism, as argued by Barr, deserves careful consideration. He claims that Roosevelt’s policy “called for a common assault on German militarism and negotiation with Russia in the context of general international cooperation for peace and prosperity,” but that under Truman, America decided to “go it alone,” canceling Lend-Lease, “sabotaging” UNRRA, turning down proposals in the UN Social and Economic Council for a World Development Authority, and finally launching the Marshall Plan as an act “done by Washington bilaterally, and not by the United Nations, in accordance with its Charter, as a venture in mutual aid.” As a result the United States, according to Barr, has been left with “that most useless of instruments, a foreign policy that does not appeal to foreigners,” for most of the world does not share the American preoccupation with the threat of Communist aggression, and even the Atlantic Pact, in Barr’s interpretation, had to be forced on an unwilling Europe by American economic pressure. Barr claims to speak on behalf of “some two billion human beings who are neither Russian nor American,” who are not interested in a Russo-American quarrel, and demand, not dollar hand-outs conditional on conformity with American foreign policy, but a worldwide TVA whereby mankind by joint effort can tackle the basic problem of the “World Slum.”

What he has to say about the American attitude to UNRRA is important because it provides a test case for his general view of recent history. He thus declares his opinion of what happened:

UNRRA was the last organization in which Americans worked beside men of all races to attack the common economic perils of the human race on anything like an adequate scale. The next year UN records would register sharply the shift in American policy. American aid, except for a share in the UN Children’s Fund, was going not where the suffering was most acute, but where cold-war politics directed it. This shift in policy amounted to a kind of secession from the human race.

It May be of interest to compare this version with an estimate of the UNRRA record given by a British writer, Paul Winterton, in his book Inquest on an Ally:

The total value of UNRRA aid was some £.930 millions, of which the United States provided nearly three quarters and Britain about 17 per cent. . . . America resisted the temptation to use relief as a means of gaining either political concessions or economic privileges. In no case did she make internal political changes a condition of aid. She did not, for instance, demand that any country should drop its plans for socialization. She did not use her wealth to buy investments in the countries she assisted. . . . Recipients were not even required to empty their mouths of American food before they shouted their abuse.

During the whole of UNRRA aid, when an observer certainly not biased against the Soviet Union reported that “the urban populations of White Russia and the Ukraine have been almost exclusively dependent for meat and fats on UNRRA’s supplies,” the Soviet government was not merely doing everything possible to extend Communist control by force in Eastern and Central Europe, but was working up a propaganda campaign of the most venomous hatred against America and Britain. By the premises of Communist thinking this was indeed a political necessity in order to counteract the impression produced on masses of people under Communist rule by the flow of aid from capitalist countries. The men in the Kremlin and the little Stalins in Warsaw and Prague could not afford to admit that anyone but themselves might have a disinterested concern to relieve human suffering or that the imperialists of London and Washington could have any thought but for the exploitation and enslavement of peoples. Western generosity, therefore, had to be attributed to the basest motives, and in April 1947 Ilya Ehrenburg told the American people in a broadcast from Moscow: “You do not give; you buy and bribe.” The Western nations which had made such massive contributions to the relief of distress in Eastern Europe would have been not human, but angelic, if they had not been discouraged from unconditional bounty by such insults. But even if they had been prepared to put up with official ingratitude in order to help the voiceless masses, they could not ignore the fact that any economic assistance to Communist-led countries which went beyond temporary supplies of food and clothing could only strengthen the war potential of a power which was openly hostile and actively enlarging its sphere of control. Moreover, both Britain and America had rapidly disarmed and demilitarized themselves to an extreme degree after the war, while Russia remained heavily armed; it became urgently necessary to rearm in order to deter Russia and her satellites from further advances, and rearmament could only be carried out at the expense of surplus resources which might otherwise be available for international economic aid. It was this situation, and not the seduction of President Truman by Wall Street, which produced the “secession from the human race” so much deplored by Barr. America had financed through UNRRA just that kind of unconditional and internationally administered aid which Barr recommends now as a solution for the world’s difficulties, and had been repaid with slander and aggression. In the Marshall Plan America did not exclude Russia or her satellites, but insisted on a certain minimum of economic cooperation among European countries; Russia rejected the Plan, compelled her satellites to do like-wise, and instructed Communist parties outside the Iron Curtain to sabotage its operation as much as they could. It was only after this experience that American aid came to be, as Barr puts it, “directed by cold-war politics.”

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What else could it have been? Is it really argued that America and other Western nations with capital resources should have gone on pouring them into Communist-ruled countries without taking any notice of their hostility, or that they should have handed them over to a “World Development Authority” while leaving themselves and the weaker non-Communist countries they were helping virtually defenseless against Communist violence or pressure diplomacy? Barr avoids putting it as crudely as that, but it is the direction in which his argument leads him. He will not recognize the priorities imposed by the cold war, because fundamentally he does not recognize the existence of the cold war, or rather he considers it to be America’s fault and not Russia’s. It is America, and not Russia, that has “seceded from the human race” by “going it alone,” even though every major international project since the war, from the control of atomic energy to international health measures, has broken down on the refusal of Communist states to abate their national sovereignties in the slightest degree or allow any kind of investigation or supervision within their borders. Even more remarkable for one who is not a Communist and describes himself as no fellow-traveler, Barr declares:

Non-Communists in Europe know that we share one thing with Nazi Germany from which Communist Russia is free. Our economy is a war economy now, as Hitler’s was. To some extent, like him, we are caught. Russia’s economy does not depend on war.

Now it is quite true that a sudden cessation of rearmament programs in the Western democracies would produce dangers of economic dislocation and depression and that these dangers might be very serious if the situation were handled by men who have not learned anything since 1929. But most economists are now agreed that major slumps can be averted by measures which do not involve either resort to war or the abolition of capitalism. If the need for the rearmament programs were to disappear, the obvious substitute for the absorption of capital goods and the maintenance of full employment would be the kind of Point Four development projects that Barr advocates, and it is indeed extremely important that such projects, conceived on the largest scale, should be ready for operation whenever there may be enough relaxation in the cold war to make it possible to turn over resources from rearmament and alliance subsidies to purely economic objectives. But if at the present time cold-war politics take precedence over tasks which would be set by a “World Development Authority,” that is not because citizens of the Western democracies prefer spending their resources on tanks and bombers rather than on clearance of the “World Slum”; it is because the politics of the states of the Soviet bloc have left them no option but to arm themselves and contain Communist expansion if they do not want to be overwhelmed by it.

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It May be true enough that “Russia’s economy does not depend on war” in the sense that a fully planned and controlled economic system does not give rise to the special urge towards armaments as an anti-slump device which can (not must) occur in a capitalist economy. But this does not mean, as Barr suggests, that Russia remains inherently peaceful, while America is driven towards war by economic pressure. Russia is a danger to her neighbors, not because she is building up armaments to assure profits to a capital-goods industry, or because she seeks new markets for a surplus of production, but because her politics are essentially those of violence and domination. Those who are accustomed to believe that international conflicts can never be anything but by-products of economic interests are naturally unable to understand that habits of absolute power and political terror, unrestrained by law or respect for human rights and confirmed by the certainty of an exclusive possession of cosmic truth, can be a cause of collisions between sovereign states. But to suppose that Russia’s rulers care about nothing but “improving the lot of the common people,” and only started behaving roughly (insofar as it is admitted that they did) because of suspicions of American or British intentions, is to misunderstand the fundamental nature of such a regime as that which Malenkov has now inherited from Stalin. Communism is indeed theoretically concerned with the material welfare of mankind, but the principles of violent revolution and permanent party dictatorship have inevitably produced a state of mind for which everything is subordinate to the maintenance and expansion of power—a power which in violence, comprehensiveness, and arbitrary coercion surpasses all historical precedents. It is vain to expect such a power to change its basic character when it reaches a territorial frontier, and in fact Soviet foreign policy is simply Soviet internal policy tempered by caution when confronted by an effective resistance.

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Point Fourism is the creed of those who combine a keen and generous desire to bring salvation to mankind through an international TVA with an inability—or unwillingness—to recognize that totalitarian despotism in Moscow, and not selfish stupidity in Washington, is the main cause of the reversion to power politics which now bedevils world affairs. Insofar as they preach Russian innocence and oppose necessary rearmament and alliances, these people are a danger to the defense of the free world, even though they do not belong to the Communist fifth column. On the other hand, their criticism of the current policies of the Western democracies is valid within certain limits. There is undoubtedly a danger that with a continuation of present conditions Western political leaders and public opinion will tend to forget about the problems of the “World Slum,” to be content with a merely negative policy of opposition to Communism, and to make the international conflict an excuse for neglecting even what can be done to realize Point Four ideals subject to cold war priorities. That way lies danger as well as moral failure for the West, for if the awakening masses of the undeveloped countries are offered no positive alternative of economic progress to the false hopes held out by Communism, the political drift towards Moscow and Peking will become a very powerful current. However wrong Barr may be in his estimate of Soviet reality, he is talking good sense when he writes:

The bulk of the planet’s population is in the position of a sick man visited by two doctors. One doctor offers him a pill, a Red one, which he claims can cure him. The other doctor is looking, not at the dying man, but at his rival, and is shouting: “Don’t trust that man! He’s a quack!” These exclamations do not constitute a medical prescription. Which doctor is the dying man likely to choose?

The statesman who wishes to contain Communism must distinguish very clearly between the élan of the Communist dictatorship itself and the propaganda appeal by which it attracts mass support. The former is essentially a non-economic drive for power and domination; the latter is an exploitation of economic hopes. The one can only be stopped by armed defense, the other only by a more convincing hope.

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