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The dynamics of war and revolution
A former State Department diplomat and international banker, Lawrence Dennis had personal experience of the machinery of international politics. His classic book "The Dynamics of War and Revolution," first published in 1940, foreshadowed Orwell’s "Ninety-Eighty Four," arguing that the government uses perpetual wars to overcome domestic unemployment and boost profits, and reveals the part played by over-production and debt money in fomenting internal chaos (revolution) and external strife (war).Part I. Back to first 1. The social need of permanent revolution. 2. The victors make the rules. 3. The international jungle. Part The end of the capitalist 4. The industrial the profits of new monopolies. 5. The the profits of free land. 6. Rapid population the profits of cheap labor. 7. Easy wars of bows and arrows vs the machine gun. 8. The masses go to school and the polls. Part The new Mars, the 9. Necessities and frustrations. 10. We fight because of democracy's failure. 11. From capitalist to socialist imperialism. 12. The return to discipline. 13. Power politics. 14. Realism ends in foreign affairs when the people rule. 15. The bloody futility of frustrating the strong. 16. After war, pyramid building. 17. We stagnate because there is no common will to action. 18. Out of war a new revolutionary folk unity.
259 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
About the author
Lawrence Dennis
11 books3 followersAmerican diplomat, consultant and author.
He advocated fascism for a while after he began to see the Great Depression as evidence that capitalism was doomed.
Dennis contributed to the anti-New Deal publication for a while before starting his own publication the Weekly Foreign Letter.
In 1944 he was indicted for sedition.
In later years he became a critic of militarism and the cold war.
He advocated fascism for a while after he began to see the Great Depression as evidence that capitalism was doomed.
Dennis contributed to the anti-New Deal publication for a while before starting his own publication the Weekly Foreign Letter.
In 1944 he was indicted for sedition.
In later years he became a critic of militarism and the cold war.
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January 26, 2021"A bill of rights which does not include the right to a job or an old-age pension, but which is rather incompatible with this type of security, is today an absurd anachronism"
"Subject peoples are never fully conquered until revolutionized to the way of the conqueror."
"Probably capitalism will perish in war rather than in stagnation for the simple reason that those in control will, before the system collapses in stagnation, turn to war."
"The most vocal exponents of world unity are the subsidized spokesmen for the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy."
"In a democracy, propaganda governs policy."
"War makes the Christian ministry and church temporarily dynamic and influential. That, doubtless, is why they invariably are so enthusiastic for war... Given enough religion or enough war, there will never be unemployment."
Lawrence Dennis is writing the Dynamics of War and Revolution at a critical inflection point in world history. WWII has begun, but not yet in earnest. The Germans have split Poland with the Soviet Union, but in the West it is still the "sitzkrieg." There is yet no indication that the USSR and Germany will go back on their non-aggression pact, just as there is no indication that the Japanese will launch a first-strike against the United States. It is in this environment that Dennis writes of the folly of the United States entering into yet another European War, just as it had entered into WWI. What's more, Dennis joins the chorus of socialists and other provocative intellectuals in arguing that the day of capitalism is clearly over, and that, rather than being no reason to "die for Danzig," there is no reason to die for the British Empire. He makes his argument through analysis of historical processes as well as regular references to Marxist theory.
The first part of the book entitled "Back to First Principles" is focused on the defense of "dynamism" and bemoaning the lack of it in the status-quo Western democracies. He argues that capitalism, once incredibly dynamic, has degraded and fallen into stagnation for a variety of reasons. The reason is, for America, the closing of the frontier, and for capitalist societies generally the reaching of a certain "saturation point" of industrialization. In the past, he argues, development always beget more development, as "the rise of steel, machine, and tool industries in Birmingham and Sheffield, England not only meant higher living standards there but also contributed to identically the same processes in America and other far-off lands which were thus enabled to start new industries and build new railways with British machinery and steel rails." In other words, a rising tide raised all boats. Now (or then), the development of industry in one place meant the loss of jobs in another as outsourcing became the watchword of globalization. I think Dennis here underestimated the adaptability of capitalism, but then again so did Marx. As history has shown, new industries and new technologies have continued to fuel job growth, although it wasn't technology that brought the western democracies out of the great depression but war.
Part II: The End of the Capitalist Revolution is where argues why exactly capitalism is finished. These reasons are broken up into sections on the end of the industrial revolution, the closing of the frontier, the stagnation of the birth rate, the end of "easy wars," and the role of the masses For Dennis, capitalism in itself is not dynamic but in fact feeds on dynamic situations such as frontier/imperial expansion and easy wars of conquest. This argument is not dissimilar from Lenin's that "imperialism is the final stage of capitalism." In his day, government spending under the New Deal had been propping up capitalism until war of course brought a total revitalization to the economy. Other points mentioned in this section are familiar to any reader of Marxist theory. Hoarding and centralization are not abnormal but in fact are the natural results of maturing capitalism. Capitalism requires "subsidies or something for nothing" with examples being the English land enclosures which forced people into factories or of course the American frontier with its abundant natural resources ripe for exploitation. Constant expansion of the labor pool is also necessary to maintain labor scarcity and thus keep labor prices low.
Dennis spends a considerable amount of time discussing the role of the masses in the maintenance of the world order, although he does so from a considerably elite perspective. According to Dennis, it is not the masses who are responsible for world revolutions, but out-groups of elites who are able to seize power in their name. Perhaps he is right. Does, for example, Czarist Russia crumble without the intervention of Lenin? In the Western democracies, the result of the education of the masses is that they are "susceptible as they never were before to propaganda and demagogic manipulation. The greater the number of people who can vote and read, the greater the irrationality, the greater the conflict of minority interests and the greater the anarchy in the political and economic processes under a system of parliamentary democracy." Democracy in the United States is overcome by minority interests as each interest group struggles to get a large slice of the pie for itself. For Dennis, there is no natural "harmony of interests" that democracy can bring about, except for that under war of course.
It is unclear when or if political discussion was ever meant to seek out the actual truth, and Dennis writes that in his day (as in ours), "the purpose of political discussion as of good advertising copy is not to stimulate critical thought but to create a desired state of mind or emotions, desired attitudes, habits, choices, decisions, and actions. This purpose, of course, is democratic... It is both the triumph and the finish of democracy." In essence, Trump isn't responsible for the intellectual deterioration of public discussion. Despite being better educated than perhaps any society in history, it is the people and their requirements that have paradoxically brought us so low. It is democracy that allows the rise of fascists like Hitler or Trump in the first place.
In "Part III: The New Revolution. Mars, the Midwife" Dennis makes a more specific analysis on the contemporary conditions that have led to war and looks for forecast what comes afterwards. Like others, Dennis sees the rise of Hitler and other fascist movements as well as socialist movements as symptoms of the debilitating effects of trade restrictions, Versaille repayments, and other impediments to progress in the weaker states of Europe. Echoing future arguments by William Appleman Williams, Woodrow Wilson is painted as a defender of the status-quo, whose invocations of the right to self determination and collective security were more useful to the "Haves" than the "Have-nots." Wilson's world is one without revolution, one where every class stays in its place, and ultimately one where the Anglo-Saxons are "first among equals," for lack of a better phrase. The Americans were involved in WWI made the brutal Versaille Treaty possible, that they left right afterwards made its maintenance impossible and thus WWII inevitable as France and Britain were never powerful enough or unified enough to keep Germany down without American arms.
Why Wilson was so against revolution is clear, despite the fact that him and his ilk became powerful as the result of the previous revolution. Where "the old revolution was a revolt of power for money, the new revolution is a revolt against the power of money." Free trade, the watchword of modern capitalism, "calls for a world economically and politically so organized and administered that money can move from one country to another as free as migratory birds. Thus money can dictate to governments everywhere its own taxes and regulations and to labor its own wage scales, without the appearance of applying physical force." The capitalist class, while defended heavily by some nations, is in fact of no national in particular and is an international class. Whenever Americans threaten to raise taxes on they rich, they simply relocate their money to offshore accounts and in this way hold the whole economy hostage. It was money that brought American gunships to Japan, that made British soldiers burn Beijing, necessitated the occupation of Latin America by those "gangsters for Capital."
Dennis hits upon one of those great lies of the founding of America, namely that greater individual freedom has in practice largely meant "greature individual power for money, not for labor." It is the freedom to starve, the freedom to be bought and sold, or to elect officials who are more often than not bought and sold. As history can attest, promises of individual liberty have meant little to the American people of color and other minority groups that have more often than not been forced to bear the freedom of others to oppress them. The question is raised: is it possible to bring justice without the curtailment of liberty? Should bakers be forced to bake wedding cakes for gay people? I'd like to note here that before the French Revolution, it was the French nobles that complained their "rights and liberties" were being infringed upon by those who demanded equal rights. If you haven't guessed, I certainly value justice higher than the freedom of money and the freedom of intolerance.
Justice aside, another critical aspect of Dennis' new revolution is the imposition of "autarky" as was being done in several countries at the time as a result of trade restrictions. I feel as thought globalization has simply progressed too far since then for that to be possible, although its power as an idea, albeit in diluted form, is still represented in modern discourse (the "bringing jobs home" aspect of America First for instance). As neoliberalism grows more discredited, I expect that similar calls will continue to be made. Which is more important, the GDP or the GNP?
Returning to WWII, Dennis bemoans the failure of British foreign policy that led to the rise of Hitler and his warlike Germany. If Britain had stopped the Germans when they re-occupied the Rhineland, there would have been no WWII. They didn't, because such a move threatened France and not Britain. If Britain had honored their guarantee of Czechoslovakia, the Germans would again have crumbled much faster as they struggled against both Allied arms and Czech mountain fortifications. They didn't, because such a move threatened Russia and not Britain. Why, then, did they guarantee Poland in the name of "collective security." Dennis argues that thus about-face was brought about by the "pressure of democratic politics." Chamberlain clearly felt little sympathy for the peoples of Eastern Europe at Munich, he must have known he was giving Hitler the key to Prague. He was being a realist. The British people, however, became incensed after Hitler seized the rump state and thus he was forced to change courses. Now he stood for "collective security" and only after he had ignored the principle for the decade beforehand. This Dennis used to argue that collective security essentially does not work.
Returning to societal problems, Dennis speaks briefly on the importance of "pyramid building" or public-works projects as well as the philosophical incompatibility of such activity with capitalism. This incompatibility was perhaps demonstrated most clearly when Ayn Rand's "hero" blew up the public housing project in "The Fountainhead." Public-works projects are not profitable, if they were, the capitalists would do them. Pyramid building means both more work and, ideally, higher standard of living for the American poor. The rich oppose pyramid building just as they oppose efforts at what Dennis calls "regimentation" or the support for public goods such as public housing, improved subways, or socialized healthcare. Socialized healthcare, while being clearly what America needs, is in opposition to the capitalism and the meaningless "freedom to choose your own doctor" and thus is still fought over to this day.
What is the solution then? Dennis does not say much, other than the creation of a much larger public sector through nationalization as well as the creation of a "folk unity" of all Americans. The idea of Americans of all colors and creeds standing together sounds nice, Biden surely talks about it often enough, but powerful interests have more to gain from keeping us divided so I doubt that such a mythic unity is coming any time soon. I know Dennis has been described as a "fascist" but from my reading of this one book he comes off more as a socialist than anything else, albeit a socialist that is distrustful of the Stalinist method or at least doubts the viability of such a method succeeding in the United States. In this work he tries to piece together what an "American socialism" would look liked and eventually comes to the idea it would essentially be a mixed economy comparable to one of the nordic countries today.
"Subject peoples are never fully conquered until revolutionized to the way of the conqueror."
"Probably capitalism will perish in war rather than in stagnation for the simple reason that those in control will, before the system collapses in stagnation, turn to war."
"The most vocal exponents of world unity are the subsidized spokesmen for the Anglo-Saxon plutocracy."
"In a democracy, propaganda governs policy."
"War makes the Christian ministry and church temporarily dynamic and influential. That, doubtless, is why they invariably are so enthusiastic for war... Given enough religion or enough war, there will never be unemployment."
Lawrence Dennis is writing the Dynamics of War and Revolution at a critical inflection point in world history. WWII has begun, but not yet in earnest. The Germans have split Poland with the Soviet Union, but in the West it is still the "sitzkrieg." There is yet no indication that the USSR and Germany will go back on their non-aggression pact, just as there is no indication that the Japanese will launch a first-strike against the United States. It is in this environment that Dennis writes of the folly of the United States entering into yet another European War, just as it had entered into WWI. What's more, Dennis joins the chorus of socialists and other provocative intellectuals in arguing that the day of capitalism is clearly over, and that, rather than being no reason to "die for Danzig," there is no reason to die for the British Empire. He makes his argument through analysis of historical processes as well as regular references to Marxist theory.
The first part of the book entitled "Back to First Principles" is focused on the defense of "dynamism" and bemoaning the lack of it in the status-quo Western democracies. He argues that capitalism, once incredibly dynamic, has degraded and fallen into stagnation for a variety of reasons. The reason is, for America, the closing of the frontier, and for capitalist societies generally the reaching of a certain "saturation point" of industrialization. In the past, he argues, development always beget more development, as "the rise of steel, machine, and tool industries in Birmingham and Sheffield, England not only meant higher living standards there but also contributed to identically the same processes in America and other far-off lands which were thus enabled to start new industries and build new railways with British machinery and steel rails." In other words, a rising tide raised all boats. Now (or then), the development of industry in one place meant the loss of jobs in another as outsourcing became the watchword of globalization. I think Dennis here underestimated the adaptability of capitalism, but then again so did Marx. As history has shown, new industries and new technologies have continued to fuel job growth, although it wasn't technology that brought the western democracies out of the great depression but war.
Part II: The End of the Capitalist Revolution is where argues why exactly capitalism is finished. These reasons are broken up into sections on the end of the industrial revolution, the closing of the frontier, the stagnation of the birth rate, the end of "easy wars," and the role of the masses For Dennis, capitalism in itself is not dynamic but in fact feeds on dynamic situations such as frontier/imperial expansion and easy wars of conquest. This argument is not dissimilar from Lenin's that "imperialism is the final stage of capitalism." In his day, government spending under the New Deal had been propping up capitalism until war of course brought a total revitalization to the economy. Other points mentioned in this section are familiar to any reader of Marxist theory. Hoarding and centralization are not abnormal but in fact are the natural results of maturing capitalism. Capitalism requires "subsidies or something for nothing" with examples being the English land enclosures which forced people into factories or of course the American frontier with its abundant natural resources ripe for exploitation. Constant expansion of the labor pool is also necessary to maintain labor scarcity and thus keep labor prices low.
Dennis spends a considerable amount of time discussing the role of the masses in the maintenance of the world order, although he does so from a considerably elite perspective. According to Dennis, it is not the masses who are responsible for world revolutions, but out-groups of elites who are able to seize power in their name. Perhaps he is right. Does, for example, Czarist Russia crumble without the intervention of Lenin? In the Western democracies, the result of the education of the masses is that they are "susceptible as they never were before to propaganda and demagogic manipulation. The greater the number of people who can vote and read, the greater the irrationality, the greater the conflict of minority interests and the greater the anarchy in the political and economic processes under a system of parliamentary democracy." Democracy in the United States is overcome by minority interests as each interest group struggles to get a large slice of the pie for itself. For Dennis, there is no natural "harmony of interests" that democracy can bring about, except for that under war of course.
It is unclear when or if political discussion was ever meant to seek out the actual truth, and Dennis writes that in his day (as in ours), "the purpose of political discussion as of good advertising copy is not to stimulate critical thought but to create a desired state of mind or emotions, desired attitudes, habits, choices, decisions, and actions. This purpose, of course, is democratic... It is both the triumph and the finish of democracy." In essence, Trump isn't responsible for the intellectual deterioration of public discussion. Despite being better educated than perhaps any society in history, it is the people and their requirements that have paradoxically brought us so low. It is democracy that allows the rise of fascists like Hitler or Trump in the first place.
In "Part III: The New Revolution. Mars, the Midwife" Dennis makes a more specific analysis on the contemporary conditions that have led to war and looks for forecast what comes afterwards. Like others, Dennis sees the rise of Hitler and other fascist movements as well as socialist movements as symptoms of the debilitating effects of trade restrictions, Versaille repayments, and other impediments to progress in the weaker states of Europe. Echoing future arguments by William Appleman Williams, Woodrow Wilson is painted as a defender of the status-quo, whose invocations of the right to self determination and collective security were more useful to the "Haves" than the "Have-nots." Wilson's world is one without revolution, one where every class stays in its place, and ultimately one where the Anglo-Saxons are "first among equals," for lack of a better phrase. The Americans were involved in WWI made the brutal Versaille Treaty possible, that they left right afterwards made its maintenance impossible and thus WWII inevitable as France and Britain were never powerful enough or unified enough to keep Germany down without American arms.
Why Wilson was so against revolution is clear, despite the fact that him and his ilk became powerful as the result of the previous revolution. Where "the old revolution was a revolt of power for money, the new revolution is a revolt against the power of money." Free trade, the watchword of modern capitalism, "calls for a world economically and politically so organized and administered that money can move from one country to another as free as migratory birds. Thus money can dictate to governments everywhere its own taxes and regulations and to labor its own wage scales, without the appearance of applying physical force." The capitalist class, while defended heavily by some nations, is in fact of no national in particular and is an international class. Whenever Americans threaten to raise taxes on they rich, they simply relocate their money to offshore accounts and in this way hold the whole economy hostage. It was money that brought American gunships to Japan, that made British soldiers burn Beijing, necessitated the occupation of Latin America by those "gangsters for Capital."
Dennis hits upon one of those great lies of the founding of America, namely that greater individual freedom has in practice largely meant "greature individual power for money, not for labor." It is the freedom to starve, the freedom to be bought and sold, or to elect officials who are more often than not bought and sold. As history can attest, promises of individual liberty have meant little to the American people of color and other minority groups that have more often than not been forced to bear the freedom of others to oppress them. The question is raised: is it possible to bring justice without the curtailment of liberty? Should bakers be forced to bake wedding cakes for gay people? I'd like to note here that before the French Revolution, it was the French nobles that complained their "rights and liberties" were being infringed upon by those who demanded equal rights. If you haven't guessed, I certainly value justice higher than the freedom of money and the freedom of intolerance.
Justice aside, another critical aspect of Dennis' new revolution is the imposition of "autarky" as was being done in several countries at the time as a result of trade restrictions. I feel as thought globalization has simply progressed too far since then for that to be possible, although its power as an idea, albeit in diluted form, is still represented in modern discourse (the "bringing jobs home" aspect of America First for instance). As neoliberalism grows more discredited, I expect that similar calls will continue to be made. Which is more important, the GDP or the GNP?
Returning to WWII, Dennis bemoans the failure of British foreign policy that led to the rise of Hitler and his warlike Germany. If Britain had stopped the Germans when they re-occupied the Rhineland, there would have been no WWII. They didn't, because such a move threatened France and not Britain. If Britain had honored their guarantee of Czechoslovakia, the Germans would again have crumbled much faster as they struggled against both Allied arms and Czech mountain fortifications. They didn't, because such a move threatened Russia and not Britain. Why, then, did they guarantee Poland in the name of "collective security." Dennis argues that thus about-face was brought about by the "pressure of democratic politics." Chamberlain clearly felt little sympathy for the peoples of Eastern Europe at Munich, he must have known he was giving Hitler the key to Prague. He was being a realist. The British people, however, became incensed after Hitler seized the rump state and thus he was forced to change courses. Now he stood for "collective security" and only after he had ignored the principle for the decade beforehand. This Dennis used to argue that collective security essentially does not work.
Returning to societal problems, Dennis speaks briefly on the importance of "pyramid building" or public-works projects as well as the philosophical incompatibility of such activity with capitalism. This incompatibility was perhaps demonstrated most clearly when Ayn Rand's "hero" blew up the public housing project in "The Fountainhead." Public-works projects are not profitable, if they were, the capitalists would do them. Pyramid building means both more work and, ideally, higher standard of living for the American poor. The rich oppose pyramid building just as they oppose efforts at what Dennis calls "regimentation" or the support for public goods such as public housing, improved subways, or socialized healthcare. Socialized healthcare, while being clearly what America needs, is in opposition to the capitalism and the meaningless "freedom to choose your own doctor" and thus is still fought over to this day.
What is the solution then? Dennis does not say much, other than the creation of a much larger public sector through nationalization as well as the creation of a "folk unity" of all Americans. The idea of Americans of all colors and creeds standing together sounds nice, Biden surely talks about it often enough, but powerful interests have more to gain from keeping us divided so I doubt that such a mythic unity is coming any time soon. I know Dennis has been described as a "fascist" but from my reading of this one book he comes off more as a socialist than anything else, albeit a socialist that is distrustful of the Stalinist method or at least doubts the viability of such a method succeeding in the United States. In this work he tries to piece together what an "American socialism" would look liked and eventually comes to the idea it would essentially be a mixed economy comparable to one of the nordic countries today.
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