Date: 	Fri, 3 Oct 1997 12:40:23 -0800
From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari)
Subject: Re: M-TH: Wall Street


>Rakesh Bhandari wrote:
>
>>Who wrote this early criticism of stock exchange capital?
>>
>>"Marx and Lasalle looked for the roots of the [social] problem not in the
>>direction of the stock exchange, but of industrial production; they made
>>the industrialists responsible for all social ills and directed the
>>workers' wrath toward them. Our movement corrects this. We should show the
>>people that the roots of their plight are in the power of money, in the
>>mercenary spirit of the stock exchange."
>
>Sounds not unlike Mein Kampf.
>
>Doug

The quote is from Adolph Stoecker, leader of the Christian Social Workers
Party, which later became the Christian Workers Party in Germany during the
period of conservative-clerical reaction (1879-1886).

Stoecker however was instrumental in developing the distinction between
predatory and productive capital, which was later to figure prominently in
Nazi propanganda.

However, Stoecker's own program "had called for a reconciliation between
the state and the proletariat through the workers' submission to government
control. The state, he had insisted, should abandon economic laissez faire
and take a nahd in revampting the relatinship between capital and labor; in
return the workers were to accept the benevolent authority of the Christian
state; In its philosophy the program was directed against economic
liberalism Specific demands--tax on stock exchange operations, restoration
of the law against usury--hinted at the identification of liberalism with
the economic ills commonly attributed to Jewish business practices. But as
long as Stoecker wooed the industrial population, anti semitism was not in
the foreground of his agitation..."

>From Paul Massing's Rehearsal for Destruction: A Study of Political
Anti-Semitism in Imperial Germany (New York: Harpers and Brothers, 1949).

Rakesh





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