Socialism, Revolution and Capitalist Dialectics

However, in 1923 the think tank the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), which Grosse in his “semi-official history” describes as the USA’s “East Coast foreign policy establishment”, issued its first report on Soviet Russia. Grosse writes:

Awkward in the records of the Inquiry[30] had been the absence of a single study or background paper on the subject of Bolshevism. Perhaps this was simply beyond the academic imagination of the times. Not until early 1923 could the Council summon the expertise to mobilize a systematic examination of the Bolshevik regime, finally entrenched after civil war in Russia. The impetus for this first study was Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which appeared to open the struggling Bolshevik economy to foreign investment. Half the Council’s study group were members drawn from firms that had done business in pre-revolutionary Russia, and the discussions about the Soviet future were intense. The concluding report dismissed “hysterical” fears that the revolution would spill outside Russia’s borders into central Europe or, worse, that the heady new revolutionaries would ally with nationalistic Muslims in the Middle East to evict European imperialism. The Bolsheviks were on their way to “sanity and sound business practices,” the Council study group concluded, but the welcome to foreign concessionaires would likely be short-lived. Thus, the Council experts recommended in March 1923 that American businessmen get into Russia while Lenin’s invitation held good, make money on their investments, and then get out as quickly as possible. A few[31] heeded the advice; not for seven decades would a similar opportunity arise.[32]

What is instructive here is both the pro-Bolshevik attitude in trying to allay popular fears that the Bolsheviks represented a revolutionary threat outside Russia, and in particular the assessment that the regime was pursuing “sound business practices” of which business should take advantage before the possibility of change.

The CFR was correct in warning that the opening up of the USSR to exploitation under the amiable regime of Lenin and Trotsky might be short-lived. Four years later Stalin had consolidated absolute authority. Armand Hammer, head of Occidental Petroleum, reminisced that he had intimately known every Soviet leader from Lenin to Gorbachev—except for Stalin. In 1921 Hammer was in the USSR concluding business deals when he met Trotsky, who wanted to know whether financial circles in the USA “regard Russia as a desirable field of investment?” Trotsky remarked to Hammer that “capital was really safer in Russia than anywhere else” because capitalists who invested there would have their investments protected even after the “world revolution.”[33] Hammer states that Trotsky remarked to him that “no true Marxist would allow sentiment to interfere with business,” comments that supposedly “startled” Hammer at the time, “but they wouldn’t surprise me today.”[34] In contrast, Hammer said he never had any dealings with Stalin and that by 1930 “Stalin was not a man with whom you could do business. Stalin believed that the state was capable of running everything without the support of foreign concessionaires and private enterprise.”[35]

If prospects for the USSR turned sour during the Stalinist reign and never quite returned to the days of Lenin, the communization of China might be seen to have paid off certain dividends—in the long term: Firstly in terms of helping to contain the USSR[36]; and, secondly, as a dialectical method of re-organizing China comparatively quickly from a peasant state to a centralized, industrialized state which has become very much part of the global economic system. Indeed, the killing of some 70,000,000 Chinese in process of modernization, communist-style, is better suited to commissars than to corporate executives.[37]

The USA was never adverse to Mao’s rulership of China, and insisted on Chiang Kai-shek negotiating with Mao. It was Mao who rebuffed U.S. overtures in favor of a debilitating “friendship treaty” with Stalin, which was designed to turn China into a humiliated vassal state.[38] Gen. Marshall had told Chiang in 1946 that U.S. military support would stop if he continued to pursue the Red Army into Northern Manchuria, a move that was crucial in what became the outcome for the struggle for China.[39] In 1953 Mao sought an alliance with the USA on the death of Stalin, however the Korean War made any such overtures impossible to sell to the American people. [40]

However, the long-term interests of certain business concerns in the USA, centered primarily on the Rockefeller dynasty, came to fruition in 1970. The self-described “East Coast foreign policy establishment,”[41] the CFR, played a significant role in normalizing relations between the USA and China, opening the way for economic relations that were to become so extensive that Niall Ferguson has described the US and Chinese economies as now existing in “interdependence.”[42] Grosse relates the Council’s role:

The Council turned in earnest to the problem of communist China early in the 1960s. Various Council publications had started developing the idea of a “two-China” policy—recognition of both the Nationalist government of Taiwan and the communist government on the mainland. This, Council authors suggested, might be the least bad policy direction. Professor A. Doak Barnett published a trail-blazing book for the Council in 1960, Communist China and Asia. A major Council study of relations between the United States and China commenced in 1964, the year China exploded its first nuclear bomb; the group met systematically for the next four years. “Contentment with the present stalemate in relations with the Chinese is not statesmanship,” declared Robert Blum of the Asia Society[43], the first director of the project. “American impatience and the strong currents of political emotion often make it impossible to plan ahead to manage our policy in a persevering but flexible way.”[44]

Taiwan presented a problem for the globalists insofar as the USA had guaranteed Taiwan’s security in the supposed line-up of the Cold War. The CFR therefore formulated another dialectical solution of seemingly supporting a “two China” policy that in practice would mean that Taiwan could be ditched by the USA while seeming to not have abandoned her. That in reality is what happened, as the USA used the “two-China policy” formulated years before within the CFR to secure China’s entry in into the United Nations, and to sideline Taiwan. The CFR approach was one of gradual promotion of the Mao regime, decrying the so-called “strong currents of emotion” that were holding back the globalist relationship with China, just as the CFR had in 1923 decried the anti-communist “hysteria” (sic) that was preventing the development of commerce with Bolshevik Russia. However the intentions were clear enough, and Grosse is explicit regarding the CFR attitude towards Mao’s China:

This seemed just the sort of political stalemate that the Council on Foreign Relations, free of electoral and partisan constraints, was endowed to repair. Midway through the project, the Council published an analysis of public opinion called The American People and China by A. T. Steele, who reached the unexpected conclusion that Americans were more willing than many of their elected officeholders to forge new relations with China. This study argued that it was only a steady diet of hostile public statements that had made Americans “disposed to believe the worst of communist China and they [the Chinese] the worst of us.”

In 1969 the Council summed up the project under the title, The United States and China in World Affairs, publication came [sic] just as Richard Nixon, a longtime and outspoken foe of Chinese communism, became president of the United States. (Some months earlier, Nixon himself had chosen Foreign Affairs[45] as his forum for exploring a fresh look at Asia in general, and China in particular.) Tilting at the long-prevailing freeze, the Council’s project defined a two-China policy with careful analysis. It advocated acquiescence in mainland Chinese membership in the United Nations, and argued that America must “abandon its effort to maintain the fiction that the Nationalist regime is the government of China.”[46]