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March 21 - March 22, 2023
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.
In Italy during the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public debt, and widespread corruption. But industrial profits rose and the armaments factories busily rolled out weapons in preparation for the war to come. In Germany, unemployment was cut in half with the considerable expansion in armaments jobs, but overall poverty increased because of the drastic wage cuts. And from 1935 to 1943 industrial profits increased substantially while the net income of corporate leaders climbed 46 percent.
Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism’s raison d’être, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism.
In exchange for more positive coverage in the Hearst newspapers, for instance, the Nazis paid almost ten times the standard subscription rate for Hearst’s INS wire service. In return, William Randolph Hearst instructed his correspondents in Germany to file friendly reports about Hitler’s regime. Those who refused were transferred or fired. Hearst newspapers even opened their pages to occasional guest columns by prominent Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Göring.
Fascism preaches the authoritarian rule of an all-encompassing state and a supreme leader. It extols the harsher human impulses of conquest and domination, while rejecting egalitarianism, democracy, collectivism, and pacifism as doctrines of weakness and decadence.
The position enunciated in that play and in other Nazi propaganda does not reveal an indifference to class; quite the contrary, it represents a keen awareness of class interests, a well-engineered effort to mask and mute the strong class consciousness that existed among workers in Germany. In the crafty denial, we often find the hidden admission.
Superpatriots were told that the Jew was an alien internationalist. Unemployed workers were told that their nemesis was the Jewish capitalist and Jewish banker. For debtor farmers, it was the Jewish usurer. For the middle class, it was the Jewish union leader and Jewish communist. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images. The Nazis might have been crazy but they were not stupid.
Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a “New Order” while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.
Under the protection of U.S. occupation authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits—as is true to this day. The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, thousands of homosexuals, several million Ukranians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got away with it—in good part because the very people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were themselves complicit. In comparison, when the Communists took over in
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After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus Cologne was almost leveled by Allied bombing but its Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed, German civilians began using the plant as an air raid shelter.
Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate estimate.
In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina
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From opposing communists because they might be revolutionaries, it was a short step to opposing revolutionaries because they might be communists. The real sin of revolutionaries, communist or not, was that they championed the laboring classes against the wealthy few. They advocated changes in the distribution of class power and the way wealth was produced and used. They wanted less individualistic advancement at the expense of the many and collective betterment for the entire working populace.
People throughout the world do not need more corporate investments, rather they need the opportunity to wrest back their land, labor, natural resources, and markets in order to serve their own social needs.
The very concept of “revolutionary violence” is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.
The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.
It occurs to me that when people as smart, different, dedicated and heroic as Lenin, Mao, Fidel Castro, Daniel Ortega, Ho Chi Minh and Robert Mugabe—and the millions of heroic people who followed and fought with them—all end up more or less in the same place, then something bigger is at work than who made what decision at what meeting. Or even what size houses they went home to after the meeting. … These leaders weren’t in a vacuum. They were in a whirlwind. And the suction, the force, the power that was twirling them around has spun and left this globe mangled for more than 900 years. And to
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For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come.
The ambassador added ruefully: “We thought building a good society would make good people. That’s not always true.”
If “building the revolution” and “winning the battle of production” mean performing essential but routine tasks for the rest of one’s foreseeable future, the revolution understandably loses its luster. There is often not enough interesting and creative work to go around for all who consider themselves interesting and creative people.
Against the inflated imagination, reality is a poor thing.
Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reactionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city’s population, an estimated 1.2 million, were drug addicts. Every morning there were special street crews “whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned, and died of disease, cold, and/or starvation” (Z Magazine, October 1995).
Here I want to point out that much of the credit for the deformation and overthrow of communism should go to the Western forces that tirelessly dedicated themselves to that task, using every possible means of political, economic, military, and diplomatic aggression to achieve a success that will continue to cost the people of the world dearly.
In 1996, the International Monetary Fund extended a $10.2 billion loan to Russia, with terms calling for the privatization of agriculture and other state-owned assets, and the elimination of human service and fuel subsidies.
If West Germany had denazified anywhere near as thoroughly as it forced the East to desocialize, it would be a totally different country (Z Magazine, 7/92).
A joke circulating in Russia in 1992 went like this: Q. What did capitalism accomplish in one year that communism could not do in seventy years? A. Make communism look good.
Maureen Orth asked the first woman she met in a market if her life had changed in the last two years and the woman burst into tears. She was 58 years old, had worked forty years in a potato factory and now could not afford most of the foods in the market: “It’s not life, it’s just existence,” she said (Vanity Fair, 9/94). Orth interviewed the chief of a hospital department in Moscow who said: “Life was different two years ago—I was a human being.” Now he had to chauffeur people around for extra income. What about the new freedoms? “Freedom for what?” he responded. “Freedom to buy a
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In a similar vein, former GDR defense minister Heinz Kessler commented: “Sure, I hear about the new freedom that people are enjoying in Eastern Europe. But how do you define freedom? Millions of people in Eastern Europe are now free from employment, free from safe streets, free from health care, free from social security” (New York Times, 7/20/96).
an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists. They may occupy office but the wealth of the nation, the basic property relations, organic law, financial system, and debt structure, along with the national media, police power, and state institutions, have all been fundamentally restructured. The resources needed for social programs and full employment have been pilfered or completely obliterated, as have monetary reserves, markets, and natural resources. A few years of untrammeled free-market marauding has left these nations at
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The peoples of Eastern Europe believed they were going to keep all the social gains they had enjoyed under communism while adding on all the consumerism of the West. Many of their grievances about existing socialism were justified but their romanticized image of the capitalist West was not. They had to learn the hard way. Expecting to advance from Second World to First World status, they have been rammed down into the Third World, ending up like capitalist Indonesia, Mexico, Zaire, and Turkey. They wanted it all and have been left with almost nothing.
As Marx noted: “All science would be superfluous if outward appearances and the essence of things directly coincided.”
To see racism in the larger context of corporate society is to move from a liberal complaint to a radical analysis. Instead of thinking that racism is an irrational output of a basically rational and benign system, we should see it is a rational output of a basically irrational and unjust system. By “rational” I mean purposive and functional in sustaining the system that nurtures it.
More than just a sociological category, class is a relationship to the means of production and to social and state power.
While pummeling a rather minuscule Marxist Left, the ABC theorists would have us think they are doing courageous battle against hordes of Marxists who dominate intellectual discourse in this country—yet another hallucination they hold in common with conservatives.
Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement. To be sure, they have important contributions to make around issues that are particularly salient to them, issues often overlooked by others. But they also should not downplay their common interests, nor overlook the common class enemy they face.
To embrace a class analysis is not to deny the significance of identity issues but to see how these are linked both to each other and to the overall structure of politico-economic power. An awareness of class relations deepens our understanding of culture, race, gender, and other such things.
Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom.
Once in control of the state, plutocratic interests can use a regressive taxation system to make the public pay for the agencies of repression that are essential to elite domination. Still, democratic governance can prove troublesome, inciting all sorts of popular demands and imposing restraints on Big Business’s enjoyment of a freewheeling market. For this reason the captains of capitalism and their conservative publicists support both a strong state armed with every intrusive power and a weak government unable to stop corporate abuse or serve the needs of the ordinary populace.
Capitalism is a rational system, the well-calculated systematic maximization of power and profits, a process of accumulation anchored in material obsession that has the ultimately irrational consequence of devouring the system itself—and everything else with it.
In 1876, Marx’s collaborator, Frederich Engels, offered a prophetic caveat: “Let us not … flatter ourselves overmuch on account of our human conquest over nature. For each such conquest takes its revenge on us. … At every step we are reminded that we by no means rule over nature like a conqueror over a foreign people, like someone standing outside of nature—but that we, with flesh, blood, and brain, belong to nature, and exist in its midst. …”
The only countervailing force that might eventually turn things in a better direction is an informed and mobilized citizenry. Whatever their shortcomings, the people are our best hope. Indeed, we are they.
