Library:Rejoinder to Dye and Zeigler

Rejoinder to Dye and Zeigler
Author	Michael Parenti
Publisher	PS: Political Science & Politics
First published	1990-12
Type	Journal article
Source	https://doi.org/10.2307/419899

Rejoinder to Dye and Zeigler is a short article by Michael Parenti, published in the fourth and final issue of the twenty-third volume of PS: Political Science & Politics in December 1990. Parenti had previously written an article criticising Thomas R. Dye and L. Harmon Zeigler's Socialism and Militarism, and in the same issue of the same journal, they wrote response to him defending their article. This is his response to their response to his critique of their article.

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Professors Dye and Zeigler (D&Z) take the easy way out. They invite the reader to think of their present critic as one of those "academic Marxists" in the grip of a "secular religion" "insulated from world events, spinning out theoretical webs." This approach enables them to rest secure in their ideological assumption that, while their critic is a hopeless ideologue, they themselves are value-free social scientists arguing closely from evidence.

Yet they continue to ignore evidence they do not find agreeable—as with the numerous examples of capitalist militarism and aggression I proffered. I noted other variables that could measure militarism, including treaties, overseas bases, striking power, mobility, levels of technology, etc. Given this opportunity to respond to these specifics, D&Z choose not to. One is tempted to conclude that they fail to answer because they have no answers.

D&Z are now willing to concede that military strength could be an additional measure of militarism. but again they are selective in their treatment. They find that the Soviets have more tanks, attack submarines, and more conventional defensive weapons. They still disregard the Pentagon's admonition that gross numerical comparisons are misleading since they do not account for capability. D&Z also offer not a word about various nuclear weapons systems and space weapon systems (e.g., SDI), nothing about the tactical air-to-surface missiles and the host of other new systems that Bush is cooling over. In the all-important nuclear area, the balance is decidedly in the United States' favour. (Gervasi 1986, 276–494; Aldridge 1983; Center for Defense Information 1988).

Regarding nuclear armed submarines, their deployability, their detectability, and their striking power, D&Z are dead wrong in seeing the Soviet force as superior to the U.S. force. They are right about the Soviet supremacy in number of tanks. But here too one must wonder. For forty years U.S. leaders have been arguing as did Defense Secretary Cheney recently on TV: "We can't cut our conventional forces because the Soviets have more tanks." In those forty years the U.S. easily could have built more tanks. In the eight years that the peaceful capitalist Ronald Reagan spent $2.5 trillion on arms, we could have surpassed the Soviet tank force. But U.S. leaders chose not to do so, because the tank is a limited and obsolete weapon. They have no use for 53,350 tanks, especially when half of them are not operative or battle-ready, as is the case with the Soviet tank force. This has not prevented our leaders and some obliging political scientists from repeatedly pointing to the Soviet tanks as an apparently unsurpassable measure of military threat.

U.S. military leaders repeatedly have said they would not trade their defensive system for the one the Soviets have (Parenti 1989, 155). as careful social scientists, D&Z ought to take such opinions into account.

I observed that some portion of the troops in socialist armies are used on civilian work projects, an unexceptional fact known to anyone who has some familiarity with socialist military practice. But D&Z call that observation "disingenuous at best." D&Z should rebut the point rather than accuse the critic of dishonesty. As social scientists, D&Z must explain what research strategy allowed them to conclude that "until the advent of the Reagan Doctrine, no socialist nation was seriously threatened by a capitalist nation" in the post World War II era. What allows them to ignore the many examples I brought up? D&Z do not tell us in their rejoinder.

D&Z think that any reference to Western imperialism is just a recitation of a "tired Marxist litany." Do they mean to say that what capitalist colonialists and neocolonialists have done and are doing to the Third World has never really happened?

Imperialism is that process by which the dominant interests in one nation expropriate the land, labour, natural resources, markets, financial structure, and even popular culture of another nation. D&Z do not believe such things exist under peaceful capitalism. But the people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America—including the multitudes of non-Marxists among them—know what Western imperialism is. They will tell you about it. There is a whole literature documenting its past and present oppressions, including the economic exploitation, death-squad terrorism, and military suppression. Some of that literature is cited in my article above.

The view from D&Z's desk is roughly the view one gets from the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, and NBC, CBS, and ABC. But should social scientists so indiscriminately embrace whatever the CIA says about socialist military spending, even when that agency keeps changing its story and when independent sources have shown how rigged and self-serving CIA information can be?

D&Z find confirmation for their thesis in recent events in Eastern Europe: military backing was withdrawn, socialism collapsed. Would that we could apply such a test to Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, South Korea, Colombia, Mexico, Zaire, the Philippines, and a host of other capitalist nations. Unfortunately we will not get the opportunity, for these noncoercive capitalist countries are not ready to forego their reliance on militaristic coercion when controlling their own populations.

All of which seems to refute D&Z's argument. If socialist countries are so rigidly militaristic because of their bureaucratism and lack of a free market, then why are they capable of such dramatically liberalising political changes? Why didn't the militarists gun down the dissidents as they do in scores of free-market countries? If Third World capitalist countries are so much less militaristic, then why do they continue to resist change and terrorise their own populations with a degree of violent repression that surpasses, but is much less publicised than, the violence of Tiananmen Square? And if the U.S. is so much less militaristic than the USSR, why is it not matching the latter's military cuts?—another point I raised earlier which D&Z continue to ignore.

Finally, I welcome D&Z's idea that any measure of militaristic interventionalism by surrogate forces should include those used by the Soviet Union. Such a study should be undertaken, but preferably not by Dye and Zeigler. Capitalism is more than a way of organising an economy; it is an ideological and social order. And some people are so deeply immersed in it that they do not even know the extent of their immersion.

References

Aldridge, Robert. 1983. First Strike! The Pentagon's Strategy for Nuclear War. Boston: South End Press.

Center for Defense Information. 1988. "U.S.-Soviet Military Facts," The Defense Monitor, vol.17, no. 5. Washington, D.C.

Gervasi, Tom. 1986. The Myth of Soviet Military Supremacy. New York: Harper and Row.

Parenti, Michael. 1989. The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race. New York: St. Martin's Press.