Bohemian Tangents

The whole point of consumer culture is to incentivize people to buy things or frequent social media sites for the purpose of surrendering personal data. There is no sacred boundary separating consumption from addiction. The more consumption the better. This is the ultimate goal of profit-maximizing corporations. Consumerism has expanded in the social media era to making people into screen addicts whose web travels boost the profits of tech czars to stratospheric levels. Algorithms are designed to make you a screen addict, not a well educated citizen.

Pathological liar Trump was a godsend to social media, enticing friends and foes to stay online. Only upon the 1/6/21 Capitol insurrection did his falsehoods require punitive banishment. The larger truth governing social media is feeding the masses,  the various tribes with which people identify themselves. To feed people what they crave, to trigger them into tribal quarrels, is the pathway to Big Tech profit maximization. Zuckerberg met with with Trump. Nuff said. Trump was his premiere cash cow.

Amidst the current outrage at the billionaire Sackler family, owners of Purdue Pharma, who targeted Americans with OxyContin– reportedly a conspiracy to create unwitting opioid addicts who as victims of despicable marketing or fraud have killed themselves by the tens of thousands year after year. The cost of doing business for Big Pharma vultures is the “collateral damage” of O.D. deaths. As with many meds legal or illegal, the line between legitimate use and abuse is blurry. The Sacklers are rich criminals, but at the same time, the dangers of addiction to pain pills have been well known for decades. The opioid debacle is the fault of many people, not just the Sacklers. People’s love for pills anaesthetized them to their potential dangers. The desire for pain pills exceeds the desire to face their dangers. Otherwise, no opioid epidemic would emerge or last so many years.

Raw unadulterated capitalism is based on the primordial dialectic of supply and demand. People in pain want relief. The Sackler family understood Americans’ proclivities to pop pain pills to promote their profit margins. The Purdue shareholders made a killing by means of the indiscriminate use of OxyContin.

The morality infotainment narrative highlights the immorality of Purdue Pharma. The larger issue absent from mainstream media is the consumer-addiction ethos permeating current society. Addiction to junk food, buying clothes, new tech devices, or anything else is successful consumerism. Addictions boost profits.

The law of supply and demand necessitates both legal and illegal suppliers of mind altering substances. The culture of addiction is just a tiny step beyond ethical consumption. How do we protect people from pursuing happiness in pill-form? The only practical antidote to slow suicide by opioids is education and therapy. Legislation against Purdue Pharma is no match for the colossal craving of opioid bliss. The underlying premise of legal pill pushers is the helpless consumer who is unable to assess his or her own personal safety. The capitalist ethos of pleasing consumers for profit created our current culture of opioid addicts and screen addicts. Does the individual addicted to pain pills or his Iphone consider his or her participation in this scheme? Will lamenting the profiteers cure us or will assuming responsibility as a consumer save us? Who has our best interests at heart?

Though Biden won and the insurrection on the Capitol did not succeed in giving the dimwitted despot a second term, we are not suddenly cured of the pandemic of stupidity and chaos.  Covid19 is not the only contagion afflicting us. Crazed cultists living in alternate realities remain active on the social media. Dare I say, America remains mired in darkness, with glimmers of hope, but millions of minds are still poisoned by prejudice, xenophobia, bigotry, trickle-down rhetoric, conspiratorial obsessions with George Soros and Bill Gates, and paranoia about the perils of “socialism”. The Dark Age  afflicting us the past 4 years is not over. Ludicrous rightwing propaganda remains on the dark web and conventional social media, despite Trump being banned.

Idiocracy is the title of a comedy movie directed by Mike Judge, a satire about a future with staggeringly stupid people, seemingly plausible if the IQ-shrinking effects of social media clickbaiting continue on their current downward trajectory. Not all Americans are getting stupider. Rather, just enough to render our political system impotent. A democracy is based on the presumption of a well-informed citizenry voting for qualified candidates and the best one winning. When the news media fail in their sacred mission to inform, and a new system emerges whereby people become trapped in partisan mixtures of facts and fictions, then it’s possible for a con artist to become president.

A misinformed narcissistic clown, Donald Trump, was able to exploit the chaotic media ecosystem and many people became disenchanted with “politics as usual” and voted for him.  With the help of voter suppression laws in key swing states producing an electoral college victory, the seemingly impossible transpired November 8, 2016.  Trump won the presidential election, despite losing the popular vote by 2.9 million to Hillary Clinton. 4 years and two months later, an even more improbable event occurred, the invasion of the Capital by deluded Trump cultists. Aside from formulaic politically partisan explanations, how do we understand this new era in which a pathological liar was allowed to amass 88 million twitter followers and given free rein to lie constantly numerous years? In his 4 years as president, Trump made 30,573 false or misleading claims. He told almost 4,000 lies in October 2020 alone as he ramped up his pre-election rhetoric and attacks on Joe Biden. He set a one-day record for lies on Nov. 2, the day before the 2020 election, when he told 504 falsehoods.  Twitter gave the pathological liar a public platform up to January 8, 2021. They suspended his account 2 days after the assault on the Capitol. The obvious question is why did this take so long? What are Twitter’s priorities? Providing factual information as a public service or inciting a maximum number of clicks, followers, and shares?

How did we descend into this Dark Age in which Trump could get elected? It’s not as if all Americans became idiots overnight. My theory is our system of neoliberalism, governance by transnational corporations to the detriment of non-wealthy citizens, has led to discontentment explained in varying ways based on partisan orientation. Conservative news media are filled with narratives crafted by rich white people whereby rich and middle-class whites blame poor whites, minorities, and immigrants for leaching off of “big government”.  These narratives are useful to divert attention away from the decades of American jobs being offshored to Asia and Latin America, the middle class being decimated, wages stagnated, not keeping pace with inflation. Conservative media derive much power from radio pundits with tens of millions of listeners. It’s not just Fox News which has dominated cable TV ratings the past 20 years.

We witness after Trump’s term in office the Idiocracy’s persistence as Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was given committee assignments before having these rescinded. She repeatedly indicated support for executing prominent Democratic politicians in 2018 and 2019 before being elected to Congress.  She has promoted racism, anti-Semitism and insane false conspiracy theories such as QAnon.

The MAGA constituency did not sprout overnight, but grew apace under the influence of Trump’s white nationalism, wherein Mexican rapists and people from “shithole” countries were to blame. The demolition of the middle class and bulldozering of the poor was accomplished by predator capitalist profiteers and their puppets in government. Trump is the perfect dufus in charge to distract from this transnational corporate larceny of the government. Look at those people of color entering our previously lilly white nation. America’s descent into austerity is their fault. This is MAGA thinking.

Those who react against progress, against full voting rights for minorities, against corporations’ using Super Pacs to buy candidates, against people of color being shot by white cops, against listening to medical experts on Covid, seem to persist in their dark power. Remember the 2011 Occupy Movement? People who wanted to help lift people out of the oppression by the wealthy were lampooned on Fox News so that the oppression could continue. The forces of greed, prejudice, bigotry, misogyny persist. It is time to ponder what progress means and why America allowed itself to regress. Consider how “progressive” is a pejorative term. This suggests those using it prefer regression.

SOURCES

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/01/24/trumps-false-or-misleading-claims-total-30573-over-four-years/

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-lies-washington-post-number-november-2020_n_5ff44826c5b61817a5398564

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Analytica

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2021/02/04/fairness-doctrine-wont-solve-our-problems-it-can-foster-needed-debate/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/01/05/trump-lost-he-won-millions-new-voters-where-did-they-come/?arc404=true

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/04/963785609/house-to-vote-on-stripping-rep-marjorie-taylor-greene-from-2-key-committees

https://www.cfr.org/blog/2020-election-numbers

https://www.thedailybeast.com/these-lifelong-democrats-voted-for-trump-and-arent-sorry

https://www.cleveland.com/politics/2016/11/donald_trump_flipped_rust_belt.html

https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article2185644.html

https://www.history.com/news/george-bush-willie-horton-racist-ad

https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/17/us/oj-simpson-car-chase-anniversary-trnd

Socialism can be defined as the social or community-based control over the means of production for public benefit rather than private profit.  Various types of socialism emerged in the wake of the French Revolution, including revolutionary, reformist, and anarchist. Socialists conflicted over the role of state. Marx and Engels defined the state as the organized power of one class (the bourgeoisie) for oppressing another (the proletariat). By contrast, socialists and communists before Marx believed the state was the supreme moral agent of the society as a whole. The rule of law, and with it, the expansion of the state, was the best hope of the people against rule by the predatory interests of tyrants.

Liberal idealism is the doctrine regarding the state as the expression of the general will contrary to the Marxist concept of the state as the executive arm of the ruling class. Liberal idealism naturally contradicted every other important Marxist principle. It denied that class struggle and violent revolution were necessary or desirable, that the proletariat occupied a privileged place in history, and that any class commanded higher loyalty than the general will of the nation. The German socialist, Ferdinand Lassalle, as spokesman for German labor in the 1860’s, hailed the democratic state as the unity of the nation and the proletariat. In Britain Fabian Socialism was founded in 1884, vowing kinship with liberalism and belief in slow change, i.e., reform. France’s Alexandre Millerand led a reform socialist movement very similar to Fabianism. Eduard Bernstein was a founder of evolutionary socialism, saw flaws in Marxist thinking, rejected the materialist theory of history, and the Hegelian dialectical perspective (the basis of Marxist historical theory).

In the two decades before World War I European socialism, though apparently immersed in Marxist ideology, was working its way toward an accommodation with liberalism, whether it cared to admit it or not. Russia’s founder of Marxism was Georgi Plekhanov who said Russia would have to go through a long capitalist incubation before socialism was possible. Socialists therefore would have to wait patiently before constructing a democratic party. His disciple, Vladimir Lenin, grew to oppose this and proceeded to build his own elite organization of dedicated and disciplined revolutionaries. Orthodox Marxist Karl Kautsky explained the the absurdity of the Bolshevik claim that the bourgeois stage of history had been accomplished between February and October 1917 as Russia remained industrially backward. The false claim bolstered Lenin’s dictatorial rule as expressing the public will. Lenin and his Bolshevik cohorts believed they had mastered history and could be saved from the fate to which all previous dictatorships had succumbed. Thus assured, they rendered the party omnipotent over all of society. Whoever controlled the party inherited greater power than any Czar had ever possessed. By 1924 the Bolshevik Leviathan came under Joseph Stalin’s domination, the Communist Party secretary, who became one of history’s worst tyrants.

In the decades following Marx’s death in 1883 industrialism relentlessly moved across Europe, polarizing society into bourgeois and proletariat classes. Marxist parties sprang up in every country, including those where anarchism was strong. The German Social Democratic Party emerged as the colossus of European reformist (parliamentary) socialism, and its growth kept pace with the phenomenal industrial growth of the country after German unification in 1871. As the dominant party in the Second International, created in 1889, it was the premier socialist organization of the world. Yet, socialism was not making headway in the U.S. or Britain in the form of organized parties. Britain’s socialist Fabian Society began to grow within the middle class, akin to radical liberalism and firmly anti-revolutionary. French Socialism also fell to a moderate reformist position. It became apparent that wherever political democracy showed strength it tended either to neutralize the appeal of a revolution via liberal democracy or thwart its development altogether. Conflict emerged in Germany between orthodox Karl Kautsky and revisionist (reformist) Eduard Bernstein who maintained that class conflict was diminishing, that capitalism was proving supple and strong and that socialism should be approached by piecemeal and parliamentary means.

Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863 which eventually evolved into the Social Democratic Party. His version of socialism, later termed “revisionism”, borrowed from German idealist philosophers Kant and Hegel and French socialists Blanc and Proudhon. Lassalle advocated universal suffrage (voting rights) as the means by which the workers would force the state to grant to them the whole fruits of their production. The working class, he believed, embodied the spirit of the people whose higher will was manifest in the state. Until it captured the state, the working class could expect little from independent trade union activity. It was on this point that Lassalle, or rather the Lassalleans, and Marx vehemently disagreed (Marx outlived Lasssalle by 19 years). Lassalle, like Marx, assumed the existence of an Iron Law of Wages, whereby labor was inevitably driven down to the lowest level necessary to maintain life. Lassalle found that labor could free itself only though the invincible power of the state. Marx believed the Iron Law could only be broken by the power of labor itself. He had little faith in the power of the state unless it directly responded to the interests of the working class, and had no faith whatsoever in the German state.

Lassalle settled in Berlin in 1859 and soon believed that the revolutionary phase had come to an end and that only a legal and evolutionary approach could hold hopes of success. With this goal in mind he held discussions with the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck in 1863–64. Stuck in a difficult political situation, Bismarck was seeking allies in his struggle against the majority liberal opposition, while Lassalle was pondering a  monarchical welfare state.  This was to be based on extending voting rights to all classes, not just the aristocracy (upper social echelons). He thus hoped to integrate the working class into politics and move from a bourgeois state based on private property to a democratic constitutional state. Eventually Bismarck created the first modern welfare state by incorporating these ideas into social programs which provided to German citizens all the following:  health insurance, accident insurance (workman’s compensation), disability insurance and an old-age retirement pension.

In Britain Fabian Socialism determined that laissez faire capitalism was destroying the social and cultural life. Like Marx, the Fabians assumed the logic of capitalism necessarily led to socialism. They lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917. Fabian socialists were in favor of reforming Britain’s imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform, and were in favor of a welfare state modelled on the Bismarckian German model.

Orthodox Marxist, Karl Kautsky, advocated the democratic method as essential for socialism, democracy with parliamentarism, poltical and social liberties, and the socialization of the means of production. By contrast, the Bolsheviks were a despotically organized minority that annulled the meaning socialism acquired in combination with democracy. To maintain that non-democratic methods adopted in the name of socialism was to introduce uncontrolled abuses of power. Kautsky felt that modern socialism required the democratic organization of society. His socialism was indissolubly linked to democracy. He asserted that the Bolsheviks concept of dictatorship was actually contrary to Marxist theory, which posed a historically necessary link between proletarian development and socialism. Bolshevism did not provide for a healthy gestation of the proletariat’s maturation via capitalist development and the experience of struggle seasoned by the exercise of political and civil liberties. Without this development there is no proletariat strong enough and intelligent enough to build a socialist state.

Lenin divided the social democratic movement from 1903 onward, using all the instruments of czarist repression to set up an authoritarian capitalist state. The term “communism” served to merely separate his Bolsheviks from social democrats. Lenin was in Switzerland during the March 1917 Revolution. Much to his chagrin there was an all-Russian conference of Soviets with much agreement between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. A joint meeting of these two factions began discussing of uniting. Lenin stopped these negotiations. His aim in the Russian Revolution was to destroy not only all organs of self-administration, but also all other parties and organizations except his own (the Bolsheviks). To this end, he employed falsehood, slander, and brutal force against all opponents, among whom he counted all Socialists except those subservient to him. He finally succeeded in smashing all his opponents through his coup d’etat of November 7, 1917. At this time, Zinoviev, Rykov, Rjazanov, Lozowski, and other prominent Bolsheviks demanded the formation of a Socialist government composed of all Soviet parties. They declared that the formation of a purely Bolshevist government would lead to a regime of terror and to the destruction of the revolution and the country. Lenin hoped that the elections to the All Russian Constituent Assembly would bring the Bolsheviks a majority. These elections proved contrary to his wishes, as the Bolsheviks were far from a majority with only 9 million votes. The Mensheviks and Social Revolutionists had the overwhelming majority with 23 million votes. Bourgeois parties had 4 million votes.  The Bolsheviks had the opportunity to form a United Socialist Front or coalition to form a government supported by the overwhelming majority of the people, but they formed instead a dictatorial regime, rule by a minority party over a disorganized majority that Kautsky called “Bonapartism”, which was based on the Bolsheviks’ superior armed forces.

World War I was the historical impetus big enough to sharpen the divide between the reformist and revolutionary wings. Within hours of declaration of war, nearly all socialist nations announced their support for the war

SOURCES

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ferdinand-Lassalle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_German_Workers%27_Association

Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938

LENIN’S EXILE YEARS

In the summer of 1914, the socialist movement suffered the worst defeat in its history when it became clear that the international solidarity of the proletariat, its ideological foundation, was an empty phase and could not stand the test of events. The Socialist International collapsed in the face of World War I, much to the despair of the socialists believing in the strength of their movement. Vladimir Lenin at first refused to believe that the German social democrats had obeyed the fatherland’s call to arms. In every European country the great majority had instinctively adopted the patriotic attitude. Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism, felt Russia must be defended against invasion and all the Mensheviks thought likewise. The workers’ movement organized into parties adhering more or less strictly to Marxist ideology, had obtained real successes in the fight for labor legislation and civil rights; this seemed to show that existing society was reformable, whatever the doctrine might say and thus to knock the bottom out of revolutionary programs.

At the outbreak of World War I, Lenin was in Poronino, near Krakow in what was then Austrian Galicia, close to the Russian border, agitating among local Ukrainians. The Krakow police arrested him as an enemy alien, until an Austrian socialist leader vouched that Lenin was not a tsarist spy but a “bitter enemy of Russia”. Investigations by Austrian officials determined Lenin was a revolutionary fanatic who had publicly endorsed Ukrainian separatism–a central aim of the Central Powers, Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire. Lenin was released in early September and sent with his wife on a military mail train to Switzerland, where he would spend his time conspiring against the Tsar.

Already on the Austrian radar, Lenin came to the attention of the German foreign office in 1915, and this included Alexander Israel “Parvus” Helphand, previously chairman of the Petersburg Soviet upon the 1905 arrest of Trotsky. After a Siberian exile, Parvus lived a rich and interesting life abroad in Germany and then Turkey. On Jan. 1915, he met with the German ambassador to the Ottoman Empire and told him, “The interests of the German imperial government are identical to those of the Russian revolutionaries”. Lenin and other Bolsheviks received funding from Estonian nationalist and Bolshevik, Alexander Kesküla.

Lenin held the minority doctrine of “revolutionary defeatism” that he outlined at socialist exile congresses at Zimmerwald and Kienthal, Switzerland in 1915-16. He argued that socialists should work to bring about the defeat of their own country and thereby “turn the imperialist war into civil war”. Rather than counsel draft resistance, socialists should encourage workers to join the military and turn the army “red” by promoting mutinies.

BOLSHEVIK CATALYST OF CHAOS

In the months before the February 1917 Revolution, Lenin had fallen off the German radar somewhat, but eventually learned of the Revolution in March 1917 from an Austrian comrade and wanted to return to Petrograd at once. A Swiss socialist, Fritz Platten, arranged the train trip though Germany to Russia. Lenin, 19 Bolshevik associates, Menshevik Julius Martov, and six non-Bolshevik members of the Jewish Bund rode together on the train. Germany appropriated 5 million gold marks for revolutionizing Russia, in March and April 1917. Lenin’s train was not sealed, contrary to urban legend, because the Russians had to switch trains after crossing the border into Germany. Two German army officers joined Lenin on the German train along with trade union official Wilhelm Jansson, who took orders from Parvus. Both Lenin’s acceptance of aid from the Germans as well as his support for Ukrainian separatism were openly discussed in a prisoner of war camp. Germany did in fact dispatch socialist exiles of all stripes into Russia to exacerbate between the Soviet and the Provisional Government in the new post-Tsarist era. Lenin was but one revolutionary, but his extreme views on the War and support of Ukrainian separatism made him a potent catalyst of chaos, a one-man demolition crew sent to wreck Russia’s war effort. As Parvus himself explained to the German minister in Copenhagen in late March, to prevent a revival of Russian fighting morale under the new Provisional Government, the “extreme revolutionary movement will have to be supported, in order to intensify anarchy”. Parvus remarked, Lenin was “much more raving mad” than the rest of Russia’s socialists.

Lenin’s train arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station, April 3, 1917. At the Bolshevik Party headquarters Lenin launched into a fiery two-hour speech denouncing the “piratical imperialist war” along with party back-sliders who had offered support to the Provisional Government still fighting it. Lenin’s program was so extreme, that the Party organ, Pravda, refused to print it. April Theses was Lenin’s radical pacifist program which was aligned with Germany’s wartime goals. Germany army intelligence in Stockholm reported the following day to the German high command: “Lenin’s entry into Russia is successful. He is working exactly as we wish”. The German government spent 2 million marks to support revolutionary propaganda in Russia.

THE BOLSHEVIK COUP D’ETAT

The Provisional Government was finally put out of its misery by the Bolshevik coup on October 27, sometimes called the October Revolution. This post-Tsarist government was the Soviet of People’s Commissars, or Sovnarkom. At this time Zinoviev, Rykov, Rjazanov, Lozowski, and other prominent Bolsheviks demanded the formation of a Socialist government composed of all Soviet parties. They declared that the formation of a purely Bolshevist government would lead to a regime of terror and to the destruction of the revolution and the country. Lenin hoped that the elections to the All Russian Constituent Assembly would bring the Bolshevists a majority, but the elections proved otherwise. The Bolsheviks got a mere 9,000,000 votes compared to the 23,000,000 for the other socialist parties, and 4 million for bourgeois parties. The Sovnarkom indefinitely postponed the opening of the Assembly, due on November 28, and demanded an investigation into electoral abuse. The opposing parties wanted the Assembly and staged a large demonstration the same day. The leading right-wing party, the Kadets, was banned, its leaders arrested, and its printing presses smashed. On December 7, the Cheka, Soviet secret police force, analogous to the Nazi’s Gestapo, was established. Support for the Assembly was called “counter-revolutionary”. The first session began January 5 and ended at 4 a.m. January 6. The Palace was closed and surrounded by troops. The one and only fully democratic body in all of Russia’s history lasted less than 13 hours. This marked the real turning point where all pretense of socialism was smashed on the path to totalitarianism.

As the new Tsar for the Bolshevik dictatorship, Lenin called the masses “children who needed to be protected from their own misguided inclinations”. Under Lenin’s dictatorship, the Cheka took the initiative in shooting opponents and spreading terror throughout the nation to consolidate centralized dictatorial power. Lenin said violence was necessary for revolution. “The proletarian revolution is impossible without the forcible destruction of the bourgeois state machine and the substitute for it of a new one which is no longer a state in the proper sense of the word”. Violence was deemed integral to the proletarian dictatorship and revolution. The Bolsheviks were akin to Fascists, using palingenetic fervor, ushering in a new era or new humanity. Heretics and unrepentent members of the bourgeoisie were murdered. The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission, known as the Cheka, was empowered on February 22, 1918 to arrest and shoot immediately all members of counter-revolutionary organizations.

The military backbone of the dictatorship was the Red Army, formally established by the Sovnarkom in January 1918. War Commissar, Trotsky, conscripted thousands of ex-officers and non-commissioned officers from the now defunct Tsarist Imperial Army. To ensure loyalty to the Communist Party, commissars were attached to every military unit. Obedience was guaranteed by the Cheka. By 1920 there were 3 million troops in the Red Army. In lieu of an actual proletariat, this mass of soldier employees formed the foundation for the new totalitarian state falsely termed “communist”.

SOURCES:

Historically Inevitable: Turning Points of the Russian Revolution, Ed. Tony Brenton

Social Democracy vs. Communism by Karl Kautsky

https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-got-the-russian-revolution-off-the-ground/a-41195312

The Russian Revolution – Sean McMeekin

The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed To End by Robert Gerwarth

Main Currents of Marxism, Vol. 2 by Leszek Kolakowski

Social democracy came about as a  synthesis of socialism and parliamentary democracy beginning in the pre-Marxist era of co-operatives and trade unions of the 1830’s-40’s. The objective of egalitarian democracy when confronted by the historical forces of nationalism and wars engendered a spirit producing democratic and authoritarian streams. Socialism split into revolutionary and reformist branches. Marx was revolutionary whereas the reformers, Ferdinand Lassalle and Eduard Bernstein, both supported implementing socialism in the form of social democracy within the government. Marx claimed the state was the organ of exploitation by the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, which enslaves the majority of humans for the realization of its aims.

Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-1864) was the prototype of the state-socialist – one whose goal is to incorporate socialism within the existing state. He told the workers that the state is something “that will achieve for each one of us what none of us could achieve for himself.” Marx taught the exact opposite, that the working class had to emancipate itself and abolish the existing state in the process. Lassalle declared: “The immemorial vestal fire of all civilization, the State, I defend with you against those modern barbarians (the liberal bourgeoisie)”

Lassalle founded the General German Workers’ Association in 1863 which eventually evolved into the Social Democratic Party. His version of socialism, later termed “revisionism”, borrowed from German idealist philosophers Kant and Hegel and French socialists Blanc and Proudhon. Lassalle advocated universal suffrage (voting rights) as the means by which the workers would force the state to grant to them the whole fruits of their production. The working class, he believed, embodied the spirit of the people whose higher will was manifest in the state. Until it captured the state, the working class could expect little from independent trade union activity. It was on this point that Lassalle, or rather the Lassalleans, and Marx vehemently disagreed (Marx outlived Lasssalle by 19 years). Lassalle, like Marx, assumed the existence of an Iron Law of Wages, whereby labor was inevitably driven down to the lowest level necessary to maintain life. Lassalle found that labor could free itself only though the invincible power of the state. Marx believed the Iron Law could only be broken by the power of labor itself. He had little faith in the power of the state unless it directly responded to the interests of the working class, and had no faith whatsoever in the German state.

Lassalle settled in Berlin in 1859 and soon believed that the revolutionary phase had come to an end and that only a legal and evolutionary approach could hold hopes of success. With this goal in mind he held discussions with the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck in 1863–64. Stuck in a difficult political situation, Bismarck was seeking allies in his struggle against the majority liberal opposition, while Lassalle was pondering a  monarchical welfare state.  This was to be based on extending voting rights to all classes, not just the aristocracy (upper social echelons). He thus hoped to integrate the working class into politics and move from a bourgeois state based on private property to a democratic constitutional state. Eventually Bismarck created the first modern welfare state by incorporating these ideas into social programs which provided to German citizens all the following:  health insurance, accident insurance (workman’s compensation), disability insurance and an old-age retirement pension.

Although Lassalle was not a Marxist, he was influenced by the theories of Marx and Friedrich Engels and he accepted the existence and importance of class struggle. However, unlike Marx’s and Engels’s  The Communist Manifesto,  Lassalle promoted class struggle in a more moderate form. Marx viewed the state negatively as an instrument of class rule that should only exist temporarily upon the rise to power of the proletariat and then dismantled, whereas Lassalle viewed the state as a means through which workers could enhance their interests and even transform the society to create an economy based on worker-run cooperatives. Lassalle’s strategy was primarily electoral and reformist, with Lassalleans contending that the working class needed a political party that fought above all for universal adult male suffrage.

The German Social Democratic Party emerged as the colossus of European reformist (parliamentary) socialism, and its growth kept pace with the phenomenal industrial growth of the country after German unification in 1871. As the dominant party in the Second International, created in 1889, it was the premier socialist organization of the world. Yet, socialism was not making headway in the U.S. or Britain in the form of organized parties. Britain’s socialist Fabian Society began to grow within the middle class, akin to radical liberalism and firmly anti-revolutionary. French Socialism also fell to a moderate reformist position. It became apparent that wherever political democracy showed strength it tended either to neutralize the appeal of a revolution via liberal democracy or thwart its development altogether. Conflict emerged in Germany between orthodox Karl Kautsky and revisionist (reformist) Eduard Bernstein who maintained that class conflict was diminishing, that capitalism was proving supple and strong and that socialism should be approached by piecemeal and parliamentary means.

Lassalle was for many decades considered a reformist heretic by the worker’s movement, which then adhered to the deterministic notions of popular Marxism according to which the dictatorship of the proletariat was foreordained by history. By others Lassalle continued to be romantically glorified as a pioneer of socialism. The modern significance of Lassalle was realized belatedly, only since the time of Eduard Bernstein and the era of revisionism, when the German Social Democratic Party took the form of parliamentary democracy. He is less remembered as the theorist and the organizer of a workers’ party.

In Britain Fabian Socialism determined that laissez faire capitalism was destroying the social and cultural life. Like Marx, the Fabians assumed the logic of capitalism necessarily led to socialism. They lobbied for the introduction of a minimum wage in 1906, for the creation of a universal health care system in 1911 and for the abolition of hereditary peerages in 1917. Fabian socialists were in favor of reforming Britain’s imperialist foreign policy as a conduit for internationalist reform, and were in favor of a welfare state modeled on the Bismarckian German model.

Orthodox Marxist, Karl Kautsky, advocated the democratic method as essential for socialism, democracy with parliamentarism, poltical and social liberties, and the socialization of the means of production. By contrast, the Bolsheviks were a despotically organized minority that annulled the meaning socialism acquired in combination with democracy. To maintain that non-democratic methods adopted in the name of socialism was to introduce uncontrolled abuses of power. Kautsky felt that modern socialism required the democratic organization of society. His socialism was indissolubly linked to democracy. He asserted that the Bolsheviks concept of dictatorship was actually contrary to Marxist theory, which posed a historically necessary link between proletarian development and socialism. Bolshevism did not provide for a healthy gestation of the proletariat’s maturation via capitalist development and the experience of struggle seasoned by the exercise of political and civil liberties. Without this development there is no proletariat strong enough and intelligent enough to build a socialist state.

Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was a major socialist thinker and, in many socialist circles, as the founders’ successor. In the years following Engels’ death, Bernstein took an increasingly critical view of Marx, beginning with his recognition that Marx’s prediction of capitalism’s imminent demise in Das Kapital sharply conflicted with the emerging realities of industrialized European states where market forces gained strength and where the living conditions of workers were gradually improving. Bernstein rejected key ideological tenets of Marx, including Marx’s economic theories and dialectical materialism. Bernstein concluded that Marx’s worldview was unfounded; however, he respected and urged fellow socialists to uphold Marx’s intent to improve the living conditions of the laborer. He maintained, however, that violent revolution was unnecessary and that social reform could be effected through the ballot box. He favored advancing the rights of workers and increased state intervention in the economy but in the context of a democratic society based on rule of law.

In the course of World War I and the years that followed soon thereafter a final break took place between the the democratic-revisionist majority and radical revolutionary minority. This decisive turn was triggered by the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, October 1917, and by reaction to the victory of the revolutionary over the reformist line. Before the Bolshevik hegemony. Russia had a powerful social democratic party, The Social Democratic Workers’ Party (SDRPR), founded in 1898. Lenin, however, as early as 1903, had broken away from it in a militant revolutionary fighting party, founding the Bolsheviks in Prague in 1912. The 1917 Russian Revolution included the cessation of the Romanov dynasty, establishment of a Provisional Government, and its violent overthrow in October by Lenin’s Bolsheviks.

If Bernstein’s democratic views had prevailed over the partisans of violent revolution such as Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924) and Leon Trotsky (1879-1940), the repression and genocide that characterized totalitarian states such as Leninist-Stalinist Soviet Union, Mao Tse-tung/Maoist China, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and totalitarian North Korea might have been avoided. Bernstein’s thought did shape the views of today’s pro-democratic social democratic party of Germany, the Socialist Party of France and the Labor Party of the United Kingdom as well as numerous other socialist political parties. In post-communist societies, communists have tended to revert over the past two decades and embrace pro-democratic political positions that parallel Bernstein’s.

SOURCES

The Age of Ideologies: The History of Political Thought in the 20th Century by Karl Dietrich Bracher

History of Socialist Thought: From the Precursors to the Present by Subrata Mukherjee and Sushila Ramaswamy

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/chartism-feargus-oconnor-democracy-suffrage-thomas-paine/

Socialist Thought: A Documentary, Eds A. Fried, R. Sanders

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Ferdinand-Lassalle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabian_Society

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_German_Workers%27_Association

Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, 1880-1938

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_democracy

http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Eduard_Bernstein

https://libcom.org/library/dictatorship-proletariat-joseph-weydemeyer

http://www.politicalsciencenotes.com/theories-of-state/marxist-theory-of-state-definition-origin-and-2-models/769

Definitions of Fascism

Fascism is a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition. Author of Fascists, Michael Mann says fascists embrace the nation-state. Racial homogeneity is the basis of the nation where the people rule and such rule may entail the violent exclusion of minority ethnic groups up to ethnic cleansing or genocide. More powerful modern states accompany fascism as they become governed by authoritarian regimes then cleanse minorities and opponents from the nation. The violent purification of the the fascist state comes from above and below. Radical paramilitary movements or citizen armies serve their fascist nations. Sources of power making fascism possible are ideological, economic, military, and political. Fascism, says Mann, is the pursuit of a transcendent and cleansing nation-statism through paramilitarism.

Author George L. Mosse found fascism in the specious ideal of popular sovereignty as expressed by the Enlightenment philosopher Rousseau whereby the leader expressed the “general will” of the people and manifested a new secular religion, that is, social control over the masses through official ceremonies. festivals, and imagery. Totalitarianism began in the modern era with the French Revolution. Rousseau’s “general will” was an exaltation of the people bent by the Jacobins into a dictatorship in which the people worshiped themselves through public festivals and symbols, “the goddess of reason”.

The Development of Fascist Ideology

After 1900 revolutionary syndicalists began deviating from more orthodox Marxists. Georges Sorel, Mussolini’s mentor, wrote Reflexions sur la violence, 1904-10, which provides an alternate view of morality and history. Morality does not automatically ensue from the unfolding of history, rather it is won in conflict through individual and collective effort. Virtue results from mortal challenge, won by groups in fatal contention. Collective virtue is the consequence of the spontaneous acceptance of a set of principles by the members of a community, living in peril, led by heroes in epic battle against decadence and moral cowardice. Sorel inhabits a Manichaean world in which the the forces of light find themselves forever in mortal combat with those of darkness.

Fascism made common cause with the most radical youth movement of the period: F. T. Marinetti’s Futurism, which provided a special political style, which could be employed only by a political elite knowledgable about the non-rationality of mass man. A self-selected cadre of professional revolutionaries had the historic responsibility for a hierarchically organized mass movement. Classical Marxism seemed unable to provide a competent explanation for the failure of the proletariat to discharge its revolutionary obligation. Both Georges Sorel and Roberto Michels, were termed “revolutionary Marxists” and insisted Marxism needed supplementation with more adequate assessments of human motivation and organization if the problems of the nonrevolutionary proletariat and, ultimately the influence of nationalism on the political mobilization of men were to be satisfactorily managed. “Italian radicalism”, according to A. J. Gregor, was the new revision or modification of the Marxist movement in Italy. The new idea was the influence of nonrational stimuli to render the proletariat nonrevolutionary.

Gregor maintains that the substance of Fascist thought derives from relatively specific sociological and philosophical traditions largely in response to Marx and Engels during the last quarter of the 19th century and first decade of the 20th, described as “the anti-individualist sociological tradition” popular in antebellum Italy. Mussolini insisted, along with Wilfredo Pareto, Michels, and Sorel, that revolution involved both the calculation of the material interests of men, classes, and the invocation of sentiment as well. Mussolini read Le Bon’s Psychology of Crowds and was enormously impressed. Le Bon and Pareto sought to explain mass behavior with mass mobilization as a central concern.

By 1904 Mussolini was addressing himself to a proletariat elite, a conscious and aggressive minority that was to serve as a vanguard of the revolution. Mussolini, Pareto, and Michels were convinced that revolutions are initiated by vanguard elites, elites that serve to mobilize the sentiments of masses in the service of the revolution. Mussolini insisted, by exploiting the sentiments of solidarity, marshalled individuals into “communities of consangunity, territory, economic interest, and intellectual affinity” to become the motive force of change. Thus, individual men be mobilized to bring about revolution. Pareto’s Socialist Systems, including his ‘theory of elites’  seems to have been a core source. Mussolini came to believe men were animated by a moral articulated by directive elites and accepted by passive majorities. The elite minority of men were gifted with the capacity to mobilize the ‘torpid consciousness’ of the majority to respond to their true interests. Socialists were enjoined to constitute themselves a vigilant and combative vanguard, in order to compel the masses never to lose sight of their true goals.

Roberto Michels wrote in Cooperation “modern economic man exists only insofar as he is a member of an aggregate”, a conviction which Mussolini insisted “demolished that individualism which has been now reduced to a theory entertained only by literateurs on holiday”. A sustained recognition is necessary so that one moral order must intransigently oppose another. Sorel emphasized animating myths to motivate the masses. Historic myths are those symbolic and linguistic artifacts that elites use to lead responsive masses by reshaping poltical and social commitments. Myths serve to define the moral universe in which men, individually and collectively must operate. Men function as moral agents, members of an association with solidarity, an in-group, opposed to an out-group. The ultimate test and measure of group cohesion is the readiness to suffer and employ violence.

In November 1912 the Marxist unity of the world’s workers was affirmed at the Congress of 2nd International in Basel, Switzerland. The Congress solemnly declared: “workers consider a crime to shoot each other for the increase of profits of capitalists, dynasties’ ambitions or for the glory of secret diplomacy agreements.” This unanimously adopted manifesto called the proletariat to gather all efforts to avert a bloody war, but it failed.

World War I

The actual manifestation of fascism as a political movement and/or party resulted from its surpassing parliamentary democracy in mobilizing the masses in the crises during and after World War I. World War I debunked idealizations about an international brotherhood of workingmen united against the depredations of an international capitalist cabal. The two most urgent problems Marx and Engels left to their heirs were: (1) the matter of the nonrevolutionary proletariat; (2) the entire issue of nationalism and its role in the revolutionary mobilization of men. Both problems were unanticipated or unresolved in the well-standardized theoretical system developed by Marx. The men who were to become Fascist ideologues, Mussolini and others, responded specifically to these problems. Influenced by syndicalists, Mussolini interpreted mass mobilization and organization as extending beyond rational economic concerns.

As World War I began, they defended the imperialist  policies of their own bourgeois governments. In the early days of WWI, August 1914,  Mussolini claimed the Second International of socialists had failed in the face of the crisis. European Marxists had opted to defend their respective bourgeois nations against the bourgeois of other nations. The socialists of the International were bereft of a uniform and specifically doctrinal response. By and large, each nation’s socialist political organization tended to support its respective government. None of the major socialist organizations chose to martyr their own country on the altar of Marxist principle. 

The orthodox Marxist position was for the international proletariat to unite against the bourgeois nations wanting to use laborers as cannon fodder in their imperialist wars. Instead, masses of men caught war fervor. The parliamentary contingent of Germany’s Social Democratic Party voted, almost to the man, for the Kaiser’s war credits. The German proletariat volunteered for war service. The Socialist Party of Italy took an official stand of absolute neutrality. The war was a brigand’s war, one between capitalists, therefore the proletariat would not shed Italian blood for the capitalist class. Nevertheless, the impact of national loyalties caused European socialism to disintegrate. Socialists from France, Germany, and Russia volunteered for military service. Radical syndicalists in Italy decided to serve their nation in war. On Oct. 5, 1914, they issued the Manifesto del Fascio Rivoluzionario d’Azione internazionale to demand their nation’s entry into the War.

Initially an orthodox internationalist, Mussolini gradually changed his mind, concluding that the socialists who refused to recognize the reality of the problem of national sentiment were “blind and dogmatic”. His call for reassessment of the party’s position on the war led to his expulsion from the party. By November 1914 Mussolini addressed the Socialist Party, noting their failure to examine national problems. The Socialist International never effectively occupied itself with such issues and consequently died. The nation, Mussolini realized, represents a stage of human development yet to be transcended. The most resolute and active men were animated by national rather than class sentiments. War taught revolutionaries that an international class could hardly serve as the primary object of loyalty for men. The “international working class” was simply too large, shapeless, and meaningless a community with which men could identify. The power of the new ideology, Fascism, was intimately connected to the comparable lack of power of revolutionary socialism, i.e., Marxism.

Interventionalism, the participation in World War I in deference to one’s nationality,  provided the watershed for all the currents that were ultimately to coalesce in the political form of Fascism. Fascists baptized national syndicalism, a synthesis anticipated by Michels, Sorel, and Corradini. Italy as a whole was an exploited community. Just as socialists had insisted the workers had been exploited, Italy was exploited by plutocratic nations that used every bourgeois device to deny the nation its equitable share of the world’s resources.

Postwar Origins of Fascism in Germany

Postwar civil unrest in Germany resulted in Bavaria’s creation of two briefly existing socialist states, the People’s State of Bavaria and the Bavarian Soviet Republic, from November 1918 to May 1919. These states were denigrated as “Red Bavaria, fomenting in the Bavarian people a hatred of left-wing rule. They saw the period in which these two states existed as one of privation, shortages, censorship, impediments to freedom, chaos and disorder.  These feelings were then constantly to be reinforced by right-wing propaganda not only in Bavaria, but throughout the Reich, where “Red Bavaria” was held up as an object lesson in the horrors of Socialism and Communism. In this way, the radical right was able to provoke and feed the fears of the peasants and the middle-class. The separate strands of Bavarian right-wing extremism found a common enemy in despising the Left, and Bavaria became profoundly “reactionary, anti-Republican, and counter-revolutionary.” Here we have the basis of Germany’s Fascism, or National Socialism of Adolf Hitler who came to power in 1933. The bad blood between Germany’s Communist Party and Social Democratic Party allowed the Nazi Party to grow and ultimately take power. The Communists blamed Social Democrats as betrayers of the international socialist revolution while the Social Democrats saw the Communists as subordinate to Russia’s Bolsheviks.  Only a parliamentary coalition of the KPD and SPD could have prevented the Nazis from coming to power. Even at the height of their influence in  the Reichstag, they would not have had enough delegates to resist such a coalition. Clearly, the splitting of Marxists by the nationalist impetus of World War I, created a new oppositional polarity for Fascism to take root. The new Fascists had answers that the “old socialists” did not.

SOURCES:

Fascists by Michael Mann

Masses and Man: Nationalist and Fascist Perceptions of Reality by George L. Mosse

The Fascist Persuasion In Radical Politics by A. James Gregor

Fascism, Totalitarianism, and Political Religion by Roger Griffin

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2017/01/how-italian-fascists-succeeded-in-taking-over-italy.html

https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/5258-Basel-Manifesto-(1912)-and-the-traitors-communism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_State_of_Bavaria