Re: [PEN-L] Sermon (is it fascism?)

[Waistline2]

>CB: Germany was more advanced than France and Germany in terms of social democratic measures and parties. Potential fascism in the U.S. today cannot be ignored because of U.S. democratic history. The U.S. had fascism in its Jim Crow/Indian genocide reservation/concentration camp period, before Italy and Germany, despite its bourgeois democratic republican institutions. The U.S. has a history of fascism to which it can revert.<   Comment   The operative political concept - not theoretical postulate, in my personal understanding of political fascism is not violence, terror or in the case of Germany the military form of fascism versus illegal and extra legal terror, but the concept and reality of a "transition" or "accession to power" or "displacement of one form of rule by another form of rule" - various parliamentary forms of governance are displaced by open terrorist dictatorship as the "new" legality.   Rosa L. and Karl L. were murdered before the coming to power of German fascism. A reactionary bourgeois democracy kills one just as dead as fascism. Fascism comes to power as a party - political, ideological and organizational form, of attack against the masses who are either in a state of unrest, upheaval or impending upheaval or have momentarily shattered or overthrown existing forms of governance. Or as it is occurring in America, as a preemptive "strike" against various political currents.   Parliamentary organization and bourgeois democratic forms gives way to complex political currents involving the refusal of the masses to be ruled in the same manner and the inability of the existing organs of state of authority to rule in the same way. This "refusal to be ruled in the same way" is a subjective matter in as much as all politics is by definition subjective. Much more is involved than personal and mass inclination or the thing called "class" - depending on who one defines class.     The scattered resistance and fight against the state has at its sharpest edge the most poverty stricken sections of the population who have no social organizations that serve as buffers or mediators between it and the state. The wave of rebellions that swept the 1960 would tend to confirm this projection as well as Los Angels in the past decade and several smaller outbreaks of rebellion.   In the American Union the classic study of the world's first fascist movement is the overthrow of the legally sanctioned bourgeois democratic Reconstruction governments. The defeat of Reconstruction was not on the basis of rallying a mass consensus and UN-electing the Reconstruction leaders and governments, but rather on the basis of drowning the South in blood and executing leaders. The ideology was white chauvinism and "Saving the South" but this fascist movement was sanctioned and financed by Wall Street imperialism.   A political force, constructed and funded by finance capital which overthrow a legal bourgeois democratic government, by way of violence, terror, fraud and mass executions and then substitutes as a state form the open terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperial elements of finance capital is called fascist. Such a political state is generally called fascism.   A reactionary bourgeois democracy is not the fascist state form but a complex of violence and terror against the most poverty stricken sector of the working class and selective bribery of the more economically secure section of the workers stabilized by institutions that serves as the social - not military, prop of capital.   The degree of organization of the working class into trade unions, especially in the imperial centers, does not in itself serve as a fundamental block to the accession to power of fascism, but tends to facilitate the transition to power of the fascists. The large industrial unions in particular are more than less fascists labor fronts . . . in my opinion. Not simply because of their "thinking" but the material connection that is the basis of their existence as social props of the existing order. These union organizations, which are important to work in and amongst the members, are nevertheless organizations or buffer organizational forms between the workers and employers and through the employers the state proper.   The trade union question is complex and not reducible to the trade union bureaucracy or rather the various elected and appointed representatives in the union are not identical to the actual administrative apparatus that holds the union together as a distinct organization or a social prop of the existing social order. To varying degrees everyone within this realm is captive to the bureaucracy, whose singular goal is always to exist as a grouping of paid functionaries, more than less independent of the representative (electoral) form of governance.    Our bourgeoisie has studied the world working class movement better than us and understands the need to defeat the consolidation of a social movement of the class before it gets off the ground and begins its inevitable leap to political consciousness and class consciousness. That is why the most poverty stricken sector of the workers are jailed in mass. These poverty stricken workers are not concious but this spontaneous social movement or "real life plight" always demand that society at large adopts an attitude or "position" towards them. Their real life plight spontaneously runs them into the state authority.     There are no buffer organizational forms between this sector of workers and the state. This sector has no organizational connection between it and employers and/or the state, other than jail.   Dutt's classic study unravels the fascists movement in Europe doing another period of the hegemony and protection of the political and economic interest of finance capital seeking a solution (recovery of profitability, expansion and productive stability), through reestablishing the old closed colonial system or wars for colonial possessions. This set German fascism in opposition to various sectors of world financial imperialism, led by American imperial interest.    This period of history - post October 1917, was very different from the period of the fascists movement and its victory in the South during the 1890s. "Industrial capital" in the US had no spontaneous interest in a fascists solution to the South during and after the Reconstruction era and in my opinion would have been perfectly content to support the "40 acres and a mule" proposal along with a South of democratic small farmers . . . along with a mass of extremely cheap labor.   Fascism in the American Union did not conform to the late 1920s and 1930s description of "classical" European fascism. Fascism is imperialism turned inwards and this political formula played itself out in our history.   In the past a fascist form of government prevailed in the old South and in the North bourgeois democracy with terror and violence directed against the most poverty stricken sector of the workers in and around the industrial centers.   The current fascism ideological movement in the American Union is to defeat the working class movement before it gets off the ground and learn how to take a stand in favor of its independent economic interest. A brutal form of national chauvinism as the ideological cutting edge of the movement has emerged.   The problem is that the working class as a class cannot take a stand on behalf of itself except on the basis of its stratification. The organized sector of the working class of the trade union movement is driven by a somewhat different set of political and economic factors than say those workers earning less than $25,000 a year without any form of economic and political organization.   In the past the fascist movement had as its ideological basis and cutting edge, the isolation of the African American as "the outsider in our midst" or a very violent form of white chauvinism. Today it is simply not possible to isolate the African American and impose a dictatorship on a tiny section of the population. Sure, it is prudent to prepare for the counterrevolution to the best of our ability, but there are certain ideas amongst the peoples of America intolerant towards a military form of fascism and legally sanctioned extra legal organizations.   We prepare for a fascist offensive that cannot succeed and stabilize itself for any significant period because society is leaping to a new mode of production based on a new technological regime. This is a tad bit different from in the past when a fascist offensive could ultimately succeed and stabilize itself on the basis of completing the industrial phase of development.   Much has changed.   Waistline