Ciencia sin método: una visión pragmatista

above, went on to become an advocate of land reform throughout Asia as a means to modernize and stabilize Asian societies and pre-empt "irrational revolutions." His views on land reform and what it might accomplish are, therefore, a benchmark for the assessment of U.S. policy on land reform and social revolution in Asia in the 1950's. In a 1948 paper called, "Trial Balance in Japan," Ladejinsky wrote of the land reform in Japan;

"It is the tale of a moderate, middle-class revolution, designed to create a stable system of capitalistic democracy. The changes that have been made have so loosened the fetters that held the Japanese people, that reactionary forces would find it difficult to tighten them again... Such reforms as the widespread ownership of land, the recognition of the right of labor to economic security, and the measures for the control of disease and the improvement of public health, so effectively carried on by SCAP, have been tangible evidence to the common people of Japan that we are actively espousing a new way of life and not merely opposing the old. It is this that distinguishes the American occupation of Japan from the occupation of other defeated countries by victors in wars, past and present"[41]

Conspicuous by its absence is any reflection by Ladejinsky on the reverse course and the attitude of the American conservatives to what he called a "moderate middle-class revolution." In May 1949, the liberal journal, New Republic, came out with a blistering attack on the reactionaries in the American Council on Japan for their assault on SCAP. Not so Wolf Ladejinsky. He was an agricultural economist, not a political economist and at no point in his career did he take stock of the intractable political and ideological dimensions of land reform as a problem in Asia or as a policy issue in the United States.

7 . In an exchange of letters with Ladejinksy in August-September 1957, Ronald Dore raised the question of the significance of the Occupation in Japan and asked whether or not Ladejinsky considered such conditions desirable as a precondition of effective reform. Ladejinsky replied on 20 August:

"Your last point amuses me. No, I do not care to deal with a reform as a member of an occupation army. I'd rather have them do it in their own way - even if ever so slowly and incomplete in some vital respects. The beginning is important and time will take care of the rest. There is, of course, the risk that there might not be enough time.”

Dore's response, dated 22 September, delicately posed the question of time, beginning and power, to which Ladejinsky seems never to have devoted more than superficial reflection:

"Glad to know that you prefer advice and persuasion to occupation and directive. But how difficult it must be to do these things gradually. If only societies could be injected with the sort of dazed receptivity for sudden and fundamental change that hit Japan in 1945-46, without having to suffer catastrophes first."

8 . After a field trip to Szechwan in the late northern summer of 1949, to acquaint himseif with the ill-fated land reform projects undertaken there by the Sino- U.S. Joint Commission on Rural Reconstruction in the last months before the Com m unist take-over, Ladejinsky lamented that the N ationalist (K uom intang) government in China had not implemented the land reform legislation of the early 1920’s, as this failure had cost it peasant support and thus political power.[42] Regarding the Communist victory in China as a "catastrophe"[43] brought about by Stalin’s "three stage program of revolution" - struggle against foreign imperialism, peasant war, proletarian dictatorship - Ladejinksy called on the United States to champion "agrarian democracy" and take the leadership of the modem revolution away from the Communists:

"What is true o f China is essentially true o f other parts o f the orient. Every densely populated farm area of Asia counts land-hungry, or just hungry, tenants by the million. Most of them would sell their souls to their governments for a piece of land in fee simple or for reasonable tenure conditions. The only question is whether these governments will heed the lessons of Chinas disastrous experience. It behooves us to make sure that they do. If for no other reason than enlightened self-interest in the contest with the Communists in Asia, the United States cannot be friendly to agrarian feudalism simply because we are against Communist totalitarianism. Our attitude should be one o f positive support fo r agrarian democracy."[45]

9. Positive support for agrarian democracy? Suppose, however, that the defenders of "agrarian feudalism" dug in vi et armis or sought to modernize agriculture not by redistributive reform but by capitalist consolidation, at the expense of the rural poor coming and going? Suppose, further, that no powerful party of "agrarian democrats" had been able to weld peasant discontent into a wide, cogent political coalition, but that armed "Gracchans" under the banner of Marx and Lenin had done so? Suppose, finally, that hegemonic conservative propertied interests in the United States saw little to choose between "agrarian democrats" and Communist "Gracchans" and were disposed to back the patricians of "agrarian feudalism" and undemocratic capitalism vi et armis against the "Gracchans"? How, then, was Wolf Ladejinsky's generous but vague vision to be actualized? He seems never to have faced these questions squarely.

1 0 . There are indications that Ladejinsky himself, as early as 1950, had backed him self into an impasse between the horror of radical revolution and the conservatism of the U.S. policy and corporate elites, neither of which was he apparently able or willing to system atically think through and politically analyse. He wrote in 1950:

"Many people wouldn't hesitate to approve of a revolutionary movement if it is the only way the common man can secure his elementary wants. But we must realize how serious a threat an agrarian revolution could be at this point of history, even if the upheaval seems justifiable from that point of view. The only way to thwart Communist designs on Asia is to preclude such revolutionary outbursts through timely reforms, peacefully, before the peasants

take the law into their own hands and set the countryside ablaze. But reforms, if they are to have a lasting effect, must come not only from opposition to Communism but from a honest purpose and plan to raise the status o f the peasantry."[45]

And again,

"Encouraging in the seemingly dismal situation in Asia is the fact that the American agrarian tradition o f 40 acres and a mule or an Asian variety thereof offers a better solution of the agrarian problem than the new Communist ideology. This is quite apart from the consideration that the latest events in China and the implied threat to the rest of Asia oblige us to bolster o p ­ position there with something more lasting and effective than we have done this far . . ."[46]

11. It does not seem that Ladejinsky ever made a serious study of the American