Economics and War
Capitalism and Socialism on Trial.
By Fritz Sternberg.
John Day. 576 pp. $6.50.

Are the major wars of this century due to rivalry between expanding imperialist powers? And if so, is imperialist expansion inherent in the capitalist system as Marx described it? Neither thesis finds much support in Marx’s own writings, but both have been developed by Marxist authors with some help from liberals, such as J. A. Hobson—and by now have taken their place among the commonplaces of socialist literature.

In Europe, the rise of interest in this subject dates from the First World War and the years immediately preceding it. Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Bukharin, and Lenin (the latter making no original contribution but relying heavily on Hobson) all tried to show that imperialism is linked to modern capitalism by an economic mechanism essential to the unimpeded working of the system. Rosa Luxemburg even attempted to supply mathematical proof of this contention: a hazardous undertaking which earned her some posthumous reproaches from Bukharin and which also helped to start off an interminable and largely fruitless theoretical wrangle among the German and Austrian Marxists of the pre-Hitler period. An echo of this controversy seems now to have crossed the Atlantic, with the customary time lag, reinforced in this instance by the fact that nearly all the participants to the original dispute have long been in their graves.

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In the work under review, Dr. Sternberg has provided a sort of Plain Man’s Guide to this fascinating topic. Although himself reared on a strict diet of Luxemburgian logic, he eschews mathematical proof and adopts the simple and direct approach of the instructor expounding elementary verities to a class of not excessively bright pupils. He has refurbished and brought up to date his earlier writings, some of them not previously translated from the German, and in this manner produced what may fairly be called an introductory textbook of Marxist (but not Communist) economic history, with special reference to the causation of war and the growth of inter-imperialist rivalry. His stand-point is that of a left-wing socialist who hopes for the emergence of a United Socialist Europe as a middle ground between the Soviet Union and the United States, and he writes with a compelling candor which goes some way to off-set the general flatness and occasional slipshodness of his style. Although still in some sense a Leninist, he recognizes that the present Soviet regime is neither socialist nor capitalist, but represents a novel form of state-controlled economy under which the workers have lost their rights to the ruling bureaucracy; he also concedes that the regime is steadily becoming more totalitarian, and consequently more obnoxious to democratic socialists. On the other hand, he holds that the Kremlin is under no economic compulsion to go to war, and from this fact he draws a modest degree of reassurance.

It might be questioned whether an economic compulsion to make war has ever existed under any circumstances; but since Dr. Sternberg assumes that there is, or was, such a mechanism, he cannot be blamed for devoting much thought to its political consequences. But he is in the curious position of having to admit that the present world conflict is not due to economic rivalry but to political antagonisms for which there seem to be no obvious economic correlates. For the Soviet regime can still expand at home, and although he is skeptical about the stability of a United States economy stimulated by a giant arms program, he concedes the existence of an alternative—a welfare economy—which need only be adopted to remove the danger of permanent overproduction. He also makes the reasonable point that the only substantial export of American capital likely to take place in future will be state-directed and subservient to political purposes. In short, on his own showing, the connection between economic expansion and war in the present epoch is so tenuous as hardly to exist at all.

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Much of what Dr. Sternberg has to say on these and related topics belongs to the common staple of socialist and New Deal literature, while his abbreviated sketch of 20th-century history may fairly be described as journalism of a not particularly high order. There are times when one wonders for whom this stout volume is intended: much of the information it contains can be culled from any textbook. Was it really necessary to relate once again the story of Hitler’s rise and fall? However, there is a theme: the decline of world capitalism consequent upon the gradual contraction of the primitive agrarian hinterland into which the youthful capitalist economy of Britain and Europe expanded during the 19th century. Insistence upon this single, all-embracing explanation not only stamps Sternberg as an orthodox Marxist of the school of Rosa Luxemburg; it also serves to link his economic argument to his ponderous historical generalizations. For if capitalism needs an agrarian hinterland for its functioning, then it becomes clear why imperialist rivalries center upon the control of backward territories, and also why such rivalries are incurable by ordinary means. This, for Sternberg, is the crux of the whole story, and it follows that in discussing the two major wars of this century he is able without flinching to adopt the familiar German view that Germany had to make war in order to acquire an empire, either overseas or in south-east Europe. Which, of course, lets in the subject of British colonialism, and of colonies in general.

It might seem surprising that a socialist like Sternberg should on this issue side with the propagandists of the Flottenverein and the Kolonialverein, but an obsessive misunderstanding of the Anglo-German antagonism is endemic in Germany (and in Russia—Lenin was as convinced as any good Russian nationalist that the British owed their supremacy to the exploitation of India). For Sternberg it is a simple matter of history that Germany—the Germany of 1914, which was fast outstripping Britain on the world market—had to make war in order to acquire a colonial empire. He takes it for granted that this was a rational aim, although he has to admit that Germany was doing extremely well without having any colonies to speak of. The fact is that colonies are to him what fortifications were to Tristam Shandy’s Uncle Toby; they are his Open Sesame. In the service of his obsession he unhesitatingly ignores the evidence where it fails to support his preconception. He quotes Marx’s warning to the Germans in 1870 that the projected annexation of Alsace-Lorraine would perpetuate French hostility and render another war certain, but when he comes to the pre-1914 period he will have it that it was Franco-German rivalry in Morocco (then a mere wilderness) which sparked their antagonism. And similarly for the mounting tension between Germany and Britain, though the record shows that the British were willing, in 1912-14, to let Germany have the Portuguese colonies in Africa and a good deal besides.

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The fact is that Sternberg is no historian, and only very dubiously a Marxist; for Marx was concerned with just the kind of historical irrationality which Sternberg, with all the confident dogmatism of a chamber of commerce president, is trying to rule out of order. German policy before and during the two wars was irrational, and the same was true of Japanese policy from 1931 onwards. To acknowledge this is not to overlook the existence of tendencies making for imperialism, but to question their relevance to the total situation. For example, an analysis of European history since about 1900 ought to start from the fact that Europe was articulated into a system of national states whose competing ambitions no longer made sense in terms of the emerging world society which capitalism was about to establish at the technological and economic level. Their historic rivalries produced two wars which have led to the partial destruction, not of capitalism, but of Europe. The causation in each case was irrational so far as Germany (the active agent of destruction) was concerned, in that the rulers of Germany twice opted for solutions which made no sense at all and led to national catastrophe. Colonies were unimportant to Germany in 1914, and had no significance whatever for her problems in 1933. And Japan already had all the colonies she needed.

It would thus seem that, in both cases, war was begun for no rational aim (in economic terms) whatever, but rather in response to internal pressures—partly economic, but mainly political and social—diagnosed by Marxist and non-Marxist observers long before “monopoly capitalism” developed. Even at the purely economic level, German agrarian protectionism—as shown in Gerschenkron’s classic study Bread and Democracy in Germany (1943)—was a far more important factor making for an aggressive foreign policy than any hankering after colonies, since it demonstrably affected the most powerful groups in society both before 1914 and after.

All this, however, is merely to say that the subject needs to be dealt with by a historian, and not by writers like Sternberg who suppose that politics have to be discussed in terms of what they are not about.

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