NOTES ON CHAPTER 2
2-C
[Communism] to humanity." Poor man, it is no easy task for William Z. Foster (or anyone else) to prove the virtues of economic and social planning. Even the planners who have had the inside track through every administration in Washington since the very year in which TOWARD SOVIET AMERICA was published have had no romp to victory. It is true that they moved the United States far down the Socialist road — but the fact that we have not yet been dragged the full distance is a living monument to the doggedness with which American Conservatives resist the coming of an Orwellian 1984. Desperately, Foster in Chapter 2 strives to show that Communism is the solution to all the problems of the cosmos. To prove his claim, he points to Communism in action in the Soviet Union. Or let us say he appears to point to Communism in action in the Soviet Union. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that what he is pointing to is only what he says is Communism in action in the Soviet Union. There is a difference. Unfortunately, a wasteland of statistical arguments makes this part of the book the least interesting. It is not so much that the statistics are too far out of date to prove anything as that they never proved much to begin with. Foster claims, for example, that the end of Moscow's second Five-Year Plan ". . . will put the U.S.S.R. within hailing distance of the United States in the matter of industrial output." (Sound familiar ?) About the only way in which the USSR could have come within industrial hailing distance of the United States, circa 1940, would have been with the assistance of a very large bull-horn. It certainly could not have made contact via its factories or machinery, any more than it is within long bellowing distance to this day. Chapter 2 contains one of the century's better ex-