The meaning of the Second World War
by Ernest Mandel
Verso: 1986
Chapter 8 Science and Administration
....No more than contemporary science should contemporary weapons be reified. They possess no independent social momentum blindly imposing its 'will' on people. The atomic bomb or the computer have no 'will' of their own. The people who control them and are ready to use them have wills; and these wills are determined by powerful social interests. Their power over machines and weapons is a function of their power over other people. That is the message to be drawn from the Third Reich's relative success in developing sophisticated weapons, from Stalin's breakthrough in having Katyushkas put on the conveyor belt, from American imperialism's success in producing the atom bomb. A monopoly of decision-making by human 'experts' or attempts to stop scientific progress cannot prevent disastrous developments. The mass of the people genuinely in control of the means of production, in contrast, can. There is no 'inevitable sequence of events'.
....the terror of nuclear weapons has unleashed an international spirit of resistance to the madness of nuclear war. The struggle between those ready to unleash it and those ready to oppose it by all means necessary is not decided in advance in favour of the madmen. It will be decided politically by a clash of basic social forces, motivated not only by interest, but by conviction and moral stamina as well.
....Four radical innovations during WW II were directly stimulated by scientific research for military purposes: radar; sonar; the proximity fuse; and the atomic bomb .
....given the nature of contemporary armies, their size and complexity, the actual utilization of scientific-technological inventions in the war depended as much, if not more, on planning and production than on scientific discovery per se or even on the recognition of the importance and potential use of the discovery. That is why World War Two was not so much a 'wizard's war' (as Churchill claimed), as a war of administrators and planners, therewith reflecting the organizational implications of its being a conveyor-belt war. Keitel, Eisenhower, and also, to a large extent, Stalin were not so much strategists as administrators
....A given army could make a real breakthrough in weapons efficiency by correctly exploiting a new invention, but remain hamstrung by lack of the wherewithal to utilize it on a large scale. (The Luftwaffe, for example, was forced to keep half of its deadly ME 163s on the ground in the final phase of the war because of fuel shortages.)
....planning and administration of the utilization of scientific breakthroughs thus become a matter of synthetic judgement, of determining priorities, and weighing advantages and disadvantages before taking certain decisions. Once the decision has been made, however, it changes the overall situation and for some considerable time.
....differences between countries under bourgeois democracy and those under various types of dictatorship largely disappear in war conditions. It could be argued that Roosevelt and Churchill but especially Churchill actually enjoyed more power to impose such decisions than did Hitler, Tojo, Mussolini, or even Stalin. Centralised decision-taking is unavoidable given centralisation of economic and political power, it is not possible to delegate the authority to build a new type of airplane (say, a jet plane) to ten different authorities covering one hundred different factories.
....false choices made by a handful of people led to disasters from which millions suffered. The top decision-makers, confronted with a growing number of urgent choices, more and more depended on information and advice given by committees, and became overwhelmed by papers to be read. Thus they in turn were forced to delegate authority on matters seemingly of secondary importance, but which could decisively impede progress or even cause major setbacks.
....Something that needs to be stressed is the lack of realism of those who argue that oppressive regimes are, by their very nature, unable to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons or seriously participate in the technological race. There is nothing in the record of the armaments industry during World War Two to warrant such an optimistic conclusion. On the contrary, qualitative breakthroughs in weapons' 'progress' occurred in all countries which had passed a certain threshold of industrial/scientific infrastructure. Those who establish alleged causal links between 'modern arms and free men', to quote the title of a once famous book by Vannevar Bush, seriously underestimate the capacity of any government, state, ruling class or stratum to mobilise over-specialised partial knowledge in pursuit of specific projects independently of its overall nature or of the 'immoral' global goals it pursues.
....the very nature of contemporary production, geared as it is to generalised (capitalist) or partial (postcapitalist) commodity production, puts a premium on achieving specific partial goals, irrespective of their global long-term impact on society or humankind as a whole.
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