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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
On Wars and Revolutions., October 26, 2003
_The Dynamics of War and Revolution_ was written by American interventionist capitalist Lawrence Dennis in 1940 just before the involvement of the United States in World War II on the side of the Allies. In this book Lawrence Dennis predicts the coming war in which America was to be immersed and shows why fighting this war will ultimately be not in the best interests of the American people. World War II was sold to the American people on the grounds that it would "make the world safe from fascism" - in which the United States fought against Germany, Italy, and Japan - but as Lawrence Dennis shows by instituting an Industrial Mobilization Plan as well as the New Deal legislation, FDR in effect was able to bring about the fascist revolution here in America. Lawrence Dennis sees in fascism (and national socialism, of course) as well as in the communism of Stalin the revolution and the birth of socialism. According to Dennis, capitalism and democracy were brought about by revolution (the Industrial Revolution) and once this revolution has taken effect the subsequent socialist revolution (resulting in "dictatorship of the proletariat" as predicted by Karl Marx) is inevitable. Dennis argues that Hitler had been able to bring about the revolution in Germany by capturing the capitalists through anti-communism, the nationalists through anti-Versailles rhetoric, and the masses through the anti-Semitic delusion. (Indeed according to Karl Marx, anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools.) Rather than preserving capitalism as the bourgeois in Germany had hoped, Hitler in fact had destroyed it and brought about socialism and thus the revolution. Dennis notes how the existence of usury through finance capitalism makes possible interventionist involvement overseas, by the Americans. By issuing fiat money the capitalists force industry to increase production and that this excess must be sent overseas. In times of peace, this is easy enough to do through foreign aid. However, eventually it becomes necessary to do so through war. This is indeed what the elite have intended. Dennis writes this book for the elite and not the masses, having naturally little faith in the mass man or in democracy itself. For the in-elite, the contents of this book are already known and are being used to bring the country into a war. But for the out-elite, this knowledge may prove valuable in their attempt to remain afloat during the subsequent revolution (brought about through the war). Dennis seems to have sympathy for socialism as opposed to liberalism (capitalism plus democracy), although his remarks are largely intended to be merely prophetic and factual without actually taking a side on the whole issue of morality. To Dennis, the current capitalist system fueled through finance capitalism is not in the best interests of the people of the United States and thus will be toppled. Dennis argues that a new "folk unity" among the American people will be made necessary through the subsequent war and the coming revolution in America. Lawrence Dennis was an early writer who saw the development of socialism within America subsequent to the Second World War. At the time, his comments were greeted with much disapproval from the elite (including FDR and his minions) and he was subsequently tried for sedition. While Dennis wrote in the interests of America, he noted that while he personally was opposed to the coming war, he would do what was in his power to defend America after the war had started (either through propaganda writing or otherwise). This book is one that bypasses the usual Left/Right divide and takes a look at the capitalist situation from a third perspective. Republished by Noontide Press, this book promises to open some eyes to the immorality of the capitalist system which fuels revolution within the United States and across the world. In an era in which a war has been declared on "terror" these writings by Lawrence Dennis are all the more important today.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
The future according to America's corporatist Karl Marx, September 9, 2006
Justus Doenecke, the academic historian of the US isolationist movement, in his paper "The Isolationist as Collectivist: Lawrence Dennis and the Coming of World War II" says that thiss book was "too hot" for Harper Brothers press when first released in 1940 forcing Dennis to publish it himself. Dennis was a political hot potato mainly because of his alleged open advocacy of fascism. Yet what did Dennis mean by fascism? Did he mean the same thing that fascism means today? Doenecke attempted an answer.
"If fascism combines a one-party state with strident nationalism, continental autarchy, and centralized economic controls that mould private ownership to public will,-in short, a truly corporatist and organic society transcending localized interests-then Dennis's system might be fascistic. If, however, one defines fascism as involving a clear-cut Fuhrerprinzip, a terror system, and permanent purge so often associated with Nazi Germany, then Dennis was not a fascist. He adhered neither to the racism of an Alfred Rosenberg or a Vidkin Quisling; rather his politics centered on the twin poles of economic corporatism and rigid isolationism."
Actually Dennis called his system "socialism" more often than he ever called it "fascism". Perhaps it's better to think of Dennis as a "corporatist" or a "right wing technocrat", at least if we are to judge him by this one book. 'Dynamics' was written a year before James Burnham's seminal "The Managerial Revolution". Like Burnham he sees the old capitalist order inevitably giving way to a new managerial order (to use Burnham's terms) or a socialist order (to use Dennis's terms). To Dennis, communism, fascism and the New Deal were all local and temporary manifestations of socialism. He dismissed quibbles over terminology as pedantry. But it almost got him jailed. Burnham and Dennis both believed German victory in Europe was likely. To Dennis, an arch realist (or "Machiavellian" to use the title of Burnham's best book) socialism, like capitalism was also inherently elitist. Egalitarianism a mere pipe dream. To Dennis, revolution was not dialectical class conflict with the have-nots replacing the haves, but a battle at the top, with an out-elite displacing the in-elite with the have nots, if anything, playing only a supporting role. Burnham eventually traded in his Trotskyism and ended up on the masthead of William Buckley's "National Review". Some of Burnham's jilted former comrades have made the point that his work parallels his predecessor Lawrence Dennis too closely for comfort. Whilst Burnham has gone on to an important place in the history of political thought, Dennis has all but vanished in obscurity. And probably unfairly. If there was any 20th century successor to Karl Marx as the great big picture analyst of capitalism and imperialism, Lawrence Dennis, perhaps even more so than Burnham, deserves that title.
Let me retreat for a moment. By "right wing technocrat" I refer to Dennis's vision of corporatism (what he called socialism). Dennis's socialism has much in common with the 1930s "technocracy" movement, a movement that embraced characters such as Thorstein Veblen and R Buckminster Fuller, they foresaw a new rational order planned by an elite of engineers and experts. Technocracy has roots in (Fabian socialist) H G Wells and, has more recently, spawned J K Galbraith's "New Industrial State", a two sided iberal critique and apologia for the modern corporation. Dennis doesn't explicitly acknowledge his debt, but he does make various reference to Stuart Chase, a self described "technocrat" who coined the term "New Deal".
Interestingly, there are many parallels between the careers of Chase and Dennis. Chase worked for the Federal Trade Commission in the 1920s and his investigations into the accounts of major meat packers led to him being fired. Dennis, with a background in international banking and later the diplomatic corps, first wrote articles for left leaning journals like The "New Republic" and "The Nation" on the the shadier side of overseas loans from New York banks to Latin America. Ex-diplomat Dennis was a prominent `insider critic' of US gunboat diplomacy in Nicaragua. Dennis and Major General Smedley T Butler (author of "War is a Racket") made an unlikely pair of whistleblowers. Some of Dennis's charges against US gunboat diplomacy and the bloody civil war in fuelled in Nicaragua appear as fascinating extended footnote in 'Dynamics'.
Dennis's analysis of capitalism has some parallels to the Marxist theory of 'primitive accumulation', the `original sin' of capitalism. Dennis sees the 19th century advances of anglo-american capitalism as based on the 'free gifts' of frontier land and territories gained by a series of 'easy and early imperial wars'. These gifts had met their "used by date" by the 20th century leading to the early 20th century "crisis of capitalism" of which the Great War and the Great Depression are both merely part. In response to the crisis, the leading capitalist states ("the haves") bring up their economic drawbridges, applying tougher trade and immigration barriers, thus globalizing the economic crisis. This deepens the split between the privileged "have" powers (US, UK and France) from the "have not" powers (Russia, Japan, Italy and Germany). In the "have not" powers out-elites have overthrown the old in-elites implementing local versions of socialism, so their revolution against capitalism is both domestic and international.
Dennis has some closer parallels to Karl Marx. Both were social outsiders with establishment credentials, Marx from a jewish family and Dennis from a mixed race family from the South. Both explain capitalism in crisis in world historical terms and both outline a radical critique of capitalism and a premonition of things to come. Both see themselves as unsentimental realists, but unlike Marx, Dennis had no political movement to serve. Marx was a player in party politics. Dennis was a perennial outsider. Dennis had no time for Marx's romantic utopianism, or, most romantic of all, Marx's pretensions to "scientific" exactitude. Dennis has no Hegelian baggage to make his writing and thinking difficult and easy-to-obscure. Dennis wrote clear crisp text (at least in Dynamics) and thus avoids the rubbery reinterpretations of followers, of which, in any case, he had none.
Dennis, like Marx, was not shy of prognostication. He believed the isolationist movement, which he was in sympathy with, in it's attempts to restrain FDR's march to war would fail. He believed that after the new war American troops would return home to a renewed great depression. From their number the rank and file of the new revolution would come. But the captains would emerge from those behind the War and Navy Departments' pre-war plans for Industrial Mobilisation. From there a new planned economy and total state would take root. The new technocratic state would be a mixed economy with a radically reduced market sector and the old plutocratic elite made redundant. The revolution would be "fascist" rather than "communist" as American socialism would be nationalistic and the old bourgeoisie would survive as experts, and not face the firing squad. Dennis believed that capitalism and democracy were two sides of the same coin and that the revolution against capitalism, orchestrated by the out-elite and domestic have nots, would be curtains for democracy too, even if the revolution's march to power was via the ballot box. He was convinced that capitalism and liberal democracy were incapable of meeting the crisis of mass unemployment. In fact democracy needed to be replaced as democratic politics made rational state economic planning impossible. In a sense he anticipated the classical liberal critique of economic planning of F A Hayek but from the other side of the fence. Hayek rejected planning as anti-liberty, Dennis rejected liberty as anti-planning. Dennis was not so much eager to sacrifice liberty and democracy for economic security, he saw it's loss as an inevitable consequence of mass unemployment and social disorder.
Dennis writes well and his argument is mostly clear. In his discussion of economics, especially the section on how rising land values provided an ongoing escape valve for capitalism, a valve now blocked by cheap transportation he struck me as just confused. Dennis, a former diplomat, has his strong point in foreign policy. His 'realist' assessment of Europe's inter-war years is first class and worth remembering, even if the rest of his analysis is thrown overboard.
To Dennis, the two world wars are part of the crisis of capitalism. The failures of Versailles and Munich merely highlighted the weakness of democratic statesmanship, in previous generations a rump aristocracy managed foreign affairs for the great capitalist powers and they were, for a time, successful. The demise of the aristocratic rump, to Dennis, was another reason why democracy was on the way out. In the Great War, France and Britain needed to US to achieve victory and eventually impose the Versailles settlement. Yet that treaty became a dead letter, awaiting it's inevitable end, once it became clear that Wilson could not deliver ongoing US support to the League of Nations to ensure Versailles' enforcement. Dennis says that Despite the facade of 'collective security' and 'international law', both ideals popular with democratic voters at home, international relations really is just about power politics and peace is a product of the balance of power. Post-aristocratic democracies are especially inept in rational power politics. In the immediate post-war years, it was in Britain's interests to ensure a weak German navy and a strong German army to counter France. France wanted the reverse. The only anglo-french compromise, a Germany with a weak navy and a weak army, was an unsustainable demand on Europe's second most populous nation. Similarly, instead of revamping the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a federation of Europe's smaller peoples as a counter-weight, Versailles balkanised Eastern Europe into a hodge podge of only notionally independent powers, financial and political dependencies on France and Britain. This new order could not last and would be kicked in, Hitler or no Hitler. To Dennis, Hitler was a symptom not the disease. Munich was not a sell-out. It was Chamberlain's last minute revival of old fashioned balance of power diplomacy, unfortunately he had to be sell it falsely back home as a victory for peace, the only language a democratic electorate would accept. Chamberlain's later reversal to the collective security with his flimsy and toothless guarantee to Poland was the real start to war. Dennis said "Chamberlain gave Hitler the key to east europe and then forbade him to use it." This is one of the most incisive analyses of the origin of WW2 I've read.
Dennis, like Marx made many predictions. He argued that a stable world would be based on continental superpowers and this would necessitate the dismantling of the British Empire. The dominions would have to defend themselves or seek shelter under an American umbrella. An economically obsolete Britain would be thus overpopulated, so he recommended mass emmigration to provide relief. He believed the postwar period would see US war industry planners take command of the economy and use nationalism to push through their new order. To get the country really working again, 'pyramid building' projects and a welfare state would be required.
Obviously Dennis's predictions have not panned out. Capitalism and democracy have survived. Or did Dennis only get it half wrong? The returning troops were actually met by a post-war boom not the renewed depression and allied victory in Europe prevented, at least temporarily, the German dominated Europe Dennis believed inevitable.
Of course America's second war in Europe was no where near as destructive to US democracy as Dennis and many isolationists believed it would be. But it should be remembered that Dennis wrote in 1940. Stalin and Hitler were then still nominally allies. Hitler would not double cross Stalin until six months before Pearl Harbor, but those six months were critical. Had America intervened a year earlier, it is not unreasonable to speculate that Hitler may have postponed his Eastern front war. If so, it's not clear that an American victory would have been as won as "easily" or with as low a human and economic price tag as it actually was. And a high cost victory would have consequences for the next decades. Following the war the debate on economic planning was red hot. Hayek wrote his 'Road to Serfdom' to counter the planning push and defend traditional liberties. Most of Dennis's corporatist, technocrat and socialist peers denied Hayek's alarm bells. Hayek actually won the round, but it was a close race and the anti-planning people only won by a nose. Had dole queues greeted the troops the debate may have had another ending. As Dennis predicted, post-war America did develop both a welfare state. 'Pyramid building' came too, from Eisenhower's "defense" highways to NASA. America got a diluted version of Dennis's 1940 recommendations. The 'military industrial complex', perhaps the biggest pyramid of all, certainly grew post-war. It may not have become the new command cockpit of the whole economy, but it was, a kind of obnoxious and obese senior co-pilot. (In a later book, published in the sixties, Dennis would note that America's proportional defense spending in the 1950s exceeded Germany's in the 1930s. Dennis believed that it was WW2 that cured the depression and what J.K. Galbraith later called "military Keynesianism" was used to prevent a new depression.) Post-war the British Empire has gone. The dominions looked to America and all ran major immigration programs collectively importing millions of Britons. Europe was reorganised by the EU with Germany it's economic centre. Dennis even predicted that America would make official use of "race equality" as a war aim, a move he saw as fanning the flames of domestic revolt from African Americans. Dennis, always an enemy of the Dixiecrats, got this prediction right if a decade or so premature.
Historian Ronald Radosh tells us that in post-war years Dennis retreated from his 1940s collectivism to a more conventional pro-free enterprise position. According to Radosh, he still drew sharp distinctions between small business and the bureaucrats of the big corporations. He became a firm critic of both the Cold War and McCarthyism. Indeed in Radosh's classic survey of the immediate post-war period's cold war critics "Prophets On The Right", Dennis's critique is perhaps the most uncompromising and incisive. There is not much written to account for his change of opinion. Dennis's next book after Dynamics was in the late 1960s. I think Radosh exaggerates the degree of Dennis's shift to 'free enterprise' conservatism, he remained a Keynesian. Most failed prognosticators merely revamp their old prophecies. Dennis didn't. At least insofar as civil liberties were concerned his later works show a new concern, and his critiques of McCarthyism are tough and uncompromising. Why the turnabout? Why was he so unsentimental about these things in 1940 and so firm later? Perhaps it was his experience on the receiving end of a witch hunt, the 1944 Sedition Trials, that gave him a renewed respect for the importance of the traditional liberties that he, like many others on both right and left, took so lightly in the hungry '30s.
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4.0 out of 5 stars
First published in 1940, when the US was on the brink of getting into the escalating war in europe,, June 19, 2008
Intellectual thinker of his day, Lawrence
Dennis, who was half ethnically black and
raised by a wealthy black family in the
south, it hilights his intuitive and talen-
ted philosophical outlook, which was basical-
ly the populist-far-middle. Highly recommended.
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