War and the
Need
of
Economic Unity
THE military necessity, the pressure of war between nations and
the need for prevention of war by the assumption of force and authority in the
hands of an inter- national body, World-State or Federation or League of Peace,
is that which will most directly drive humanity in the end towards some sort of
international union. But there is behind it another necessity which is much
more powerful in its action on the modern mind, the commercial and industrial,
the necessity born of economic interdependence. Commercialism is a modern
sociological phenomenon; one might almost say, that is the whole phenomenon of
modem society. The economic part of life is always important to an organised
community and even fundamental; but in former times it was simply the first
need., it was not that which occupied the thoughts of men, gave the whole tone
to the social life, stood at the head and was clearly recognised as standing at
the root of social principles. Ancient man was in the group primarily a
political being, in the Aristotelian sense, - as soon as he ceased to be
primarily religious,- and to this preoccupation he added, wherever he was
sufficiently at ease, the preoccupation of thought, art and culture. The
economic impulses of the group were worked out as a mechanical necessity, a
strong desire in the vital being rather than a leading thought in the mind. Nor
was the society regarded or studied as an economic organism except in a very
superficial aspect. The economic man held an honourable, but still a
comparatively low position in the society; he was only the third caste or
class, the Vaishya. The lead was in the hands of the intellectual and political
classes, - the Brahmin, thinker,
scholar, philosopher and priest, the Kshatriya, ruler and warrior. It was their
thoughts and preoccupations that gave the tone
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to society, determined its conscious drift and action,
coloured most powerfully all its motives. Commercial interests entered into the
relations of States and into the motives of war and peace; but they entered as
subordinate and secondary predisposing causes of amity or hostility and only
rarely and as it were accidentally came to be enumerated among the overt and
conscious causes of peace, alliance and strife. The political consciousness,
the political motive dominated; increase of wealth was primarily regarded as a
means of political power and greatness and opulence of the mobilisable
resources of the State than as an end in itself or a first consideration.
Everything
now is changed. The phenomenon of modern social development is the decline of
the Brahmin and Kshatriya, of the Church, the military aristocracy and the
aristocracy of letters and culture, and the rise to power or predominance of
the commercial and industrial classes, Vaishya and Shudra, Capital and Labour.
Together they have swallowed up or cast out their rivals and are now engaged in
a fratricidal conflict for sole possession in which the completion of the
downward force of social gravitation, the ultimate triumph of Labour and the
remodelling of all social conceptions and institutions with Labour as the
first, the most dignified term which will give its value to all others seem to
be the visible writing of Fate. At present, however, it is the Vaishya who
still predominates and his stamp on the world is commercialism, the
predominance of the economic man, the universality of the commercial value or
the utilitarian and materially efficient and productive value for everything in
human life. Even in the outlook on knowledge, thought, science, art, poetry and
religion the economic conception of life overrides all others.1
For the
modem economic view of life, culture and its products have chiefly a decorative
value; they are costly and desirable luxuries, not at all indispensable
necessities. Religion is in this view a by-product of the human mind with a
very
1 It
is noticeable that the bourgeois habit of the predominance of commercialism has
been taken up and continued in an even larger scale by the new Socialist
societies though on the basis of a labour, instead of a bourgeois economy, and
an attempt at a new distribution of its profits or else, more
characteristically, a concentration of all in the hands of the State.
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restricted
utility - if indeed it is not a waste and a hindrance. Education has a recognised
importance but its object and form are no longer so much cultural as
scientific, utilitarian and economic, its value the preparation of the
efficient individual unit to take his place in the body of the economic
organisation. Science is of immense importance not because it discovers the
secrets of Nature for the advancement of knowledge, but because it utilises
them for the creation of machinery and develops and organises the economic
resources of the community. The thought-power of the society, almost its
soul-power - if it has any longer so unsubstantial and unproductive a thing as
a soul- is not in its religion or its literature, although the former drags on a feeble existence and
the latter teems and spawns, but in the daily Press primarily an instrument of
commercialism and governed by the political and commercial spirit and not like
literature a direct instrument of culture. Politics, government itself are
becoming more and more a machinery for the development of an industrialised
society, divided between the service of bourgeois capitalism and the office of
a half- involuntary channel for the incoming of economic Socialism. Free
thought and culture remain on the surface of this great increasing mass of
commercialism and influence and modify it, but are themselves more and more
influenced, penetrated, coloured, subjugated by the economic, commercial and
industrial view of human life.
This great
change has affected profoundly the character of international relations in the
past and is likely to affect them still more openly and powerfully in the
future. For there is no apparent probability of a turn in a new direction in
the immediate future. Certain prophetic voices announce indeed the speedy
passing of the age of commercialism. But it is not easy to see how this is to
come about; certainly, it will not be by a reversion to the predominantly
political spirit of the past or the temper and forms of the old aristocratic
social type. The sigh of the extreme conservative mind for the golden age of
the past, which was not so golden as it appears to an imaginative eye in the
distance, is a vain breath blown to the winds by the rush of the car of the
Time-Spirit in the extreme velocity of its
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progress. The end of commercialism can only come about
either by some unexpected development of commercialism itself or through a
reawakening of spirituality in the race and its coming to its own by the
subordination of the political and economic motives of life to the spiritual
motive.
Certain signs
are thought to point in this direction. The religious spirit is reviving and
even the old discouraged religious creeds and forms are recovering a kind of
vigour. In the secular thought of mankind there are signs of an idealism which
increasingly admits a spiritual element among its motives. But all this is as
yet slight and superficial; the body of thought and practice, the effective
motive, the propelling impulsion remain untouched and unchanged. That impulsion
is still towards the industrialising of the human race and the perfection of
the life of society as an economic and productive organism. Nor is this spirit
likely to die as yet by exhaustion, for it has not yet fulfilled itself and is
growing, not declining in force. It is aided, moreover, by modern Socialism
which promises to be the master of the future; for Socialism proceeds on the
Marxian principle that its own reign has to be preceded by an age of bourgeois
capitalism of which it is to be the inheritor and seize upon its work and
organisation in order to turn it to its own uses and modify it by its own
principles and methods. It intends indeed to substitute Labour as the Master
instead of Capital;1 () but this only means that all activities will be valued by the
labour contributed and work produced rather than by the wealth contribution and
production. It will be a change from one side of economism to the other, but
not a change from economism to the domination of some other and higher motive
of human life. The change itself is likely to be one of the chief factors with
which international unification will have to deal and either its greatest aid
or its greatest difficulty.
In the past, the effect of commercialism has
been to bind together the human race into a real economic unity behind its
1 The connection
between Socialism and the democratic or equalitarian idea or the revolt of the proletariate
is however an accident of its history, not its essence. In Italian Fascism
there arose a Socialism undemocratic and non-equalitarian in its form, idea and
temper. Fascism has gone, but there is no inevitable connection between
Socialism and the domination of Labour.
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apparent political separativeness. But this was a
subconscient unity of inseparable interrelations and of intimate mutual dependence,
not any oneness of the spirit or of the conscious organised life. Therefore these interrelations produced at once the necessity of peace and the
unavoidability of war. Peace was necessary
for their normal action, war frightfully perturbatory to their whole system of
being. But because the organised units were politically separate and rival
nations, their commercial interrelations became relations of rivalry and strife
or rather a confused tangle of
exchange and interdependence and hostile separatism. Self-defence against each
other by a wall of tariffs, a race
for closed markets and fields of exploitation, a struggle for place or
predominance in markets and fields which could 1'lOt be monopolised and an attempt at mutual interpenetration
in spite of tariff walls have
been the chief features of this hostility and this separatism. The outbreak of
war under such conditions was only a
matter of time; it was bound to come as soon as one nation or else one group of
nations felt itself either unable to proceed farther by pacific means or
threatened with the definite limitation of its expansion by the growing
combination of its rivals. The Franco-German was the last great war dictated by
political motives. Since then the political motive has been mainly a cover for
the commercial. Not the political subjugation of Serbia which could only be a
fresh embarrassment to the Austrian empire, but the commercial possession of
the outlet through Salonika was the motive of Austrian policy. Pan-Germanism
covered the longings of German industry for possession of the great resources
and the large outlet into the North Sea offered by the countries along the
Rhine. To seize African spaces of exploitation and perhaps French coal fields,
not to rule over French territory, was the drift of its real intention. In
Africa, in China, in Persia, in Mesopotamia, commercial motives determined
political and military action. War is no longer the legitimate child of
ambition and earth-hunger, but the bastard offspring of wealth-hunger or commercialism
with political ambition as its putative father.
On the
other hand, the effect, the shock of war have been rendered intolerable by the
industrial organisation of human
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life and the commercial interdependence of the nations.
It would be too much to say that it laid that organisation in ruins, but it
turned it topsy-turvy, deranged its whole system and diverted it to unnatural
ends. And it produced a widespread suffering and privation in belligerent and a
gene and perturbation of life in neutral countries to which the history
of the world offers no parallel. The angry cry that this -must not be suffered
again and that the authors of this menace and disturbance to the modem
industrial organisation of the world, self-styled civilisa-tion, must be
visited with condign punishment and remain for some time as international
outcastes under a ban and a boycott, showed how deeply the lesson had gone
home. But it showed too, as the post-war mentality has shown, that the real,
the inner truth of it all has not yet been understood or not seized at its
centre. Certainly, from this point of view also, the prevention of war must be
one of the first preoccupations of a new ordering of international life. But
how is war to be entirely prevented if the old state of commercial rivalry
between politically separate nations is to be perpetuated? If peace is still to
be a covert war, an organisation of strife and rivalry, how is the physical
shock to be prevented? It may be said, through the regulation of the inevitable
strife and rivalry by a state of law as in the competitive commercial life of a
nation before the advent of Socialism. But that was only possible, because the
competing individuals or combines were part of a single social organism subject
to a single governmental authority and unable to assert their individual will
of existence against it. Such a regulation between nations can therefore have
no other conclusion, logically or practically, than the formation of a
centralised World-State.
But let us suppose that the physical shock of
war is prevented, not by law, but by the principle of enforced arbitration in
extreme cases which might lead to war, not by the creation of an international
authority, but by the overhanging threat of international pressure. The state
of covert war will still continue; it may even take new and disastrous forms.
Deprived of other weapons the nations are bound to have increasing resort to
the weapon of commercial pressure, as did Capital and Labour in their chronic
state of "pacific" struggle within the
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limits of the national life. The instruments would be
different, but would follow the same principle, that of the strike and the
lockout which are on one side a combined passive resistance by the weaker party
to enforce its claims, on the other a passive pressure by the stronger party to
enforce its wishes. Between nations, the corresponding weapon to the strike
would be a commercial boycott, already used more than once in an unorganised
fashion both in Asia and Europe and bound to be extremely effective and telling
if organised even by a politically or commercially weak nation. For the weaker
nation is necessary to the stronger, if as nothing else, yet as a market or as
a commercial and industrial victim. The corresponding weapons to the lockout
would be the refusal of capital or machinery, the prohibition of all or of any
needed imports into the offending
or victim country, or even a naval blockade leading, if long maintained, to
industrial ruin or to national starvation. The blockade is a weapon used
originally only in a state of war, but it was employed against Greece as a
substitute for war, and this use may easily be extended in the future. There is
always too the weapon of prohibitive tariffs.
It is clear
that these weapons need not be employed for commercial purposes or motives
only, they may be grasped at to defend or to attack any national interest, to
enforce any claim of justice or injustice between nation and nation. It has
been shown into how tremendous a weapon commercial pressure can be turned when
it is used as an aid to war. If Germany was crushed in the end, the real means
of victory was the blockade, the cutting off of money, resources and food and
the ruin of industry, and commerce. For the military debacle was not directly
due to military weakness, but primarily to the diminution and failure of
resources, to exhaustion, semi-starvation and the moral depression of an
intolerable position cut off from all hope of replenishment and recovery. This
lesson also may have in the future considerable application in a time of
"peace". Already it was proposed at one time in some quarters to
continue the commercial war after the political had ceased, in order that
Germany might not only be struck off the list of great imperial nations but
also permanently hampered, disabled or even ruined
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as a commercial and industrial rival. A policy of
refusal of capital and trade relations and a kind of cordon or hostile blockade
has been openly advocated and was for a time almost in force against Bolshevist
Russia. And it has been suggested too that a League of Peace1
might use this weapon of
commercial pressure against any recalcitrant nation in place of military force.
But so long
as there is not a firm international authority, the use of this weapon would
not be likely to be limited to such occasions or used only for just and
legitimate ends. It might be used by a strong nation, secure of general
indifference, to crush and violate the weak; it might be used by a combination
of strong imperial Powers to enforce their selfish and evil will upon the
world. Force and coercion of any kind not concentrated in the hands of a just
and impartial authority are always liable to abuse and misapplication.
Therefore inevitably in the growing unity of mankind the evolution of such an
authority must become an early and pressing need. The World-State even in its
early and imperfect organisation must begin not only to concentrate military
force in its hands, but to commence consciously in the beginning what the
national State only arrived at by a slow and natural development, the ordering
of the commercial, industrial, economic life of the race and the control at first,
no doubt, only of the principal relations of international commerce,2 but inevitably in the end of its
whole system and principles. Since industry and trade are now five-sixths of
social life and the economic principle the governing principle of society, a
World-State which did not control human life in its chief principle and its
largest activity would exist only in name.
1 Afterwards
realised as the League of Nations.
2 Some first beginnings of this kind of
activity were trying to appear in the activities of the now almost moribund
League of Nations. These activities were still only platonic and advisory as in
its futile discussions about disarmament and its inconclusive attempts to
regulate certain relations of Capital and Labour, but they showed that the need
is already felt and were a signpost on the road to the future.
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