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April 46, #113 ->
The Price System Breeds War
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April 46, #113 ->
The Price System Breeds War
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Scanned in by John Taube, lightly proofread by trent
All nations have engaged in war as a national policy. Isn't it high time that we approached the problem of war in a correct manner--that we change the system and not the individuals?
In 1931, When Japan invaded Manchuria, the Japanese were incapable of waging a global war. Yet American, French and British business continued to deal with the Japanese until 1941, selling them scrap steel and petroleum in quantities far in excess of their normal peacetime requirements, knowing full well that such dealings might result in war.
In 1934, Germany, under the Nazis, announced to all the world that its program was a return to conditions preceding the Versailles Treaty, Anschluss with Austria, and a crusade against Bolshevism. Yet American, French and British business continued to deal with the Germans, selling them airplane engines, planes and petroleum, far in excess of their normal peacetime requirements, knowing equally well that such dealings might result in war.
In a Price System world, private enterprise prosperity is promoted by the shipment of goods from a producer nation to a consumer nation -- even though the producer nation may be depleting its vanishing resources to the point where it will shortly have to join the ranks of the `have-nots.' History is replete with such `have-nots' -- Phoenicia, Mesopotamia, Greece, Carthage, Italy, Great Britain. Because Britain hasn't what it takes at home any more (lacking timber, iron and petroleum, and importing 50% of her food) and because she has been a `have-not' for over 350 years, she will always of necessity fight to retain her sea lanes through the Gibraltar, the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal as her life line.
In a Price System world, we find a community of interest even between potential enemies, as the last 20 years have demonstrated, brought about through the synthetic prosperity which is fostered in the internal affairs of the shipper and by the bounteous shipment of scarce goods to the economy of the receiving nation. Both find it desirable to promote the trade and commerce of goods--even war goods.
Whenever any nation sends war goods to another nation during a period of non-hostilities, it is doing so at its peril because it may be sending war goods to a potential enemy. It may be good business for the individual corporation or private enterprise in the sender nation--but it is death-dealing business to the sons and the fathers of that nation. We had a taste of just this sort of murderous practice when we were placed on the receiving end of German and Japanese death-dealing machines that originated on this Continent.
The fact remains that in a Price System, the manufacture and sale of war goods and implements is profitable business. In fact, it is good business even to sell to the enemy while you are at war with him as both World Wars I and II have shown conclusively.
We saw the results of foreign trade pressure in World War I. Woodrow Wilson, the President of the United States, and Walter Hines Page, our Ambassador to Britain in 1917, have both testified to the fact that World War I was a commercial war--the military expression of the prewar international rivalry for foreign trade and colonies which had been going on for decades. Our private bankers were gradually being driven bankrupt because they were backing the losing side in World War I. Hines' letters and cables bear this out. If we had not entered the war when we did, and if Germany had won that war, we would have suffered a disastrous financial panic in this country.
Our shipments of war material to Germany and Japan in the decade before 1941 are the result of the same pressures as were at work in World War I. What factors in the world picture are present today which will better protect us from the inevitable result of business pressures again driving us to equip Germany and Japan with war goods? Or instead of Germany and Japan, what difference would it make to our national welfare if we chose to favor China and France this time?
Americans are no more evil or murderous than any other set of human beings anywhere else in the world--and for that matter, no less. But as businessmen in a Price System, our citizens needed foreign trade in the 1920's, the 1930's and they shall need it again in 1946, if we ever expect to achieve a prosperity in this country within the framework of a continuing Price System.
We keep hopping up our national morale with promise of a $150 billion national income, yet the plain fact is that we never had a national income higher than $80 billion in all our prewar history. Isn't it significant that the only way in which we achieved the $150 billion annual incomes in 1943, 1944 and 1945 was by virtue of the fact that we were shipping abroad and expending for military purposes at the unprecedented rate of $75 to $100 billion annually? Where and how can we expect to find the replacement for these $75 to $100 billion war expenditures to bring our national income up to equal these wishful-thinking promises when we consider that the entire world trade before 1939--all world trade, mind you--was only $25 billion?
Oh, yes, we hear talk of the additional income that we will earn from the production of autos, the construction of houses and roads, of which we have been deprived during the war years. But after we have provided for these outstanding non-recurring needs, what others are there that could possibly amount to sufficient business volume to result in any considerable sum of additional national income?
Take a look at the peace picture today.
We stopped fighting against the Japanese in August, 1945. Now, only six months later, the Japs are fighting alongside British and Chinese troops in China and Indonesia. We thought we went to Asia to disarm the Japanese.
We stopped fighting against the Germans on May 8, 1945. Now, less than a year later, there are still hundreds of thousands of German prisoners organized as an armed force with their own officer cadres. How can anyone but a protocol-minded diplomat tell an enemy from an ally at even ten paces, when your enemy in one war is your ally in the next war. or even in the same war?
The politically-organized, scarcity economy, Price System world is a WAR world because it can't be anything else. Read the papers. ``We must talk stiffly to -------''; ``We must meet aggression with force''; ``We have no reason for war.'' These are the headlines in recent weeks. Methinks that the lady doth protest too much. Chastity does not need words to receive its merited acceptance. Neither does any nation need to go about protesting its peaceful intentions. ``We shall have peace--even if we have to go to war for it! We will use force--to bar aggression.'' The Price System is war and always has been.
The psychologists have a word for it. They call it `guilt complex.' Beware of those who belabor us with words of their own innocence. What happened at the UNO Conference recently ended in London? The Big Three were at each other's throats continuously--there, as everywhere else. How can we expect a unification of 60 or more nations, with diverse resources and populations, when each of those nations to be united into a world federation is itself rent and torn by internal strife because of the imbalance between its own resources and population?
But the apologists for a continuance of the status quo--those who have vested interests to protect--organized, business, organized politics and organized religion--will tell us that it is a healthy thing for nations to air their grievances in international conferences.
Then they come home and shout defiantly that `nobody can live with those Russians And the Russians, too, go home and shout defiantly that `no one can live with those capitalists!' The answer is very obvious--no one can live in a world where there is not enough to eat!
If all this posturing doesn't have the earmarks of setting up a moral basis for another war, a crusade or any other name you choose to call it--so long as our people can be induced to swallow it--then a skunk smells like a rose!
``We are going to fight those Bolshies because they are bad, evil, atheistic men and they don't respect property.'' Who says so?
``We shall see to it that the small nations get justice in this world.'' Whose justice? Ours?
``They'll have democracy, too.'' Whose democracy?
``They shall have everything-to our way of liking.'' Or else!
Given low resources and high population as exist today in all of Europe and Asia (except Russia) which takes in more than two-thirds of the world's people, the result must be pressures, both internal and external, for relief from the intolerable physical conditions. In a world of national separations, which are totally unrelated to their geographic contours, each nation will inevitably strive to establish a strategic frontier for itself.
The history of the last 3500 years bears out the fact that we have never been able to talk ourselves into a peace, for over 3100 of these 3500 years have witnessed war somewhere in the world. The normal course of events in a Price System is not peace but war, and we shall not be able to `talk' our way out of it. Peace will never be achieved by evangelism and moral crusading. We have seen tribes nations, states, dynasties and empires rise and fall, through military success or military defeat. Those which are today known as the peace-loving nations are merely the ones that have no need for further conquests--like ourselves--or are the ones that suffered such a thorough defeat in centuries past that they haven't the energy or the resources to conduct a successful military venture--like China.
Yet every nation--ourselves and China included--is engaged in a mad race to retain and build up its armaments to the fullest extent of its resources and financial capacity. For what? For peace?
History has proved that every nation on the face of the earth has at some time or other been warlike, and at other times pacific. No people ever acquired nationhood except by military power. The Chinese have been warlike. The British have been warlike. The French have been warlike. What is it that makes people go to war? Perverse human nature? Is it just certain human natures, like the Germans and the Japanese, or does it have anything to do with human nature at all?
Throw ten hungry, starving cats into a confined pit. You won't have ten cats for very long. Throw ten, starving hungry men into a confined pit. You won't have ten men for very long. Many of us still remember the Nobile expedition to the North Pole. Five men went out but only four came back. In many parts of China cannibalism is still practiced. Many tribes in South America still practice cannibalism.
Ah, but we say, man is civilized. Well, what distinguishes man from the animal? Is he more humane? Sure he's humane--but he's just as deadly and murderous when he gets hungry enough. Is he born civilized? is an infant civilized by virtue of being born of civilized man?
If men are not born civilized, and the anthropologists and the sociologists are the experts in this field, then apparently the environment into which man is born must itself be the basic causation.
You may remember the exhibition of a marine tank some years ago in Florida. This tank contained every variety of fish-life, including some species which ate other fish and some which were man-eating as well. Yet, every day a human being went down into that tank completely unprotected in order to clean out the bottom. There he was in the midst of man-eating sharks and other such ferocious specimens, but never was he molested. The answer is simple. The fish in that tank were fed enough and fed regularly.
Now if you throw 140 million people into a scarcity area where they cannot get enough to feed themselves regularly, they must either war among themselves or with another area for the acquisition of the minimum necessities for maintaining life.
The world agricultural resources today total only four billion acres. We need two and one-half acres to provide each person with the minimum food necessities for maintaining life. That leaves over 600 million people who cannot be provided with any food at all, or leaves the total population with so little food as to result in less than a minimum level for all. And this takes no account of the fact that India and China alone will increase their populations about 50 million each in the next ten years.
Look around the world map Kuomintang Chinese are fighting Communist Chinese. Why? Would Chinese fight Chinese if they were all well fed and warm? Sure, the explanations and the reasons given by the moralists and apologists have the usual philosophic ring about good and evil men, just and unjust, democratic and communistic. But reasons and explanations such as these are only rationalizations for the basic, fundamental cause--food for a Scarcity-ridden China.
Americans and Japanese are helping the Kuomintang Chinese in their fight. Why do Americans and Japanese-recently violent, vitriolic enemies-join hands to help one group of Chinese against another group of Chinese? A Yenan Chinaman in Kuamintang wouldn't look any different than a native. But Manchuria, Shantung and Mongolia, controlled by the Tenon Chinese, become very important to both Japanese and Americans. China, under Kuomintang control, is potentially lucrative to our private enterprisers in foreign trade. Our politicians and businessmen, completely incapacitated in the face of abundance at home, desperately need a formula for destroying that abundance. `Sink it, burn it, ship it off the Continent--but get rid of it!' is their motto. So private enterprise goes in for a campaign of propaganda to get the American people to accept the necessity of foreign trade--just as we were propagandized into an acceptance of war.
The Yugoslavs and the British are maneuvering in the Trieste area. Why? Because Trieste is a strategic harbor on the Adriatic and one of the gateways to the Danubian Basin. The Adriatic and the Mediterranean lie astride the British life line. It doesn't matter to the British who will control Trieste so long as the nation that does control it is friendly to the British. With the Karageorgevich dynasty back in control of Yugoslavia, would the British behave the same way? The bald fact is that Yugoslavia under Soviet influence is a threat to British security, in a scarcity world.
The British are still occupying their former ally Greece. What does democracy or religion or future intentions toward world unity have to do with continued British occupation? Only after a friendly regime has been firmly established--one that will not denounce the high interest rate on the Royal Government loans, chiefly held by British investors, and one which will be no threat to their life line to India--will the British consent to withdraw from Greece.
There is rebellion and bloodshed in India, Egypt and Palestine all British mandated or controlled territory.
There is a struggle going on in Iran among Russia, Britain and America. Russia is demanding the return of strategic Ars and Kardahan from Turkey and wants unrestricted access to the Mediterranean.
And here at home we are witnessing a titanic labor struggle involving millions of men--with CIO battling AFL bitterly and both of them engaged in a knock-down, drag-out, three-cornered fight with industry.
All this has been going on without a single peace treaty written yet, no less signed. What war is over in what world?
The Price System breeds war! It has nothing to do with the individual men who live in that system. We have today, and have had, price systems in backward and progressive nations, in Christian and heathen nations, in brown, black and white nations, in every kind of nation during every century. Yet, all nations have engaged in war as a national policy. Isn't it high time that we approached the problem of war in a correct manner, changing the system and not the individuals?
When Technocrats use the words Price System they mean any social system that effects its distribution of goods and services by means of trade or commerce based on commodity valuation and employing a form of debt token or money. Only scarcities can be distributed by trade or commerce. Therefore, any area which operates under a Price System can be referred to as a scarcity economy area. Price System and scarcity, you see, are synonymous.
When we use the term `war,' we mean organized physical conflict between human beings whether the weapons employed be primitive bows and arrows, sling shots and ramming rods or modern gunpowder, artillery and atomic bombs.
Do wars break out because of individual pugnacity, individual urge for self-preservation or because man was born in original sin and therefore an evil-doer? Man's instincts cannot exist in a vacuum. They must have dimension and a live environment in which to express themselves. It is the environment which provides the vessel in which is brewed the mass drive toward war. The manner in which patriotism, love of power, love of glory, dislike of what is alien and the feeling of superiority are expressed, are but the mores and the teachings of a society in which a mass of people live, and they have nothing to do with the instincts of the individual. For instance, once we got into World War II, we taught our youth that organized homicide of the enemy was patriotic, and we spent millions of dollars in an organized campaign of appeals and propaganda showing the desirability of killing for our national salvation.
December 6, 1941, we were pacifist.
December 8, 1941, we were militarist.
Did a miracle occur by a change in our instincts? We were merely doing what we had to do in order to survive.
Can we ever prevent future wars by war guilt trials, treaties between resource-hungry, over-populated nations, or by federation of a world of scarcity? Suppose we indict, try and convict a million so-called war guilty. Will that do away with the fact that the same environment, of scarcity of resources in the midst of overexpanded population, which produced war guilty hundreds of times in the last 3500 years, will inevitably produce a fresh crop of war guilty?
We have had prisons and hangings for thousands of years. We have had police forces and laws against stealing and killing. Have these served to eliminate or even reduce crime? It still remains a simple thing to predict that economic depressions increase the incidence of crime and economic prosperity reduces the incidence of crime.
In a Price System scarcity world, any nation which does not strive to better itself by capturing or acquiring militarily the essential resources for survival is relegated of necessity to a back seat.
The alternatives today are so narrow that we have but one choice a continuance of the Price System which is war, or a discontinuance of the Price System in order to achieve a potential peace.
For the first time in eight thousand years we in North America represent an area population-the only area in the whole world which can, by integration and coordination into a single, organic, social, economic unit, insulate itself against war by virtue of its preponderance of resources and its relatively small population. This Continent alone has arrived at the stage where it can potentially eliminate scarcity, even though it hasn't done so yet because of restraints by the beneficiaries of the status quo. Because we have the capacity to produce an abundance for all, we can eliminate strife internally and make ourselves impregnable externally.
The idea that we can leave the solution of our problems to future generations--that we should plan in terms of centuries, or even decades and that abundance is something to be ushered in within the next fifty years--is intolerable to us as we know it must be to you, because the next five years will decide whether there will be any future decades at all. These are the dynamic years when 50 million people were killed in a five-year war, and when 50 million people can get killed in a five-day war the next time!