History in the Gear of Social Change [ 255 ]
the countries of the world into an alignment against Bolshevism. She
made herself the foremost beneficiary of the transformation by taking
the lead in that solution of the problem of market economy which for
a long time appeared to enlist the unconditional allegiance of the
propertied classes, and indeed not always of these alone. Under the lib-
eral and Marxist assumption of the primacy of economic class inter-
ests, Hitler was bound to win. But the social unit of the nation proved,
in the long run, even more cohesive than the economic unit of class.
Russia's rise also was linked with her role in the transformation.
From 1917 to 1929 the fear of Bolshevism was no more than the fear of
disorder which might fatally hamper the restoration of a market econ-
omy which could not function except in an atmosphere of unqualified
confidence. In the following decade socialism became a reality in Rus-
sia. The collectivization of the farms meant the supersession of market
economy by cooperative methods in regard to the decisive factor of
land. Russia, which had been merely a seat of revolutionary agitation
directed toward the capitalistic world, now emerged as the representa-
tive of a new system which could replace market economy.
It is not usually realized that the Bolsheviks, though ardent social-
ists themselves, stubbornly refused to "establish socialism in Russia."
Their Marxist convictions alone would have precluded such an at-
tempt in a backward agrarian country. But apart from the entirely ex-
ceptional episode of so-called "War Communism" in 1920, the leaders
adhered to the position that the world revolution must start in indus-
trialized Western Europe. Socialism in one country would have ap-
peared to them a contradiction in terms, and when it became reality,
the Old Bolsheviks rejected it almost to a man. Yet it was precisely this
departure which proved an amazing success.
Looking back upon a quarter-century of Russian history, it ap-
pears that what we call the Russian Revolution really consisted of two
separate revolutions, the first of which embodied traditional Western
European ideals, while the second formed part of the utterly new de-
velopment of the thirties. The Revolution of 1917—24 was indeed the
last of the political upheavals in Europe that followed the pattern of
the English Commonwealth and of the French Revolution; the revolu-
tion that started with the collectivization of the farms, about 1930, was
the first of the great social changes that transformed our world in the
thirties. For the first Russian Revolution achieved the destruction of
absolutism, feudal land tenure, and racial oppression—a true heir to
[ 256 ] The Great Transformation
the ideals of 1789; the second Revolution established a socialist econ-
omy. When all is said, the first was merely a Russian event—it fulfilled
a long process of Western development on Russian soil—while the
second formed part of a simultaneous universal transformation.
Seemingly in the 1920s Russia stood apart from Europe and was
working out her own salvation. A closer analysis might disprove this
appearance. For among the factors which forced upon her a decision
in the years between the two revolutions was the failure of the interna-
tional system. By 1924 "War Communism" was a forgotten incident
and Russia had reestablished a free domestic grain market, while
maintaining state control of foreign trade and key industries. She was
now bent on increasing her foreign trade, which depended mainly on
exports of grain, timber, furs, and some other organic raw materials,
the prices of which were slumping heavily in the course of the agrarian
depression which preceded the general break in trade. Russia's inabil-
ity to develop an export trade on favorable terms restricted her im-
ports of machinery and hence the establishment of a national in-
dustry; this, again, affected the terms of barter between town and
countryside—the so-called "scissors"—unfavorably, thus increasing
the antagonism of the peasantry to the rule of the urban workers. In
this way the disintegration of world economy increased the strain on
the makeshift solutions of the agrarian question in Russia, and has-
tened the coming of the kolkhoz. The failure of the traditional political
system of Europe to provide safety and security worked in the same di-
rection since it induced the need for armaments, thus enhancing
the burdens of high-pressure industrialization. The absence of the
nineteenth-century balance-of-power system, as well as the inability
of the world market to absorb Russia's agricultural produce, forced her
reluctantly into the paths of self-sufficiency. Socialism in one country
was brought about by the incapacity of market economy to provide a
link between all countries; what appeared as Russian autarchy was
merely the passing of capitalist internationalism.
The failure of the international system let loose the energies of his-
tory—the tracks were laid down by the tendencies inherent in a mar-
ket society.
C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - O N E
Freedom in a Complex Society
ineteenth-century civilization was not destroyed by the exter-
nal or internal attack of barbarians; its vitality was not sapped
by the devastations of World War I nor by the revolt of a socialist prole-
tariat or a fascist lower middle class. Its failure was not the outcome of
some alleged laws of economics such as that of the falling rate of profit
or of underconsumption or overproduction. It disintegrated as the re-
sult of an entirely different set of causes: the measures which society
adopted in order not to be, in its turn, annihilated by the action of the
self-regulating market. Apart from exceptional circumstances such as
existed in North America in the age of the open frontier, the conflict
between the market and the elementary requirements of an organized
social life provided the century with its dynamics and produced the
typical strains and stresses which ultimately destroyed that society.
External wars merely hastened its destruction.
After a century of blind "improvement" man is restoring his "habita-
tion." If industrialism is not to extinguish the race, it must be subordi-
nated to the requirements of man's nature. The true criticism of mar-
ket society is not that it was based on economics—in a sense, every and
any society must be based on it—but that its economy was based on
self-interest. Such an organization of economic life is entirely unnatu-
ral, in the strictly empirical sense oi exceptional. Nineteenth-century
thinkers assumed that in his economic activity man strove for profit,
that his materialistic propensities would induce him to choose the
lesser instead of the greater effort and to expect payment for his labor;
in short, that in his economic activity he would tend to abide by what
they described as economic rationality, and that all contrary behavior
was the result of outside interference. It followed that markets were
natural institutions, that they would spontaneously arise if only men
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