Date: 	Wed, 8 Oct 1997 02:02:34 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-I: Fascism and social fascism


The following are notes from a friend (Geoffrey McDonald) who doesn't have
a pc hooked up, but has been following the discussion through the web.

First, in order to get at the character of social democracy, he suggests
that we look at its American variants:

"Nelson Lichenstein's recent bio of Walter Reuther, for all its
hagiographic silliness, has some interesting data on American social
democracy; though it never had an independent institutional existence,
soc-dem as incarnated in the "left-wing" UAW was far from powerless in
American politics, and Reuther was probably the most influential soc-dem of
the post-WW2 era (Olaf Palme did his Ph.D. dissertation on him, and Reuther
sponsored annual retreats at which all the European heavies -- I forget
their names, too many blunts! -- of soc-dem cavorted, plus he got SDS
going, etc.) So instead of bemoaning the absence of soc-dem in the USA
maybe they should look at its actual record: support for fascism all over
the (third) world, etc. Reuther consistently served capital and, like his
Wiemar predecessors, sabotaged the interests of his own organization when
its dictates demanded it (Lichtenstein is useful on the recession of the
late 1950s, which had all the classic symptoms of overproduction)."

Second, he takes issue with Doug:

"Henwood said somewhere in one of his missives that the problem with the
anti-globalizers is that they downplay the nation state's continuing
economic significance. I think its more interesting to ask to what extent
is the state constrained by capitalism. Joyce Kolko, who's no shirk when it
comes to empirical economic data, put this very well in her book on
"Restructuring the World Economy": "The nation-state, though an integral
part of the capitalist system, is subordinate to it ... The state in
capitalist societies is neither autonomous nor even relatively autonomous
of that [the capitalist] class. Governments, on the other hand, having
multiple forms, may appear to be independent as long as the objective
conditions permit differing approaches to managing the economy ... It would
appear in the present period that, far from being autonomous, the state is
barely even separable from capital as a category of analysis."(p. 186)
        She goes on to say: "It is wholly in the interests of the
bourgeoisie that
the state appear to be autonomous of economic class relations and to
represent a 'national interest'. Significant now is the eclipse of this
posture among the bourgeoisie and the readiness, under the conditions of
crisis, to discard the rhetoric of full employment and welfare, even as an
abstract goal. Curiously, academics and many on the left [I think she's
referring to the Poulantzas/Miliband debate] picked up a variant of this
theme that the state is semi-autonomous at the very moment when empirically
it is the most exposed as fallacious and abandoned by its principal
advocates."(p.187)

Finally, he writes: "I just don't see why its so beyond the fringe to
explore the continuities between liberalism and fascism. It seems that
we're supposed to be so grateful that they're not lining us up and shooting
us that all we can do is point out "differences" like good postmodernists.
The best book I read about the German Social Democrats is "The Collapse of
the Weimar Republic" by David Abraham."

rb




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