Preventive Cold War: II

July 7, 1958

Just when our own official propagandists were warning us that Russian Communism was outpacing American capitalism in overall production, Khrushchev announced another major reform in the Soviet agricultural system that is interpreted as a step toward “the farm-commodity market of capitalist countries.”

Harry Schwartz of The New York Times describes it as follows: “In essence, the decision indicates that the key lesson learned by the Soviet agricultural officials who visited the United States three years ago is now being applied to the collective farms. That lesson is simply that the market forces of supply and demand, price and cost, profit and loss are more effective stimuli for an efficient agriculture than the government exhortations and orders the Soviet Union has relied upon for three decades.”

Whether the new reform does in fact go as far as this will be better known as more details become available and further decisions are announced. But there can be no doubt that Khrushchev, in spite of his daily denunciation of capitalism, has been moving in the direction of the capitalistic free market. This is shown in his attempts to decentralize industrial production decisions, to permit collective farms to own rather than rent tractors, and to set up what he calls a planned system based on “incentives.”

WHY WE ARE LOSING

It is true that the new system will be still far from a free market. The government will still set an arbitrary price and will still fix compulsory production or delivery “quotas.” Unfortunately, we cannot contrast our own system too sharply with this. We too, in agriculture, have abandoned the market system, at least for so-called “basic” commodities. These are supported by an arbitrary government-set price which creates wasteful surpluses and diverts land, labor, and capital from more needed output.

But with the growth of welfare statism at home, our own bureaucrats have come more and more to accept the socialist premises. That is why they are impressed by fallacious comparisons of Russian production with our own. That is why they believe that the road to world salvation lies in government-to-government foreign economic aid. That is why they are not only willing but eager to subsidize India’s socialistic Five Year Plan, an obvious imitation of Russian models.

And that is one of the main reasons why we have so steadily been losing the cold war. For this cold war is chiefly a war of propaganda. It is a struggle for men’s minds. And, if our leaders have only a feeble faith in our own system, if they do not understand its virtues and how to explain them, if they do not understand the Marxist philosophy and its weaknesses, they are putty in the hands of the trained dialecticians and determined propagandists of Moscow.

EDUCATE THE RUSSIANS

Marshal Zhukov once told General Eisenhower that the Soviet system “appealed to the idealistic” whereas ours appealed “completely to the materialistic.” “I was very hard put to it,” the President confessed at a press conference a year ago. “I had a very tough time trying to defend our position.” Two months ago Khrushchev told our American ambassador that when the Communists win the economic competition with the capitalistic world, “we shall also re-educate you.” And Ambassador Thompson merely stared at the floor with a faint smile.

Yet it is we who, for our own survival, must re-educate the Russians. It is their philosophy that is materialistic; it is the Western philosophy of economic, political, religious, and cultural freedom that is idealistic. If our economic system is also immensely more productive than Communism, it is precisely because it releases intellectual and spiritual energies.

A subordinate organization like the Voice of America, with its effort to penetrate the Iron Curtain by radio, can perform only a minor role in explaining all this. It must be explained at the summit. Our political leaders must know the right things to say. And, like their opposite numbers in Russia, they must say them persistently, systematically, daily. The fact that such a program will not cost billions or even millions is not a good reason why it can be neglected.