REIF: In your study On Violence, there is this sentence: “The third world is not a reality but an ideology.” That sounds like blasphemy. For, of course, the third world is a reality; what’s more, a reality that was brought into being first by the Western colonial powers and later with the cooperation of the United States. And so it is not at all surprising that this reality produced by capitalism should result, under the influence of the worldwide and general indignation of youth, in a new ideology. However, the significant thing, I believe, is not this ideology of the New Left, but simply the existence of the third world, the reality of the third world, which first made this ideology possible.
Do you really intend by your astonishing sentence to question the reality of the third world as such? Possibly there’s a misunderstanding here that you could clear up.
ARENDT: Not a bit of it. I am truly of the opinion that the third world is exactly what I said, an ideology or an illusion.
Africa, Asia, South America—those are realities. If you now compare these regions with Europe and America, then you can say of them—but only from this perspective—that they are underdeveloped, and you assert thereby that this is a crucial common denominator between these countries. However, you overlook the innumerable things they do not have in common, and the fact that what they do have in common is only a contrast that exists with another world; which means that the idea of underdevelopment as the important factor is a European American prejudice. The whole thing is simply a question of perspective; there is a logical fallacy here. Try telling a Chinese sometime that he belongs to exactly the same world as an African Bantu tribesman and, believe me, you’ll get the surprise of your life. The only ones who have an obviously political interest in saying that there is a third world are, of course, those who stand on the lowest step—that is, the Negroes in Africa. In their case it’s easy to understand; all the rest is empty talk.
The New Left has borrowed the catchword of the third world from the arsenal of the Old Left. It has been taken in by the distinction made by the imperialists between colonial countries and colonizing powers. For the imperialists, Egypt was, naturally, like India: they both fell under the heading of “subject races.” This imperialist leveling out of all differences is copied by the New Left, only with labels reversed. It is always the same old story: being taken in by every catchword, the inability to think or else the unwillingness to see phenomena as they really are, without applying categories to them in the belief that they can thereby be classified. It is just this that constitutes theoretical helplessness.
The new slogan—Natives of all colonies or of all former colonies or of all underdeveloped countries unite!—is even crazier than the old one from which it was copied: Workers of the world unite!—which, after all, has been thoroughly discredited. I am certainly not of the opinion that one can learn very much from history—for history constantly confronts us with what is new—but there are a couple of small things that it should be possible to learn. What fills me with such misgivings is that I do not see anywhere people of this generation recognizing realities as such, and taking the trouble to think about them.
REIF: Marxist philosophers and historians, and not just those in the strict sense of the word, today take the view that in this stage of the historical development of mankind there are only two possible alternatives for the future: capitalism or socialism. In your view, does another alternative exist?
ARENDT: I see no such alternatives in history; nor do I know what is in store there. Let’s not talk about such grand matters as “the historical development of mankind”—in all likelihood it will take a turn that corresponds neither to the one nor to the other, and let us hope it will come as a surprise to us.
But let’s look at your alternatives historically for a moment: it began, after all, with capitalism, an economic system that no one had planned and no one had foreseen. This system, as is generally known, owed its start to a monstrous process of expropriation such as has never occurred before in history in this form—that is, without military conquest. Expropriation, the initial accumulation of capital—that was the law according to which capitalism arose and according to which it has advanced step by step. Now just what people imagine by socialism I do not know. But if you look at what has actually happened in Russia, then you can see that there the process of expropriation has been carried further; and you can observe that something very similar is going on in the modern capitalist countries, where it is as though the old expropriation process is again let loose. Overtaxation, a de facto devaluation of currency, inflation coupled with a recession—what else are these but relatively mild forms of expropriation?
Only in the Western countries are there political and legal obstacles that constantly keep this process of expropriation from reaching the point where life would be completely unbearable. In Russia there is, of course, not socialism, but state socialism, which is the same thing as state capitalism would be—that is, total expropriation. Total expropriation occurs when all political and legal safeguards of private ownership have disappeared. In Russia, for instance, certain groups enjoy a very high standard of living. The trouble is only that whatever these people may have at their disposition—cars, country houses, expensive furniture, chauffeur-driven limousines, et cetera—they do not own; it can be taken away from them by the government any day. No man there is so rich that he cannot be made a beggar overnight—without even the right to employment—in case of any conflict with the ruling powers. (One glance into recent Soviet literature, where people have started to tell the truth, will testify to the atrocious consequences more tellingly than all economic and political theories.)
All our experiences—as distinguished from theories and ideologies—tell us that the process of expropriation, which started with the rise of capitalism, does not stop with the expropriation of the means of production; only legal and political institutions that are independent of the economic forces and their automatism can control and check the inherently monstrous potentialities of this process. Such political controls seem to function best in the so-called welfare states whether they call themselves socialist or capitalist. What protects freedom is the division between governmental and economic power, or, to put it into Marxian language, the fact that the state and its constitution are not superstructures.
What protects us in the so-called capitalist countries of the West is not capitalism, but a legal system that prevents the daydreams of big-business management of trespassing into the private sphere of its employees from coming true. But this dream does come true wherever the government itself becomes the employer. It is no secret that the clearance system for American government employees does not respect private life; the recent appetite of certain governmental agencies to bug private homes could also be seen as an attempt on the part of the government to treat all citizens as prospective government employees. And what else is bugging but a form of expropriation? The government agency establishes itself as a kind of co-owner of the apartments and houses of citizens. In Russia no fancy gadgets in the walls are necessary; there, a spy sits in every citizen’s apartment anyhow.
If I were to judge these developments from a Marxian viewpoint, I would say: Perhaps expropriation is indeed in the very nature of modern production, and socialism is, as Marx believed, nothing but the inevitable result of industrial society as it was started by capitalism. Then the question is what we can do to get and keep this process under control so that it does not degenerate, under one name or another, into the monstrosities in which it has fallen in the East. In certain so-called communist countries—in Yugoslavia, for instance, but even in East Germany—there are attempts to decontrol and decentralize the economy, and very substantial concessions are being made in order to prevent the most horrifying consequences of the expropriation process, which, fortunately enough, also has turned out to be very unsatisfactory for production once a certain point of centralization and enslavement of the workers has been reached.