Karen Kraft
29
- Joined
- May 18, 2002
- Posts
- 36,253
As one begins to analyze the underpinnings of fascist thought, one learns that this is a group highly anti-capitalist people. One would be hard pressed to find a Bolshevik or a Social Democrat more vehement in his or her renunciation of traditional capitalism. For example in the 1930s, George Orwell (1984 and others) lamented that the struggle leaving so many dead and wounded is, essentially, between fascists and socialists since, at the end of the day (inside joke – disregard) “We are all the same.”
Indeed, in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party campaigned against both the Marxists and the Capitalists, urging the folks to believe that the nazi system will take the best of both the other systems and create “a new socialist man.”
In his, The Coming American Fascism, 1936, Lawrence Dennis—noted American economist and anti-Semite—boasted that classic liberalism—that is, 18th-century Americanism—would soon become a laughing stock, and that, liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights, would be replaced by fascism, that is, the enterprises of public welfare and social control. And, Dennis stated further...
[Fascism] does not accept the liberal dogmas as to the sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market.... Least of all does it consider that market freedom, and the opportunity to make competitive profits, are rights of the individual. Such decisions should be made by a 'dominant class', an 'elite'.
See, for example, Lawrence Dennis’ work, The Coming American Fascism (1936), in which he author asserts that 18th Century Americanism, with its foolish notions of liberal norms of law and constitutional guarantees will be replaced by the more efficient fascist system, in which enterprises of public welfare and social control replace greedy and anti-social (read: Jewish) individual economic endeavors which only lead to a capitalist elite class. Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class (1923), restate these notions. Mosca was, as I’m sure y’all know, an Italian Fascist.
Mosca was critical of parliamentary government in his early work, but later, especially in the material added to the 1923 edition of the Elementi, he spoke strongly of its merits; he saw it as the one form of organization able "to utilize almost all human values in the political and administrative departments of government, … [in which] the door has been left open to all elements in the governed classes to make their way into the ruling classes" (The Ruling Class, p. 389). Thus, although Mosca thought that recognition of the inevitable existence of the ruling class in any society was sufficient to destroy the illusions of democratic ideologies, his conclusions are not easy to distinguish from the standard doctrines of socialist political philosophy.
But let’s move on to Spain. I love Spain this time of year. Don’t you? Of course you do! Let’s take a look at the 1936 speech made to the Cortes by the fascist Calvo Sotelo: “I am proposing the integrated state, which will bring economic justice, and which will say with due authority: no more strikes, no more lock-outs, no more usury, no more starvation wages, no more criminal conspiracies against full production, no more capitalist abuses.” The purest socialist state is the fascist state, “If this be the Fascist State, then I proudly declare myself a Fascist!” Of course, Sotelo was assassinated by a Republican (no, not the one Lincoln was in) Army conspiracy working in tandem with the Spanish Socialist-Communist Your League). That’s how the Spanish Civil War got its trolley under way.
Why, even the Bambino, Il Duce, [aka: His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire] helps us see that fascism is merely a sect or sub-section of socialism and socialist philosophy: [In reference to the communists’ viewpoints] “In the whole negative part, we are alike. We and the Russians are against the liberals, against democrats, against parliament”. – Mussolini 1932.
What is now considered to be “socialist” philosophy arose under the combined influence of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. The common theme history was telling us was that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth and unbridled competition would lead to increased suffering by the common man and one socio-economic crisis after another. The idea was to create a system that would organize the means of production so as to do away with poverty and oppression. You with me, camera guy, I can’t do this all day.
Besides the ideals of equality, social programs, and the abolition of private ownership and control over the means of production, both socialist theory and fascist theory were in agreement. It is a common mistake to regard the Nazi movement simply as a revolt against reason, an irrational spasm without intellectual background. Were that the case, National Socialism would have been far less dangerous! Indeed, the doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought, a process in which historic contributors had had substantial influence far beyond the borders of Germany.
Like a monster born with hidden but hideous birth defect, the logic of National Socialism, once its initial premise is accepted, flows smoothly and naturally as a nearly perfect socialist system: essential collectivism, but one in which progress is no longer fettered by inconvenient notions of individualism. Thus, fascism is the exact antithesis of individualism, is the antichrist of capitalist thought, substituting a nation-state based socialist social and economic system for a capitalist or state-capitalist (“Communist”) system and, lacking all sense of individualism, becomes the more brutal section of the socialist movement.
So here we are! “But master, I was taught in school that the Nazi movement was a capitalist knee-jerk over-reaction to the onset of European socialism, blended with a beer and sausage aroma of exaggerated nationalism!”
Not quite, Grasshopper! The support which brought National Socialism to power in Germany came precisely from the socialist camp. The engine of National Socialism came not from an overly strong bourgeoisie, but from its absence!
As we all can figure, political philosophy is not lineal but circular. If you go far enough to the right, you end up on the left, and vice versa. The socialists on the far left drift around the circle like the condiment lazy susan over at Dan Rather’s house, until they become “little Hitlers” as people here on the GB like to say, for whatever reason. It was the fusion of radical and conservative socialism that killed off liberal notions of individual rights in Germany.
The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism—Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism. .... From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. OKAY !!!!
I know that many of you have the attention span of a snail darter with attention deficit disorder, so I will give you the CLIFF NOTES carry-in-your purse-or-wallet cheat-sheet Easy-Target-Rule-Of-Thumb card which, for your amusement, has some generalizations salted here and there so you can pick on those when your failure to grasp the earlier parts of this post frustrate you. Here we go now…..
How am I to be able to tell that fascists are socialists, Coach?
Well, the Nazis called themselves The National Socialist German Workers Party, not, The National Capitalist German Plutocrats Party, and the National Socialists boasted that Hitler had created in Germany, the most modern socialist state in the world.
Also, Ernst Roehm, a dedicated socialist, leader of the SA, second only to Hitler in power in the National Socialist Party, in a letter to a friend, observed how often his street thugs switched back and forth between Roehm's National Socialist gangs and the Communist gangs, uncertain on whose side they rightly belonged.
While you are thinking about it, consider that in Mussolini's early days, before his rise to power, many of his Marxist critics viewed his fascism as a curiosity and recognized it as more of a heresy from, rather than a mortal challenge to revolutionary Marxism. (See Agursky's, The Third Rome, 1963.)
Beginners stop. Advanced may continue:
During the 1920s and 30s, because such little practical difference existed between fascists and Bolsheviks, critics of Hitler's National Socialism routinely called it, National Bolshevism. Needless to say the Bolshevists got all pouty and pissed off to have to share the same bed with the fascists and invented their very own “agency theory” of fascism. (Any of you eve take this stuff in school? No? Okay, let’s continue. So the Comintern established the 1930s version of “inherited from Bush;” “end of the day” mantra that fascism must immediately and forever more be associated with capitalism and thereby, per formal Stalinist/Leninist dogma, fascism became the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital. That dumb tune played over and over and over again and is still popular with the left today! Imagine that! Although there is nothing to suggest it is true, leftists insist (via snark and ad hominem fallacy, of course) that fascism is a necessary component of capitalism. Needless to say the critics of the socialist gospel get tagged as fascists through this little joke for half-wits.
In his book, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974), Hayek remarks that, during the 1930s, the propagandists of both parties recognized the relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa and how university professors in the U.S. and Britain noticed that students returning from study in Germany could not decide whether they were Marxists or fascists, but were certain only that they hated, Western Civilization. But I guess that’s one of those Nobel Prize LOL moments. What does Hayek know, right? If he’s so smart, why’s he dead, right? RIGHT?
But what do I know? I bet I can find an online dictionary that proves me wrong in some sort of really cool WIKI-WAY (not to be confused with Mikey Way…)
Indeed, in 1932, Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party campaigned against both the Marxists and the Capitalists, urging the folks to believe that the nazi system will take the best of both the other systems and create “a new socialist man.”
In his, The Coming American Fascism, 1936, Lawrence Dennis—noted American economist and anti-Semite—boasted that classic liberalism—that is, 18th-century Americanism—would soon become a laughing stock, and that, liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights, would be replaced by fascism, that is, the enterprises of public welfare and social control. And, Dennis stated further...
[Fascism] does not accept the liberal dogmas as to the sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market.... Least of all does it consider that market freedom, and the opportunity to make competitive profits, are rights of the individual. Such decisions should be made by a 'dominant class', an 'elite'.
See, for example, Lawrence Dennis’ work, The Coming American Fascism (1936), in which he author asserts that 18th Century Americanism, with its foolish notions of liberal norms of law and constitutional guarantees will be replaced by the more efficient fascist system, in which enterprises of public welfare and social control replace greedy and anti-social (read: Jewish) individual economic endeavors which only lead to a capitalist elite class. Gaetano Mosca’s The Ruling Class (1923), restate these notions. Mosca was, as I’m sure y’all know, an Italian Fascist.
Mosca was critical of parliamentary government in his early work, but later, especially in the material added to the 1923 edition of the Elementi, he spoke strongly of its merits; he saw it as the one form of organization able "to utilize almost all human values in the political and administrative departments of government, … [in which] the door has been left open to all elements in the governed classes to make their way into the ruling classes" (The Ruling Class, p. 389). Thus, although Mosca thought that recognition of the inevitable existence of the ruling class in any society was sufficient to destroy the illusions of democratic ideologies, his conclusions are not easy to distinguish from the standard doctrines of socialist political philosophy.
But let’s move on to Spain. I love Spain this time of year. Don’t you? Of course you do! Let’s take a look at the 1936 speech made to the Cortes by the fascist Calvo Sotelo: “I am proposing the integrated state, which will bring economic justice, and which will say with due authority: no more strikes, no more lock-outs, no more usury, no more starvation wages, no more criminal conspiracies against full production, no more capitalist abuses.” The purest socialist state is the fascist state, “If this be the Fascist State, then I proudly declare myself a Fascist!” Of course, Sotelo was assassinated by a Republican (no, not the one Lincoln was in) Army conspiracy working in tandem with the Spanish Socialist-Communist Your League). That’s how the Spanish Civil War got its trolley under way.
Why, even the Bambino, Il Duce, [aka: His Excellency Benito Mussolini, Head of Government, Duce of Fascism, and Founder of the Empire] helps us see that fascism is merely a sect or sub-section of socialism and socialist philosophy: [In reference to the communists’ viewpoints] “In the whole negative part, we are alike. We and the Russians are against the liberals, against democrats, against parliament”. – Mussolini 1932.
What is now considered to be “socialist” philosophy arose under the combined influence of the Industrial Revolution and the French Revolution. The common theme history was telling us was that the uncontrolled concentration of wealth and unbridled competition would lead to increased suffering by the common man and one socio-economic crisis after another. The idea was to create a system that would organize the means of production so as to do away with poverty and oppression. You with me, camera guy, I can’t do this all day.
Besides the ideals of equality, social programs, and the abolition of private ownership and control over the means of production, both socialist theory and fascist theory were in agreement. It is a common mistake to regard the Nazi movement simply as a revolt against reason, an irrational spasm without intellectual background. Were that the case, National Socialism would have been far less dangerous! Indeed, the doctrines of National Socialism are the culmination of a long evolution of thought, a process in which historic contributors had had substantial influence far beyond the borders of Germany.
Like a monster born with hidden but hideous birth defect, the logic of National Socialism, once its initial premise is accepted, flows smoothly and naturally as a nearly perfect socialist system: essential collectivism, but one in which progress is no longer fettered by inconvenient notions of individualism. Thus, fascism is the exact antithesis of individualism, is the antichrist of capitalist thought, substituting a nation-state based socialist social and economic system for a capitalist or state-capitalist (“Communist”) system and, lacking all sense of individualism, becomes the more brutal section of the socialist movement.
So here we are! “But master, I was taught in school that the Nazi movement was a capitalist knee-jerk over-reaction to the onset of European socialism, blended with a beer and sausage aroma of exaggerated nationalism!”
Not quite, Grasshopper! The support which brought National Socialism to power in Germany came precisely from the socialist camp. The engine of National Socialism came not from an overly strong bourgeoisie, but from its absence!
As we all can figure, political philosophy is not lineal but circular. If you go far enough to the right, you end up on the left, and vice versa. The socialists on the far left drift around the circle like the condiment lazy susan over at Dan Rather’s house, until they become “little Hitlers” as people here on the GB like to say, for whatever reason. It was the fusion of radical and conservative socialism that killed off liberal notions of individual rights in Germany.
The connection between socialism and nationalism in Germany was close from the beginning. It is significant that the most important ancestors of National Socialism—Fichte, Rodbertus, and Lassalle—are at the same time acknowledged fathers of socialism. .... From 1914 onward there arose from the ranks of Marxist socialism one teacher after another who led, not the conservatives and reactionaries, but the hard-working laborer and idealist youth into the National Socialist fold. It was only thereafter that the tide of nationalist socialism attained major importance and rapidly grew into the Hitlerian doctrine. OKAY !!!!
I know that many of you have the attention span of a snail darter with attention deficit disorder, so I will give you the CLIFF NOTES carry-in-your purse-or-wallet cheat-sheet Easy-Target-Rule-Of-Thumb card which, for your amusement, has some generalizations salted here and there so you can pick on those when your failure to grasp the earlier parts of this post frustrate you. Here we go now…..
How am I to be able to tell that fascists are socialists, Coach?
Well, the Nazis called themselves The National Socialist German Workers Party, not, The National Capitalist German Plutocrats Party, and the National Socialists boasted that Hitler had created in Germany, the most modern socialist state in the world.
Also, Ernst Roehm, a dedicated socialist, leader of the SA, second only to Hitler in power in the National Socialist Party, in a letter to a friend, observed how often his street thugs switched back and forth between Roehm's National Socialist gangs and the Communist gangs, uncertain on whose side they rightly belonged.
While you are thinking about it, consider that in Mussolini's early days, before his rise to power, many of his Marxist critics viewed his fascism as a curiosity and recognized it as more of a heresy from, rather than a mortal challenge to revolutionary Marxism. (See Agursky's, The Third Rome, 1963.)
Beginners stop. Advanced may continue:
During the 1920s and 30s, because such little practical difference existed between fascists and Bolsheviks, critics of Hitler's National Socialism routinely called it, National Bolshevism. Needless to say the Bolshevists got all pouty and pissed off to have to share the same bed with the fascists and invented their very own “agency theory” of fascism. (Any of you eve take this stuff in school? No? Okay, let’s continue. So the Comintern established the 1930s version of “inherited from Bush;” “end of the day” mantra that fascism must immediately and forever more be associated with capitalism and thereby, per formal Stalinist/Leninist dogma, fascism became the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist, and most imperialist elements of finance capital. That dumb tune played over and over and over again and is still popular with the left today! Imagine that! Although there is nothing to suggest it is true, leftists insist (via snark and ad hominem fallacy, of course) that fascism is a necessary component of capitalism. Needless to say the critics of the socialist gospel get tagged as fascists through this little joke for half-wits.
In his book, The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich August von Hayek (recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1974), Hayek remarks that, during the 1930s, the propagandists of both parties recognized the relative ease with which a young communist could be converted into a Nazi or vice versa and how university professors in the U.S. and Britain noticed that students returning from study in Germany could not decide whether they were Marxists or fascists, but were certain only that they hated, Western Civilization. But I guess that’s one of those Nobel Prize LOL moments. What does Hayek know, right? If he’s so smart, why’s he dead, right? RIGHT?
But what do I know? I bet I can find an online dictionary that proves me wrong in some sort of really cool WIKI-WAY (not to be confused with Mikey Way…)
