It was also intended to counter his misconception that he or anyone should not criticize the US communist movement. This line of thinking is incorrect because only based on our criticism can we determine the correctness or incorrectness of any given movement as you yourself exemplified in your criticism. My comments were to encourage criticism to determine the correctness of a given political line although my focus in that message was not quite necessarily criticism of the US communist movement in general but specifically along the line of the failure to understand the dialectical nature of how US fascism is developing and does in fact exist in the US. It is an error for any communist to say fascism does not exist because it does not exist in the mold characteristic of classical fascism. US fascism may never take on all of the characteristics of classical fascism because the contradictions have given rise to newly developed conditions that will determine its own mold and characteristics just as you have noted this in relation to the newly emerging class of proletarians in society today. <<<
Comment I favor the broadest criticism of the communist movement in America, by communists outside America and deeply feel we communists in America should be extremely careful in our assessment of the world outside America. My personal inclination is to error on the side of saying nothing in respects to the world communist movement. Our status as the most imperial of all imperial workers means we must keep in mind our impact on the various political polarities in which we operate. Our criticism must and should always be sincere and use concrete examples drawn from our daily life experience; history of shifting class alignments in our country; pinpoint the various modes of struggle of our laboring classes against capital aggression and highlight the subjective and political boundaries we have faced over the course of the last 150 years. The issue of fascism as a historical economic and political mode of operation of capital rule has confounded the American mind. Our history has run in a somewhat different political mode than "European history" and at a more dynamic pace as a trajectory of industrial development. That is to say I have a concept of world industrial development as a curve of history. In America our historically distinct form of the emergence of modern imperialism (financial and industrial capital imperial rule), occured on a wave of events in front of "Europe." Modern American imperialism is different from the imperialism of the Slave Oligarchy with its insatiable need for territory (land mass) as capital economic and production relations in land. The actual mechanics of slave production of commodities - tobacco and cotton, meant capital expansion was directly related to how much land was brought under cultivation, rather than say the intensive development of industrial implements, which increase the productive capacity of labor in industry. Pardon the following economic summation but comrade outside America have extreme difficulty in understanding our history and the Marxist approach of a section of American communists to it. Slave labor requires increasingly large gangs of slaves and massive expansion into futile soil, due not simply to soil depletion but the law of capitalist reproduction on an expanding scale. Here is the contradiction internal to the plantation system. This means the slave mode of the laboring process itself stands in antagonism to capital expansion. The slave master understood this contradiction and antagnoism - economic law of the value producing system, but could not as a class liquidate his capital in slaves to modernize his productive forces before modern productive forces appeared, even if he subjectively desired to do so. The inability to resolve this contradiction is what compelled the slave oligarchy to convert states like Maryland and Virginia, which had employed slaves on the production of export articles, into states that raised slaves in order to export these slaves into the deep South, as the plantation system attempted to expand into new territories. Marx clarity and summary of this economic law is to the point: "A strict confinement of slavery within its old terrain, therefore, was bound according to economic law to lead to its gradual effacement." http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2003w33/msg00152.htm This process logic is as close as American history has come to something akin to the closed colonial system characteristic of Europe. Modern imperialism is dated from roughly the 1900s to the outbreak of WW I - 1914, but events in America witnessed the emergence of a form of modern financial imperialism - with the financier as dominator, in front of the curve. The logic of our history is different and peculiar but not an exception to the general law of society described by Marx or the general body politics of the Third International - during that period of time. European fascism led by its aggressive German form is associated with the industrial sector of capital for some concrete reasons that involves a historically distinct stage of capital imperialism as the closed colonial system. Again - the only political phenomenon similar to this in our history is the period of the Slave Oligarchy leading up to the Civil War. The actual history of American fascism and its material rule within the American Union is bound up with the rise of Wall Street imperialism on the basis of/as the defeat of the Slave Oligarchy and then the counterrevolution in the Deep South. Fascism in American history as a political phenomenon is not directly related to the rule of industrial capital as the leading component of financial capital expansion or the closed colonial system. German fascism of Hilterism sought direct colonies as appendages to their industrial infrastructure as a basis to enlarge their military capacity for the attack on Bolshevism. The communist of my hue have always pointed out that European fascism as a social phenomenon was the direct result and reaction of the European bourgeoisie to the October Revolution. The various Trotskyite trends and imperial bourgeois leftist relate European fascism to the rise of Stalin and Stalinism but this is not true at all. The polarity that became European fascism was directly related to the victory of Bolshevism in 1917 and the curve of defeat of the German Revolution before the death of Lenin. Something very different happened in America during the 1890s that birthed the worlds first fascist movement and fascists victory that would later be copied by Hitler to the "tee." The victory of fascism in the South during the 1890s was related not to the demand logic of industrial capital but the political logic of the alliance between Wall Street imperialism and the old Slave Oligarchy and the need to subdue the revolutionary outpouring released as the Civil War and emancipation of millions of slaves. The class demands of the freemen was to break up the large plantations and construct a modern bourgeois order and this impulse could not be contained by the Northern Yanks. It is true that aggressive American fascism in our history could not and did not assume the military form characteristic of German fascism, but operated primarily as an organization of extralegal organizations buttressed and protected by the state. Nor was American fascism related to the industrial sector of our capital whose pre and Civil War program was in alignment with Jeffersonian democracy and supplying the implements for the growth of the family farmers. It was the rule of Wall Street imperialism - (financial and industrial capital led by the financial bourgeoisie seeking penetration of the markets of the closed colonial system), in political alignment with the shattered Slave Oligarchy that overthrew the legal bourgeois democratic Reconstruction era governments of the South. While fascism on European soil was most certainly related to the industrial sector of capital as the closed colonial system - hence its internal military form, this was not true in America. In America the Southern armies of reaction were defeated on the battle field and not allowed to regroup as a legal military organization. The Southern army was horribly shattered and the South laid in ruin. This shattered army of men became so much riif raff, armed ruffians, bandits or mutherfucking "Jay Hawkers." Groups like the Ku Klux Klan was so much of this scum of the earth and regrouped as a military strike force against the Reconstruction governments. Here is how we described the political phenomenon of fascism as American history 30 years ago: "Some of the fascist characteristics of the counter revolution were: (1) it conformed to the description of being the "open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital." (2) "The accession to power of fascism is not an ordinary succession of one bourgeois government by another, but a substitution of one state form of class domination of the bourgeoisie - bourgeoisie democracy, for another form - open terrorist dictatorship." (3) "Fascism come to power as a party of attack on the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, on the masses of the people who are in a state of unrest; yet it stages its accession to power as a revolutionary movement against the bourgeoisie on behalf of the whole nation. "What made up the fascist character of the counter revolution was not simply its brutality or violence, but the fact that the 'revolt of the poor whites' cloaked itself in the mantle of saving the South. The fascist led 'revolt' was the absolute agent of finance capital of the North. The counterrevolution attacked and overthrew the Reconstruction bourgeois democratic governments. Then, the fascist substituted a reign of terror as the new state form of domination . . .. In the Anglo American nation (North - M.P.) the capitalist in the main relied on deception, bribery and fraud - in short on bourgeois democracy. This was not the case in the Black Belt! Here, the rule of finance capital was maintained by an unheard of reign of terror, legal and extra legal, both by police and the KKK." Page 39 "A political force, constructed and funded by finance capital, which overthrows a legal bourgeois democratic government and substitutes as a state form the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic elements of finance capital is called fascist. Such a political state we call fascism. " http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2003w33/msg00152.htm (Negro National Colonial Question by Nelson Peery - 1972 edition hardback. ) The black and white masses were locked down under a fascist form of state rule in the South, that did not undergo fundamental collapse and reconfiguration until the 1950's under the impact of the magnificent struggle that broke out in Montgomery Alabama. This struggle took shape and accelerated on the basis of the mechanization of agriculture and the liquidation of 11 million s harecroppers as a class - 5 million black and 6 million white. Changes in the productive forces - mechanization of agriculture, were the basis for the old South to leap forward in its social relations. The impulse to revolutionize production as a tendency of expanding value took place in the context of the world wide polarity with Soviet Power. This post WW II polarity conditioned the struggle in America and provided our class and diverse peoples with a "breathing space" we no longer possess. What we are experiencing today is an increasingly reactionary bourgeoisie democracy attempting transition to a fascist state form of rule. The distinction between a reactionary bourgeois democracy and outright fascism is the distinction in the rising and falling wave of the German Revolution that was the assassination of Rosa Luxembourg and Karl L. versus Hitler's consolidating power and imperial assaults to regain Germany's imperial throne. In my estimate the American peoples and our working class are not going to accept a fascists military form of rule because that runs counter to our history and huge fissures in the military establishment are already apparent. A small section of the military and believe it or not, intelligence is hostile to fascism as a political form of rule. Yet, the material logic of our ruling class is to scare the crap out of the peoples of America and attempt to treat them as the slaves of the pre-Civil War era and make them stand in fear. A complex struggle unfolds impacting all of society where you have the Senate's senior Constitutional scholar, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia equating Bush political program to Hitler's ramming fascists legislation through the Reichstag. We have enough material in our own history to explain and describe the current moment in history and our political currents in details rather than general Marxist formula. Peace Waistline _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list Marxist-Leninist-List@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
