Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 20:04:04 -0800 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari) Subject: Re: M-I: state capitalism How would a Leninist defend the thesis that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism after the apparently even later development of fascism? Fascism, argued William J Blake in an unpublished mss from 1947, is "a form of reorganization of the Imperialist battle for redivision of the world. It seeks to take over without payment direct or indirect, vast resources, such as the Ukraine, the Caucasus, Romanian oil, and ultimately Turkish chrome, etc. it seeks to enslave tens of millions of labourers, thus squeezing effort at the least possible cost. It seeks to enslave millions of peasantry to obtain cheap deliveries of food, so as to cut the cost of feeding slaves. Its acquisition of Europe proved that instead of resolving its difficulties, it took over the difficulties of the Low Countries, France and Italy, and needed not only plunder which it required for its own monopolies but enough to render the others workable too. Europe was not enough because Europe was a recepient of plunders, flowing into the Imperialist lands, and these had to be made good if the system was to work. Hence Nazi youth chanted "Tomorrow the World" not as mere megalomania but as a childish reflection of the necessary motion of their mentors. The Second WW ended as did the first, the struggle for the redivision of the world was a failure: Fascism was not strong enough even as an organizing force (it had the same wastes and contradictions) to defeat the older imperialisms, partly because of their greater resources in gold, territory, raw materials, population, that is, industrial population, but above all because the new challengers, for the first time, had to face non-capitalists as well. At one time, the Hitlerian and Japanese Empire were statistical rivals of the older capitalisms: these were pretty much down to Great Britain and her empire (slightly truncated) and the US. But the weight of resources and industrial capacity on the other side proved still to be more than 21/2 times as large in oil, steel, coal. With 5/6th of Axis land forces in Europe engaged against the non-capitalist foe, the disparity of resources made defeat certain. Thus fascism, that last denial of all the freedoms won under capitalism, the negation of the older Imperialisms which retained democratic forms. From this there can only be one deduction: that fascism is not a stage of capitalism because an older imperialism was able to crush the Fascist Imperialism: it crumbled in Japan, Germany, Italy, and with it went a host of statellite Fascisms, its creatures, some of it authentic as in France, some of it mere chameleon play. "This is far from saying that Fascism cannot be utilized by the remaining Imperialisms if it suits the books of their monopolists. Where capitalism cannot solve its problems either through the market or counteract the ever pressing historical tendency against profits, by utilizing democratic forms with which to lower the real wage in perpetuity, it will utilize a form of state intervention identical with or closely related to Fascism." --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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