Barbary Shore (33 page)

McLeod looked at Hollingsworth almost without recognition. His eyes knitted together to form a vertical line between, and with a sigh, as though to hew to the line of the argument were even more demanding upon himself than upon us, he reached into his pocket and withdrew a pack of small papers upon which he had scribbled some notes.

“The plausibility of the apologist’s argument depends upon a logic which is as attractive as it is superficial. Everything he said was complete nonsense.” This was worth a pause. “It may be noted that the apologist was an abstract conception. In life, since he claims to be a realist, he finds himself inevitably espousing the cause of one side or the other. He can hardly argue for both. Need I add that he hopes the bloc for which he pleads will win in the war which is to come. And if one asks him what will happen if the other side wins, he will answer: disaster, complete disaster. So, by adding two separate halves of the truth, one arrives at the conclusion.”

For the first time McLeod’s voice showed some animation. He remained still seated formally in his chair, hands before him on the table to examine the notes, his spectacles set resolutely upon his nose, but in completing the introduction he seemed to have purged his fatigue. “I need hardly depend, however, upon such legerdemain. I prefer to answer more fully. My political formulations are based on the thesis that war is inevitable, and I think it is reasonable to assert that if either of the two powers is unable to solve its economic problems without going to war, it
must follow that war will come. But what if both of the Colossi suffer such contradictions?
A fortiori,
the inevitability of war receives its double guarantee.

“Proper analysis must be virtually exhaustive. I have been reminded that my time is not without limit and so I will confine my remarks to assertions. The situation of the bloc which may be called ‘monopoly capitalism’ is critical.” McLeod went on to repeat what I had already analyzed for myself. The productive capacity of monopoly had become so tremendous, its investment in machinery so great in comparison to the labor force it could exploit, that only the opening of the entire world market could solve its search for investment and profit even temporarily. “Those backward areas of the globe so necessary to monopoly cannot be lost,” McLeod droned. “Without them, monopoly cannot continue its operations on an adequate scale, without them there is no choice but to engage in the production of armaments or to suffer economic collapse. Yet those same backward regions, finding their own development to capitalism blocked by monopoly, whose interest it is to keep them retarded, are obliged to move at one historic bound from feudalism to state capitalism. Thus, half the world is now closed to monopoly, and the other half, still nominally in its possession, has moved a long way on the road to nationalization.

“The crisis of the major state capitalist power is even graver. Upon the mountains of rhetoric which have been deposited, it is not my intention to add more than a stone. I wish merely to underline the notion that socialism does not come about by an act of will. It should be axiomatic that, where conditions do not exist which make it possible to raise the standard of living, a socialist revolution can only degenerate into its opposite, and when the events of 1917 failed to induce similar proletarian uprisings in the countries of the West, the revolution was doomed. Surrounded by enemies, forced into the herculean labor of raising production by the bootstrap, all possibility for socialism
was lost in the necessity for survival. The portion of the economy devoted to goods and services for the mass of people had to be limited. The more production which went into the creation of the tools, elements, and articles making possible further production, the less could be provided for human consumption. Such a project of expanding one’s industrial capacity has potential enrichment only if it is not necessary to continue it too long. For, mark you, the results. If benefits do not follow deprivation, the proletariat diminishes its rate of productivity. A man is capable of participating efficiently in the modern industrial process, with all its demands for skill, intelligence, and intense labor, only if there is a reward possible, to wit an adequate scale of living and the promise of an improved future. Deprived of the minimum of comfort and hope, workmanship must degenerate. Little balm for the laborer if factories swallow the earth, when they fail to provide him with creature comfort, and less balm for the bureaucrat when the failure to produce what is socially possible becomes increasingly more serious.

“Do you find this hard to follow, Leroy?” McLeod interjected suddenly. Hollingsworth answered by yawning in his face.

“Witness the problem the bureaucrats of state capitalism must face. If they are to retain their power and privilege, there is a limit beyond which they cannot depress the standard of living or they are left only with slave labor and the complete deterioration of their economy. Yet the working class can be neither coerced nor driven to begin to match the productivity of monopoly. Their morale is too low. Only the adrenalin of the last war with the incentive to fight against a foreign invader could solve that problem temporarily. Therefore, no matter how they suffered in that war, no matter how the mass may want peace, peace is impossible.

“The inescapable corollary is that state capitalism as a social organism has lost hope in its own ability to improve productivity. It must now depend upon seizing new countries, stripping
them of their wealth, and converting their economy to war. In short, plunder. Alas for the project, this plunder is a flask which contains no bottom. The wealth newly acquired must be immediately converted into armament, the living standard fails to rise, and the process must be repeated. Thus, each bloc from its own necessity to survive prepares for war. The process is irreversible.

“It is a war fought by two different exploitative systems, a system vigorous in the fever of death, and another monstrous in the swelling of anemia. One doesn’t predict the time precisely, but regardless of the temporary flux of military situation, it is a war which ends as a conflict between two virtually identical forms of exploitation. State capitalism occupies the historical seat. The state, the sole exploiter capable of supporting the ultra war economy and the regimentation of the proletariat, absorbs monopoly either peaceably or by a short internal conflict. There is no alternative. The historical imperative is to reduce to the minimum the production of consumer goods in order to expand the critical needs for armament. Such a change occurs against the background of military losses and military destruction. To a people who depended upon commodities as the opium which gave meaning to their lives, the last of the luxuries is inexorably wiped from the board. Problems permitting of only a single solution follow upon this in quick order. More money than goods to buy, an inflation of vast proportions can be prevented only if wages are reduced and exploitation increased. The result is a diminishment of the will to work and a drop in the velocity of industrial performance. Discontent is everywhere. The first examples of random sabotage, motivated by no more than brute exasperation, begin to multiply. The police system which had been already expanded at the moment of entering the war, when hundreds of thousands of people politically suspect had to be found and imprisoned, now receives a new levy. The police are everywhere, within the unions, in the military, at the seats of
government power; they have almost reached the point where they co-exist with all of society. State profit and state surveillance, state-enforced poverty and state-endowed wealth. The bureaucrat drives his limousine and he is the only one. Poor proletariat. Cheated still another time. They are fed the turnips their masters would have them become.”

McLeod was speaking in a mournful cadence, so slow, so spaced, so sad that emotion was betrayed by irony and he was almost mocking himself. Across the desk Hollingsworth sat in the perfect pose of boredom, one arm supporting the elbow of the other while with his free hand he picked languidly at his nose, much as if he lay upon a couch and plucked grapes from a bowl. Lannie seemed to have fallen asleep, or was she in coma? Her legs stretched out before her, breath rattled from her throat, and her eyes, pressed tightly closed, twitched with the anxiety of the hand that holds a lizard.

“Very well,” McLeod sighed. “The process takes surprisingly little time. Nations which come late to a new organization of society seldom take as long to trace the history of their predecessors. Moreover, the character of economic production must undergo so profound a change that little will remain of the bastard civilization we now possess. Consider it carefully. For the first time in history, the intent of society will be to produce wholly for death, and men will be kept alive merely to further that aim. Through the worst excesses and inequities of every culture which has preceded us, the natural function of economy was to produce for life. Even capitalism in its search for profit assumed automatically that life and profit were compatible. Perhaps a little less life and a little more profit, but nonetheless the body of man’s production served to keep him alive. In the advanced stages of state capitalism this natural function must be discarded. Hereafter the aim of society is no longer to keep its members alive, but quite the contrary, the question is how to dispose of them. With your permission”—a
nod at Hollingsworth—“I should like to illustrate my remarks.”

“Do as you wish,” Hollingsworth said sullenly.

“The factor never to be forgotten is that the economic crisis is now permanent. If the parasitical layers of capitalism have been destroyed, they are replaced by the elephantiasis of the bureaucracy. From that moment the rate of production is never again capable of steady increase. The search begins for methods to stimulate it. State competition becomes substituted, and artificial campaigns between state corporations, accompanied by all the machinery of propaganda, make exhaustive efforts to match the requirements of armament. Piecework reappears. Such a process is narcotic. The injection must become progressively more intense, until the price for losing a competition becomes the neck of a bureaucrat. The first stage of cannibalism has been reached, and the bureaucracy finds itself obliged to dispose of the same personnel it needs so desperately. They are a class which comes to power at the very moment they are in the act of destroying themselves.”

Hollingsworth was giving his attention once more. There was a little sore at the corner of his mouth and his tongue came out to explore it, moistened the lesion and then wet his lips.

“You must realize,” McLeod said to him, “that these gentlemen are subject to the most extraordinary pressures. They dare not commit an action which is against the interests of the state, yet the interests of that body change constantly; they are terrified of the price for error and would content themselves with the minimum of initiative, yet extraordinary efforts are constantly demanded of them. They are not able to consider their own needs before their duty. There is a conflict between their desire for a private life and their public and party obligation. They function for the collectivity and the most terrible greeds for personal enrichment begin to torment them. Psychologically, the check must at last be paid. The bureaucrat becomes driven to express his personality through anti-social action.” Here, McLeod
stopped, and he and Hollingsworth stared at one another, as if the one had said too much and the other had listened too long.

“I follow you, yes I do,” Hollingsworth whispered, his tongue worrying the lesion.

“They become obliged,” McLeod said hoarsely, resolved I thought to mutilate every retreat, “obliged to commit some act against the state. Its content matters not. It suffices only if it is illogical, unfounded, and disastrous for them. You see they have lost the sense of their own identity, and if it has been the state which began to devour them, they end by collaborating with the process.

“But let me waste no grief for those gentlemen. They are merely a parallel to the destruction between armies and within economies. War has become the only method of accumulation, and by the orchestration of patriotism’s mad opera that pace of manufacture which insists upon diminishing may be resuscitated for its brief time. Yet what is one to do? As the strength of the working class is progressively exhausted, the quality and the rate of work continue to diminish. No longer will any measures but the most drastic be effective. The armory of compulsion must be employed. Forced labor appears, and since even hell must have its stages, at the end of forced labor is the concentration camp.”

“The gas chamber,” Lannie said loudly. She might have been awakening from a dream.

“The concentration camp,” McLeod repeated. “And its mate, the secret city, where new weapons of more extraordinary capacity for destruction are developed. These phenomena accompany the most significant phenomenon of all—the degeneration of knowledge. In the past our collective understanding was limited only by the capacities of the human mind; now it is to be restricted by the social organism whose necessity is to maintain ignorance of the whole. Thus, millions will be destroyed in
the concentration camps while a few miles away people will conduct the routine of their lives and know nothing but the suspicion of rumor.

“The techniques of the last war provide only a hint of what is to come. On a quasi-systematic basis an attempt was made to eliminate that portion of the population which was incapable of producing for the economy. But the lines were blurred by religious and political categories. As the next war progresses it will become even more impossible to maintain the luxury of non-producers. They will have become intolerable for society. The aged and the children will be killed, but such selection will serve as a beginning rather than an end. For the organ has been created, it is a part of the social structure, and may be dismantled no more than the state. If Moloch is not fed, the last stage of hell will vanish, and with it, the apparatus of hell. So, year by year, the useless millions are to be eliminated, until in the final crowning of contradiction, even the producers will go into the machine. Stability depends upon it.”