Mr. Chairman,
May I state in what sense, and in what sense alone, I could consent to be called a pacifist? Mussolini stated the position of fascism to pacifism thus: “A doctrine which is founded upon the harmful postulate of peace is hostile to Fascism.”a What Mussolini here denounces as the “harmful postulate of peace” is the doctrine I stand for; it was not an idealist or sentimental contention such as peace is “good,” and therefore it “ought to be” – or any other equally meaningless assertion – but this postulate implied a definite political and economic diagnosis of the present crucial stage in the development of human society. It is to this specific diagnosis that I subscribe. According to this diagnosis, at the heart of the present struggle between fascism and democracy, as between capitalism and socialism, there is the problem of war. If to uphold such a belief makes one a pacifist, then I am a convinced pacifist. I will have to deal with this at length tonight.
If, however, pacifism implies the acceptance of the command “not to fight,” then I am emphatically not a pacifist. My specific diagnosis implies, on the contrary, that, perhaps for a long time to come, human beings will have to fight if the institution of war is ever to be abolished.
What is the root of the danger of war in our age? It is this.
The actual forms of material existence of man are those of worldwide interdependence. The political forms of human existence must also be worldwide. Either within the boundaries of a world empire or in those of a world federation – either through conquest and subjection or by international cooperation – the nations of the globe must be brought within the folds of one embracing body if our civilization is to survive. Until peace is organized in one of these two ways wars, and wars on an ever increasing scale, must continue.
Our starting point is economic interdependence.
The reference to the material factor has in this case nothing whatever to do with so-called economic self-interest. Not incomes, profits, wages, and standards of groups or classes of the population, but the very lives of millions of human beings depend upon the material factor in question. That which would involve the deliberate destruction of tens millions of people becomes, in the nature of things, politically impracticable and morally indefensible.
Now, but for the actually existing economic interdependence, the nations and peoples could decide tomorrow that they will henceforth live peacefully, as independent sovereign states, in economic self-sufficiency. Passion and prejudice might prevent them from following this course; but politically and morally it would be justified. But for one factor, precisely: the economic. The establishment of the universal self-sufficiency would necessarily and inevitably cause such a sudden and fateful drop in the material resources of mankind as would reduce the population of earth to a very considerable degree. For the enforced return to primitive conditions of production would involve the starvation and death of vast masses of human beings. For this one fundamental reason the solution of the problem of war by the method of universal self-sufficiency is inacceptable.b
Most important consequences follow. If universal self-sufficiency offers no solution, we must attempt to secure at least that measure of international economic cooperation that existed until recently. The question is: How to achieve it?
Our thesis is that this cannot be done in the traditional forms of economic cooperation. These have broken down for good and all and cannot be restored. New forms of economic cooperation will have to be created. And it is the necessity of creating these new forms of economic cooperation that compels us to establish new forms of political organization on an international scale. It is precisely in the imperative need for new forms of international life that we must seek the ultimate cause of all the strain, stress, and suffering that mankind has to undergo at present and may yet have to undergo in the future.
It might be objected: Why could the traditional forms of economic cooperation not be restored? And why should the creation of new forms of international economic cooperation necessarily involve the tragedy of fratricidal wars and civil wars?
Our two main problems:
The traditional forms of international economic cooperation have broken down. An international gold standard, an international capital market, an international commodity market, based on the free exchange of goods and payments, have passed away. The system hinged on the international gold standard. It cannot be restored, because it has become apparent that the closer the interdependence of the nations, the greater the sacrifices needed in order to keep the system going. Why? The working of the international gold standard implies the readiness of all countries concerned to allow their internal price level to move up and down according to uncontrollable changes in the international balance of payments. As long as the swing of the prices is upwards, governments might agree; but a permanent fall in the price level means a slowing down of production, a drop in the consumers' wealth produced, it means mass unemployment and the consequent danger of the dissolution of the social fabric itself. No government can deliberately bring about such a state of affairs; no society could maintain itself under such conditions.
The alternative to the present forms of international economic cooperation is the setting up of new forms. Why can these not be established right away?
At least in the stage of transition – and this stage covers a long period – massive economic sacrifices would have to be made by all countries concerned. Under our present economic system the people of no country will voluntarily embark upon such sacrifices. The reason is obvious. A genuine community might very well resolve to make heavy sacrifices for the sake of a great purpose and persevere in its endeavor as long as necessary. But under our industrial system society is not a community of that sort. Our property system divides it into two separate sections: the people who are responsible for the actual carrying on of industrial production, as owners and managers of the means of production; and the people who have no such responsibility.
The latter cannot be seriously expected to shoulder the economic burden of wage cuts and unemployment consequent upon a general policy the actual costs of which they are not in the position to assess. For this simple reason it is impossible under our present system to make the whole of the population act as a single unit where economic questions are concerned. This is the ultimate reason why our nation-states, as at present constituted, are inadequate to the task of setting up a new system of international economic cooperation.
Incidentally, I wish to give you an example of the economic reasoning of our outstanding pacifists. The point at issue is no less than whether or not economic self-sufficiency is possible. Decisive for this, as we have shown, is the one and only supposition under which human communities, as at present constituted, could settle down to peaceful existence in independent sovereign states. This is what Russell says on the possibility of self-sufficiency: “I do not think it can be doubted that by the application of existing knowledge Great Britain could, within ten years, become capable of producing the amount of food necessary to support life for its own population.” It would be “much easier than usually supposed to develop our domestic supplies.”c He proceeds to quote at length an article of Dr. O. W. Willcox from The New Republic (of June 3, 1936), in which this American writer on agro-biology refers to the work of Dr. W. F. Gericke of the University of California. Dr. Gericke asserts that he has produced 217 tons of tomatoes per acre and has grown 2,465 bushels of potatoes per acre, that is, some 20 times the national average of the USA. The plants were not set in earth at all. Shallow tanks, filled with liquid chemicals were used, into which the roots of the plants were dipped. The liquid chemicals were heated by electricity. “Already we are hearing stories,” Dr. Wilcox concludes his article, “of an occasional scientist who is said to grow a years' supply of potatoes for a large family in a tin pan under the kitchen table. There is, as a matter of fact, no reason why we should not have skyscraper farms on which the rows of shallow pans would be stacked one above the other to the height of a hundred – or a thousand – feet…” Personally, I do not doubt the possibility of scientific agriculture. Indeed, ever since agriculture existed, it has been more or less artificial. But the socialist construction in Soviet Russia offers the best example of the economics of such a venture. Great capital outlay means a check on the standards of life. Does Bertrand Russell realize the amount of capital outlay involved in schemes of this kind, if they are planned on anything approaching a national scale? This capital outlay, in terms of labor and commodities, means the enslavement of the people of this country for something like a generation. Obviously there would also have to be tin pans for cotton, coffee, and tea plants, tin pans for rubber, orange, and lemon trees, and even tin pans for pigs, sheep, and oxen in order to procure the meat.
But Dr. Willcox's discovery has not been overlooked in other quarters, where the scientific mind is even more in evidence than in Russell's case – who is at least a great scientist in his own sphere. I am alluding to Aldous Huxley's recent book Ends and Means.
“Dirtless farming” devised by Professor Dr. Gericke holds pride of place in the book, although, as Huxley cautiously adds, “it is still in the experimental stage.” Dr. Willcox's book Nations Can Live at Home has convinced Aldous Huxley that the English can live at home, without the assistance of other homes. “To what extent is overpopulation a valid excuse for militarism and imperialism?” asks Huxley. “It is probable indeed that dirtless farming will produce an agricultural revolution compared with which the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries will seem the most trifling of social disturbances.”
Now one of the results of this trifling disturbance was that the population of England increased sixfold between 1700 and 1900. If “dirtless farming” results only in another sixfold increase of the population, the population of the earth may easily grow from 2 to 12 thousand million. However, Huxley wisely provides for this by expressing his hope that “the birth rate does not sharply rise.” Still, he finds it “profoundly significant that no government has hitherto made any serious attempt to apply modern agro-biological methods on a large scale, for the purpose of raising the standard of material well being among the subjects and of rendering imperialism and foreign conquest unnecessary.” This fact alone, Huxley says, would be a sufficient demonstration of the truth that the causes of war are not solely economic, but psychological. Only a fool would assert that the causes of war are solely economic. But has Huxley completely forgotten that the universal complaint against imperialist and militarist states is precisely that they do, by all artificial means, try to increase their food supplies and enlist the help of science to achieve the impossible in this respect? Mussolini's scientific “battle of grain” and Göring's dirtless butter seem to have escaped his attention. Even peaceful Czechoslovakia has diminished her agricultural imports by not less than 74 percent in 13 postwar years. But it is precisely the ghastly costs of these uneconomic pseudo-scientific efforts that impoverish the nations, depress their standards of life, and make them ripe for the psychosis of expansionist imperialism.
So much for the reasoning of “ends and means”; the most charitable thing to say about them is, I suppose, that they derive from the maxim that the end does justify the means.
We have given so much of our time to Dr. Gericke's argument in order to show up the levity with which serious pacifists sometimes treat these questions. Characteristically, it is not the religious pacifist, but a rationalist, like Russell, or someone psychologically minded, like Huxley, whose arguments are conspicuous for their irrelevance. The religious pacifist alone can make out a consistent case. I need not say that, in my conviction, he is wrong.
But let us return to our argument. Mainly for economic reasons, the international organization of life must be restored. This cannot happen on the traditional basis; for governments can and will not allow the economic system of their countries to be the football of uncontrollable international forces. It cannot happen on a new basis as long as our present economic system lasts. For our modern class societies are lacking in that degree of unity in the economic field that would enable them to shoulder the massive sacrifices involved in the establishment of a cooperative international. Only true communities can generate the moral forces of a historical heroism without which no such efforts are likely to be undertaken, to prove successful in the face of almost insurmountable obstacles.
We find ourselves in the following situation: In the international sphere, the necessarily slow process of establishing a world federation cannot cease before it reaches its final consummation. In the national sphere, our present economic system will have to be replaced by a real economic commonwealth, precisely for the reason that only such a commonwealth will be able and willing to pay the heavy economic price that must be paid for the establishment of a world federation. This is why, in the period lying before us, foreign affairs must continue to dominate over home affairs.
The powers opposed to international cooperation will force their imperialist wars on the other countries. The powers that, for whatever reason, favor an international system will tend to oppose them jointly.
It will be in the course of this prolonged and painful attempt to evolve a cooperative solution that the inherent weakness of the present economic system as a unit of planetary cooperation must bear its fateful fruit. For no international system can prove workable that does not provide for the exigencies of genuine economic cooperation on an international scale. Thus no measure of human suffering will bring us any nearer to the desired international political order, except to the degree that the nations themselves will be transformed – during the course of wars, painful defeats, and no less costly victories – into a true economic commonwealth.