6. The Destiny of North America
Variedades, Lima, 17 December 1927
The Dawes Plan unquestionably documents the vanity of all of the arguments between French neo-Thomists and German racists as to whether the defense of Western civilization falls to the Latin and Roman spirit or to the German and Protestant one. The payment of German reparations and the Allied debt has put the fate of Europe‘s economy and therefore its politics in the hands of the United States. The financial recovery of the European states is not possible without Yankee credit. The spirit of Locarno,1 security pacts, etc., are simply the names that designate the guarantees required by U.S. capital for its significant investment in the public finance and industry of European states. Fascist Italy, which so arrogantly announced the restoration of Rome‘s power, forgets that its commitments to the United States placed its currency at the mercy of this creditor.
Capitalism, which in Europe displays a lack of faith in its own forces, remains endlessly optimistic about its fate in North America. And this optimism is based simply on good health. It is like the biological optimism of youth, which, noting its excellent appetite, is not worried that later arteriosclerosis will appear. North American capitalism still has growth prospects that the destruction of war irreparably harmed in Europe. The British Empire still has a formidable financial organization, but, as demonstrated by the problem of coal mines, its industry has lost skills that had ensured its primacy. The war has converted it from a creditor to a debtor of the U.S.
All these facts indicate that the seat, the axis, the center of capitalist society is now found in North America. Yankee industry is best equipped for mass production at a lower cost. The banking industry, to whose coffers flows the gold seized by the United States in wartime and postwar business, through its capital guarantees the continuous growth of industry output and the conquest of markets that must absorb their manufactured products. The illusion, if not the reality, of free competition still exists. The state, education, and laws conform to the principles of an individualistic democracy within which every citizen may freely aspire to the possession of one hundred million dollars. While in Europe working-class and middle-class individuals are feeling increasingly trapped by boundaries of class, people in the United States believe that wealth and power are still accessible to anyone who has the ambition to acquire them. And this is the measure of the existence of the psychological factors that determine their development in a capitalist society.
The North American phenomenon, moreover, is not arbitrary. North America showed from its beginning that it was predestined for the highest achievement of capitalism. Despite its extraordinary power in England, capitalist development has failed to remove all feudal remnants. Aristocratic privileges have continued to weigh on its politics and economy. The English bourgeoisie, happy to concentrate its energies on commerce and industry, did not bother to challenge the aristocracy for land. The domination of the land should be based on the exploitation of the subsoil. But the British bourgeoisie did not want to sacrifice their landlords who were destined to maintain an exquisitely refined and decorative lineage. That is why the bourgeoisie only now is discovering an agrarian problem. Only now, with industry in decline, does it miss a productive and prosperous agriculture system on land where the aristocracy have their hunting preserves. North American capitalism, meanwhile, did not have to pay any monetary or spiritual feudal dues. On the contrary, it freely and vigorously emerged from the first intellectual and moral seeds of the capitalist revolution. The New England colonizer was a Puritan expelled from Europe for a religious rebellion that was the first act of bourgeois assertion. The United States thus emerged as a manifestation of the Protestant Reformation, which was considered the purest and most original spiritual manifestation of the bourgeoisie, that is, of capitalism. The foundation of the U.S. republic signified, for its time, the definitive consecration of this fact and its consequences. "The first permanent colonies on the eastern seaboard," writes Waldo Frank, "were grounded upon conscious purposes of wealth. Their revolution against England in 1775 was one of the first clear-cut struggles between bourgeois capitalism and the old feudality. The triumph of the colonies, which gave birth to the United States, marked the triumph of the capitalistic state. And from that day to this, America has had no tradition, no articulation outside of the industrial revolution which threw it into being."2 And this same Frank recalls Charles A. Beard‘s famous and concise judgment on the 1789 Constitution: "The Constitution was essentially an economic document, based upon the concept that the fundamental private rights of property are anterior to government and morally beyond the reach of popular majorities."3
No material or moral obstacle has hampered the energetic and free flourishing of North American capital. Unique in the world, all of the historical factors for a perfect bourgeois state, without the impediments of monarchical and aristocratic traditions, were present at its birth. On the virgin soil of America, with all Indigenous traces erased, Anglo-Saxon settlers laid the foundation of the capitalist order.
The U.S. Civil War also constituted a necessary capitalist assertion to liberate the Yankee economy from the sole defect of its infancy: slavery. With slavery abolished, the capitalist phenomenon found its path absolutely clear. The Jew, so connected to the development of capitalism, as Werner Sombart observed, not only for the spontaneous utilitarian application of his expansive and imperialist individualism but for the radical exclusion of any ―noble" activity from which he was excluded in the Middle Ages, joined the Puritan in the business of building the most powerful industrial state, the strongest bourgeois democracy.
Ramiro de Maeztu has a much more solid ideological position than reactionary neo-Thomist philosophers in France and Italy when he recognized New York as the true antithesis of Moscow, and gives the United States the role of defending and continuing Western civilization as a capitalist civilization. Generally he clearly understands, within the context of his bourgeois apologetics, the moral elements of wealth and power in North America. But he reduces them almost completely to their Puritan or Protestant elements. Puritanical morality, which sanctifies wealth and regards it as a sign of divine favor is, in fact, a Jewish morality whose principles the Puritans assimilated through the Old Testament. The doctrinal relationship of Puritanism to Judaism has long been established, and the Anglo-Saxon experience with capitalism only serves to confirm it. But Maeztu, the fervent eulogist of industrial "Fordism," needs to escape, as much out of deference to Mr. Ford for his injunctions against the "Jewish international," as for his adherence to a grudge against all of the "nationalist" and reactionary movements of the world that suspect the Jewish spirit of a terrible concurrence with the spirit of its common socialist ideal of universalism.
The dilemma of Rome or Moscow, as they shed light on the role of the United States as an employer of the capitalist stabilization of Europe, whether fascist or parliamentary, will become the dilemma of New York or Moscow. The two poles of contemporary history are Russia and North America: capitalism and communism, both universalist although very different and distinct. Russia and the United States: the two peoples who are most opposed in doctrinal and political terms are, at the same time, the two closest peoples, the supreme and ultimate expression, of Western activism and dynamism. Several years ago Bertrand Russell highlighted the strange resemblance between the captains of U.S. industry and officials of the Russian Marxist economy. And that tragic Slav poet Alexander Blok greeted the dawn of the Russian Revolution with the words: "Behold the star of the New America."