Doug: >Why people embrace politicians and parties against their own material >self-interest is one of the great mysteries of politics. And there's no >doubt that lots of people embraced fascism who later suffered from it. Why >does anti-Semitism have the power it does, even in societies with few or no >Jews? Why do so many working class Americans hate welfare moms with what >looks like an irrational passion? It has more than a little to do with sex >and race. There's many a slip between the material/social world that >Marxists analyze and the world as people see and act on it. It is not a great mystery why people act against their own material self-interest. As Marx said, the ruling ideas of any society are the ideas of the ruling class. Under normal circumstances, they accept those ideas. They only reevaluate them in a time of deep crisis, such as during imperialist war or economic upheaval. With respect to the question of people "embracing" fascism, there's no mystery about that either. Fascism was an appeal to Germany's desperate middle-class. The message was simultaneously anti-big business and anti-trade union. The shopkeepers were angry at strikers who were inconveniencing them, was well as the big retail competitors who were throwing them into the working class. Hitler promised middle-class socialism, but built a regime with traditional big business agenda after taking power. Anti-semitism has power because the capitalist system churns up all sorts of racist and xenophobic ideas. Poland, for example, is an extremely anti-semitic society even though there were few Jews left after WWII. The explanation for this is not to be found in Lacan or Zizek. It is much simpler. It took longer for Poland to be drawn into the modern capitalist realm than just about any other European country. Throughout the 19th century, the Polish countryside exhibited many of the same sort of social and economic characteristics of 14th century Spain or France. Jews functioned as tax farmers, who would raise revenue from the Christian peasants and get a cut from the aristocratic absentee landlords who lived in Warsaw. The first modern pogroms were directed against the Jews, who symbolized semifeudal exploitation. My name Proyect means "tax farmer" in Yiddish, by the way. After Poland was forcibly integrated into the Eastern European buffer states in the Yalta treaty, the Stalinist government retained many of the backward attitudes of the pre-existing system. The explanation for this is simple. Stalinism attracted the same sort of careerists who joined the AFL-CIO after it had become institutionalized. While once a progressive force, by the 1950s it had begun to make all sorts of concessions to the ruling ideas of the period, which included racism. Stalinism made its own compromise with backwardness as well. As a rule of thumb, the more thorough-going a revolution, the more that backwardness and prejudice is uprooted radically. The Cuban revolution basically made race prejudice punishable by a stiff jail term. Castro drove this point home by making Afro-Cubans top leaders of the military and police. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
