The Huey P. Newton Reader

The ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence recognize the right of nations to self-determination. Any oppressed people may, in the spirit of the American Revolution, forcibly overthrow the institutions of their oppressors in order to secure for themselves the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Yet the record shows that as the United States has assumed its role of dominant world power, it has consistently opposed the major social revolutions of our times. In violation of the principle of self-determination, the U.S. has intervened militarily, diplomatically, and economically to crush or to cause grave setbacks to these revolutions, whether in Russia, Mexico, China, Cuba, Greece, or Vietnam.

Nowhere has this pattern of policy been more evident than with the American intervention in Vietnam. In 1945, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was established in a document modeled on the American Declaration of Independence. The Republic was at first recognized by the former colonial power, France. But when that power sought to reassert control of its former colonial territory by establishing a puppet regime in Saigon, it found support in U.S. policy. Not only did Washington support France’s illegitimate war of conquest through economic and military aid, but Washington itself took over the struggle to defeat the Vietnamese Republic when the French failed. Indeed, more than twenty years after the proclamation of Vietnam’s Declaration of Independence, the Vietnamese peasants are still being assaulted by the U.S. armed forces in what must be the most ruthless and destructive intervention on historical record.

Such counterrevolutionary expeditions are of course standard U.S. Cold War policy, despite the unprecedented ferocity and unparalleled savagery of this execution. As already noted, it forms a consistent pattern with other U.S. interventions in Santo Domingo, Cuba, Guatemala, the Congo, the Middle East, China, Greece, and elsewhere during the Cold War years, and in Russia, Mexico, Cuba, China, and other countries earlier in the century. Indeed, counterrevolutionary intervention, which is at the heart of the Cold War and its conflicts, has been a characteristic of U.S. foreign policy ever since the United States embarked on a course of overseas economic expansion following the closing of the geographical frontier more than seventy years ago.

How is this counterrevolutionary policy, which runs directly counter to the high ideals of the American republic, to be explained? How is it to be explained that the largest “defense” program of any nation in history (and of the United States in particular, which, prior to the postwar decades, never maintained a peacetime conscription army) is organized around the unprecedented concept of counterinsurgency? These questions can only be answered if it can be shown that there is a group wielding predominant power in the American polity; a group whose interests not only run counter to America’s high ideals but who can impose its own interpretation of the American tradition onto the framework of policy making in the state. If it can be shown that there is an expansionist, militaristic class among the plurality of competing interest groups that enjoys a predominance of power and therefore can establish its own outlook as a prevailing ideology, then an explanation of both the paradoxical character of American policy and the sources of the Cold War conflicts can be seen.

Such a “ruling class” can, in fact, be readily shown to exist: its locus of power and interest is in the giant corporations and financial institutions that dominate the American economy, and more broadly, the economy of the entire Western world. “In terms of power,” writes one corporate executive and former U.S. policy maker, “without regard to asset positions, not only do five hundred corporations control two-thirds of the nonfarm economy, but within each of that five hundred a still smaller group has the ultimate decision-making power. This is, I think, the highest concentration of economic power in recorded history.” Further, “since the United States carries on not quite half of the manufacturing production of the entire world today, these five hundred groupings—each with its own little dominating pyramid within it—represents a concentration of power over economies which makes the medieval feudal system look like a Sunday school party.” As this observer points out, many of these corporations have budgets, and some of them have payrolls that affect a greater number of people than most of the hundred-odd sovereign countries of the world. Indeed, the fifty largest corporations employ almost three times as many people as the five largest U.S. states, while their combined sales are over five times greater than the tax revenue collected by the states.

In the final analysis, it is the dependence of men individually and collectively on the corporately organized and controlled economy that provides the basis for the corporate domination of U.S. policy, especially U.S. foreign policy. The basic fulcrum of corporate power is the investment decision, one that is effectively made by a small group of men relative to the economy as a whole. This decision includes how much the corporations spend, what they produce, where the products are to be manufactured, and who is to participate in the process of production. But this is not the whole extent of the power of the corporate investment decision. In the national economy the small oligarchy of corporate and financial rulers, who are responsible to no one, determine the level of output and employment for the economy through their investment outlays.

As Keynes observed, the national prosperity is excessively dependent on the confidence of the business community. This confidence can be irreparably injured by a government that pursues a course of policy inimical to business interests. In other words, basic to the political success at the polls for any government or its specific programs will be the way the government’s policies affect the system of incentives on which the economy runs: a system of incentives that is also the basis of the privileges of the social upper classes.

This does not mean, of course, that the business community as such must prefer a particular candidate or party for that candidate or party to be victorious. It means, much more fundamentally, that short of committing political suicide, no party or government can step outside the framework of the corporate system and its politics by embarking on a course that threatens the power and privileges of the giant corporations. Either a government must seize the commanding heights of the economy at once (that is, initiate a course of social revolution), or run things more or less according to the priorities and channels determined by the system of incentive payments to the corporate controllers of the means of production. This is an unspoken but well-understood fact conditioning politics in capitalist countries, which explains why the pattern of resource allocation—the priority of guns over butter, of highway construction over schools and hospitals—is so similar in all of them. It also explains why, despite the congressional and parliamentary enactment of progressive tax laws in all these countries, the spirit of the law has been thwarted everywhere. And nowhere has the significant redistribution of income promised by these democratically ratified statutes taken place.

The sheer economic pressure that the corporations can exert over the policies of democratically elected governments is lucidly manifest in the experience of the Wilson Labour government in England. While owing its office to labor votes and labor money, this government was forced by “the economic situation,” (that is, domestic and international capital), to pursue precisely the policies that it had condemned as anti-labor while in opposition. Of course, under normal conditions, particularly in the United States where no labor party exists, the corporations have less subtle means at their disposal for ensuring policies conducive to their continued vigor and growth. The means by which the upper classes maintain their privileged position and vested interests in countries where universal suffrage prevails vary with the differing traditions, social institutions, and class structures of the countries involved. They vary also with their historical roles. Thus, as the United States has replaced Britain as the guardian power and policeman of the international system of property and privilege, the corporate ruling class has less often been able to entrust policy to indirectly controlled representatives and has more often had to enter directly the seats of government itself.

In the postwar period, the strategic agencies of foreign policy—the State Department, the CIA, the Pentagon, and the Treasury, as well as the key ambassadorial posts—have all been dominated by representatives and rulers of America’s principal corporate financial empires. In addition, all the special committees and task forces on foreign policy guidelines have been presided over by the men of this business elite, so that on all important levels of foreign policymaking, “business serves as the fount of critical assumptions or goals and strategically placed personnel.” While the corporate-based upper class in general occupies a prodigious number of positions in the highest reaches of the “democratic” state, it need not strive to occupy all the top places to impose its own interpretation of the national interest on American policy. Precisely because the prevailing ideology of U.S. politics in general, and of the federal government in particular, is corporate ideology, reflecting the corporate outlook and interests, and because the framework of articulated policy choices lies well within the horizon of this outlook, political outsiders may be tolerated and even highly effective in serving the corporate system and its programs.

There are additionally two principal methods by which corporate ideology comes to prevail in the larger political realm. In the first place, it does so through the corporate (and upper-class) control of the means of communication—and the means of production of ideas and ideology of its strength. In a class-divided society under normal (that is, nonrevolutionary) conditions, the national interest vis-à-vis external interests is inevitably interpreted as the interest of the dominant or ruling class. Thus, in a corporate capitalist society, the corporate outlook as a matter of course becomes the dominant outlook of the state in foreign affairs. This is not to say that there is never a conflict over foreign policy that expresses a conflict between corporations and the state. Just as there are differences among the corporate interests themselves within a general framework of interests, so there are differences between the corporate community outside the state and the corporate representatives and their agents in the state, resulting from the difference in vantage and the wider and narrower interests that each group must take into account. But here, too, the horizon of choice, the framework of decisive interests, is defined by the necessity of preserving and strengthening the status quo order of corporate capitalism and consequently the interests of the social classes most benefited by it.

What, then, is the nature of corporate ideology as it dominates U.S. foreign policy? What is its role in the development of the Cold War? As a result of the pioneering work of Professor William Appleman Williams, these questions can be answered precisely and succinctly. The chief function of corporate ideology is, of course, to make an explicit identification of the national tradition and interest—the American Way of Life—with its own particular interest. This identification is accomplished by means of an economic determinism, that takes as its cardinal principle the proposition that political freedom is inseparably bound up with corporate property: that a “free enterprise” economy is the indispensable foundation of a free polity, where free enterprise is defined to coincide with the status quo order of corporate capitalism, not with an outdated system of independent farmers and traders.

Starting from this basic premise, the ideology articulated by American policymakers since the nineteenth century maintains that an expanding frontier of ever-new and accessible markets is absolutely essential for capitalist America’s domestic prosperity. Hence, the extension of the American system and its institutions abroad is a necessity for the preservation of the American, democratic, free-enterprise order at home. Originally formulated as an “open door” policy, both to prevent the closing of the external frontier by European colonialism and to ensure American access to global markets, this policy has led to the preservation and extension of American hegemony and the free enterprise system throughout the so-called “free world.” From Woodrow Wilson’s First World War cry that the world must be made safe for democracy, it was but a logical historical step to Secretary of State Byrnes’s remark at the close of the Second World War that the world must be made safe for the United States. This is the core of America’s messianic crusade: that the world must be made over in the American image (read: subjected to the American corporate system) if the American Way of Life (read: the corporate economy) is to survive at home.

If expansion (and militarism) had held the key to American prosperity or security, the postwar period would undoubtedly have realized Secretary of State Byrnes’s ambitious goal. In the last stages of the war and the first of the peace, the United States successfully penetrated the old European empires (those of France, Great Britain, and the Netherlands); assumed control of Japan and its former dependencies; and extended its own power globally to an unprecedented degree. By 1949, the United States had liens on some four hundred military bases, while the expansion of direct overseas investments was taking place at a phenomenal rate. Whereas U.S. foreign investments had actually declined from $7.9 to $7.2 billion between 1929 and 1946, they increased an incredible eightfold to more than $60 billion between 1946 and 1967. It is this global stake in the wealth and resources of the external frontier that forms the basis of the U.S. commitment to the worldwide status quo, even though it may not always provide the whole explanation for particular commitments or engagements. This commitment to the internal status quo in other countries renders Washington’s expansionist program not the key to security but the very source of Cold War conflict.

No one acquainted with the behavior of western corporations on their pilgrimages for profit during the last fifty years can really be surprised that the…explosions now taking place (in the underdeveloped world) are doing so in an anti-American, anti-capitalist, anti-western context. For many years these continents have been happy hunting grounds for corporate adventurers, who have taken out great resources and great profits and left behind great poverty, great expectations and great resentments. Gunnar Myrdal points out that capitalist intervention in underdeveloped countries thus far has almost uniformly had the result of making the rich richer and the poor poorer.

This has indeed been the undeniable historical consequence of capitalist corporate expansion, even though this is not what one is led to believe by the orthodox theorists and academic model builders who function so frequently as the sophisticated apologists of the American Empire and the policy of counterrevolutionary intervention necessary to maintain it. In the writings of such theorists, the expansion of America’s monopolistic giants and their control of the markets and resources of the poverty-stricken regions is presented as entailing the net export of capital to these capital-starved areas, the transfer of industrial technologies and skills, and the flow of wealth generally from the rich world to the poor.

From this point of view, revolutions that challenge the presence and domination of foreign corporations and their states in the underdeveloped world are misguided, sinister in intent, or contrary to the real needs and interests of the countries involved. Indeed, for those who maintain this view, revolutions are regarded as alien-inspired efforts aimed at subverting and seizing control of the countries in question during periods of great difficulty and instability prior to the so-called takeoff into self-sustaining growth. This is the argument advanced by W. W. Rostow, former director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff and the chief rationalizer of America’s expansionist counterrevolutionary crusade. In fact, this view rests neither on historical experience, which shows the presence of foreign capital and power to have had a profoundly adverse effect on the development potential of the penetrated regions, nor on a sound empirical basis.

Far from resulting in a transfer of wealth from richer to poorer regions, the penetration of the underdeveloped world by the imperialist and neo-imperialist systems of the developed states has had the opposite effect. As a result of direct U.S. overseas investments between 1950 and 1965, for example, there was a net capital flow of $16 billion to the United States. Similarly, when looked at in their political and economic settings, the much-heralded benefits of the advanced technologies transplanted into these areas (but under the control of international corporations), also tend to be circumscribed and even adverse in their effects. Regarded in terms of its impact on total societies rather than on particular economic sectors, the operation of opening the backward and weak areas to the competitive penetration of the advanced and powerful capitalist states has been nothing short of a catastrophe. For as Paul Baran showed in his pioneering work The Political Economy of Growth, it is precisely the penetration of the underdeveloped world by advanced capitalism that has in the past obstructed its development and continues in the present to prevent it. Conversely, it has been primarily the ability of a select few countries to escape from the net of foreign investment and domination that has made countries such as Japan exceptions to the rule. Professor Gunder Frank and others have continued the work that Baran initiated, showing how foreign capitalist investment produces the pattern of underdevelopment (or “growth without development,” as it is sometimes called) that is the permanent nightmare of these regions. The crisis of reactionary intercommunalism has now inevitably given rise to the concept of “revolutionary intercommunalism.”