I’ve absolutely no respect for Chairman Mao. Far from being a liberator, the former Chinese dictator was a ruthless butcher, who killed and brutalized millions during the ‘Cultural Revolution’. Over 60 million people died in the artificial famine his regime created. He and his comrades were also vandals and barbarians, who tried to destroy China’s millennia old culture by smashing monuments and priceless art treasures, as well as the ruthless persecution of religion, including Buddhism and Taoism, as well as Christianity.
But Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News says some very interesting things and makes some very acute observations of contemporary capitalism. In this piece, he discusses reports, found only in the Mail and RT, that the German authorities discovered a Nazi plot by serving members of the armed forces to overthrow the government. The plot including 14,000 soldiers, who were members of Nazi organisations. It’s a trivial number compared to the vast numbers in the German armed forces, but it’s serious because they were genuine Nazis. In the event of widespread unrest, the plotters in the military planned to leave the civilian government to its fate, and start re-opening concentration camps, in which they would incarcerate leftists and members of ethnic minorities.
Unruhe notes that this story seems to have been comprehensively buried by all of the media, with the exception of the two above, because of its explosive nature. He also states that we don’t know how many people have been arrested. This is a serious threat to democracy and justice in Germany. It means anti-Fascists have to become better organized and equipped, with German antifas now in a dangerous position. This plot means that they are Europe’s first and best line of defence against a real Nazi resurgence.
I can’t say I’m surprised at the high number of real Nazis in Germany’s military. The Baader-Meinhof Gang in the 1970s were spurred on to carry out their terror attacks from the realization that the denazification campaign after the War had only affected a comparatively small number of those serving Hitler’s vile regime. Many others had escaped, and despite their horrific crimes were living peaceful, comfortable lives. The British and Americans recruited Nazi agents and collaborators, including men responsible for vicious pogroms and massacres against Jews, for the intelligence agencies during the Cold War. It thus really wouldn’t surprise me if they let many Nazi members of the armed forces keep their jobs in the Cold War as part of Europe’s defence against Stalin. Just as they set up Gladio, a left-behind resistance network that would fight Communism if the Warsaw Pact successfully invaded and conquered the West. The feared invasion mercifully never happened, but various elements of the Gladio network were involved in far right-wing terrorism. It’s possible something similar could have been behind the persistence of real Nazism in the armed forces. Also, the neo-Nazi papers on sale in the eastern parts of the Federal Republic after the War styled themselves as the newspapers for soldiers and peasants.
Fascism is now a very real threat in Europe, with the election of Far-right wing parties to power in Poland, Hungary and other countries in eastern Europe, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, and the Fascist Alternative fuer Deutschland on the rise in Germany. The leaders and senior members of the latter do have Nazi, or neo-Nazi connections. They’ve made speeches denouncing Germany’s Holocaust memorial as a ‘national shame’, and declared that if they got into power they’d open an underground railway to Auschwitz.
But I’m not as pessimistic as Unruhe is here. I got the distinct impression that young Germans are very anti-totalitarian, and that German anarchists, who are very ready to fight Fascism on the streets, are very well organized.
This is, of course, if there’s anything to this story at all. I think it probably is true, but it may be fake news concocted for some strange reason, and released only by those two sources. I also wonder about the figures involved. 14,000 sounds very high. I’m not sure that the National Democrats or the German Republican Party, two of the main neo-Nazi parties before the AfD a few years ago, had anywhere near that number of members. They certainly didn’t have much popular support, as they always came very low down the list in German elections, although the NDP did manage to get something like four members elected to the Reichstag or somewhere in Germany before they were banned.
But if this is true, then it’s a frightening demonstration of how serious a threat Fascism now is. It has to be fought wherever it’s found, right across Europe, before it seizes power again and begins another Holocaust.
Robert A. Brady provides further evidence of the capitalist nature of Nazism in his book, The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937) by pointing out how the Nazis promoted private industry and businessmen as part of the biological elite, who were entitled to positions of leadership. They also embarked on a campaign of privatization of state enterprises, and promoted to positions of leadership in the economic direction of the state private businessmen, even when the majority of enterprises in that particular sector of the economy were state owned. And finally, the German law the Nazis used to promote their management of industry was that which recognized the management of private property for public use, as against proper socialized or nationalized industry.
Brady points out that the businessmen and functionaries who joined the Advisory Council of the National Economic Chamber had to take an oath to serve the Fuhrer and National Chancellor, which meant Hitler in the two offices he occupied, the goals of the National Socialist party, the Third Reich and the construction of the people’s community. (p. 265). But he also quotes Hitler’s economics minister, Hjalmar Schacht, who declared that businessmen were indispensable to the Nazi system, as was free competition.
“We cannot dispense with the economic willing of individual business leaders and workers,” Schacht said. To do so, he held, would be to destroy “the creative power” of the people. The function of business enterprise is to release this creative power on behalf of the nation. “Under no circumstances,” he continued, “shall we destroy the multifarious individual character of our economic system. For all time to come we shall need the independent employer who, for better or worse,, is connected with his enterprise.” In other words, businessmen in the new Germany are to be given free rein to function as before, except now they must be “honest” in the sense that they must not resort to “unfair” tactics to achieve corporate ends. (pp. 265-6).
He further quotes Schacht as saying, “We cannot get along without an honest struggle of competition”. (p. 266).
He makes it also clear that the German business community were also able to name the Nazi functionaries appointed to lead the various state planning organisations controlling private industry. He writes
Since the whole Nazi philosophy necessarily calls for this apotheosis of bourgeois and capitalistic virtues, it is only natural that when they were presented with an opportunity to shape organization more nearly after the pattern of their hearts’ desire the business men should also be able to name their controlling staff of “Leaders.” And such has been the case. In all the literature published by business organisations, and of all the dozens of businessmen personally interviewed in Germany, regardless of their industrial, trade, or financial origin, not a single criticism has been found of the type of “Leaders” placed in command. There is a great deal of complaint about individuals and policies, but there are uniformly the pleadings of minority groups who are being discriminated against, or else against the specific incidence of policies which economic facts compel them to endorse.
Further, the leadership has been entirely that of men enjoying the confidence of the business community. This holds for the Chambers of Industry and Commerce, the Provincial Economic Chambers, the various National, Economic, and Functional (or Trade) Groups, and the National Economic Chamber and its various subdivisions. The first Leader, Schmitt, was a well-known German business man, and thoroughly acceptable to the business community at large. The second Leader, Dr. Schacht, has been so completely acceptable, and his dicta so readily enforced throughout the country, that he is commonly known as the “economic dictator of Germany.” Under the leadership of these men, the appointment and removal of inferior “leaders” through the system has been, with minor exceptions, entirely to the satisfaction of the business communities affected. (p. 290).
He also describes how private industry, and privatization, were promoted against state industries.
The same picture holds for the relations between the National Economic Chamber and the organs of local government. As Frielinghaus has put it, “The new structure of economics recognizes no differences between public and private economic activity…” Not only are representatives of the various local governments to be found on both the national and regional organs of the National Economic Chamber, but it is even true that local government is co-ordinated to the end that economic activities pursued by them shall enjoy no non-economic advantages over private enterprise.
The literature on this point is perfectly explicit, being of a nature with which the general American public is familiar through numerous utterance of business leaders on the “dangers of government competition with private enterprise.” Under pressure of this sort the Reich government and many of its subsidiary bodies have begun to dispose of their properties to private enterprise, or to cease “competition” with private enterprise where no properties are at stake. Thus the Reich, the states, and the communes have already disposed of much of their holdings in the iron and steel industry notably the United Steel Works), coal, and electric power. Similarly, support is being withdrawn for loans to individuals wishing to construct private dwellings wherever private enterprise can possibly make any money out of the transactions. True, the government has been expanding its activities in some directions, but mainly where there is no talk of “competition with private enterprise,” and with an eye to providing business men with effective guarantees against losses. (pp. 191-2).
A little while ago I posted up a piece from Maoist Rebel News on YouTube, which also cited articles from economic history journals to show that both the Nazi and Italian Fascist regimes engaged in massive privatization programmes beyond those of other industrialised western nations at the time.
Brady also points that, while three quarters of the German electrical industry was state-owned, it was private businessmen who were placed in charge of it.
Nothing could show more clearly the intent of Nazi control in economic affairs than the make-up of the active management of this organization. Despite the fact that better than three-fourths of all German electric power is owned or controlled by public bodies, the directing heads of the National Electric Power Supply Federation are drawn almost exclusively from the ranks of private enterprise. Its first Board of Directors was presided over by two chairmen, both representative of private power companies: Hellmuth Otte, General Director of the Hamburg Electric Works, Inc. (controlled by the Siemens-Schuckjert combine, largest manufacturers of electric equipment and supplies in Germany), and Dr. Wilhelm Luhr, member of the Board of Directors of the Gesellschaft fur Elektrische Unternehmungen-Ludwig Lowe & Co. A.G. (the largest holding company in the private German electric-power industry, the company likewise controls several electrical supply manufacturing concerns).
This is very similar to the corporatist system in Britain and America, in which businesspeople have been appointed to government posts overseeing the economy. This has been done both by the Republicans and Democrats in America, and by the Tories and Blair’s New Labour over here. George Monbiot described the situation in Britain very thoroughly in his book, Captive State.
He also makes it very clear that Nazi economic planning is based very much on private enterprise, going back to a distinction made between private property for public use and socialized property in German law.
From what has been said above it is perfectly clear that “planned organization” should be understood not as social-economic planning in the socialist sense of the term, but as “business co-ordination” with a view to exercise of monopoly powers. There is nothing in the literature which permits a discerning reader any other interpretation. By the same token, the expression – interlarded through the endless stream of propaganda and explanatory newspapers, brochures, books, and reports-Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, requires transliteration into English patois in order to be understood properly. Gemein means “common,” or “public”, or “general”; nutz means “fruits,” or emoluments.” or “returns.” The expression Gemeinnutz as used by the Nazis, means “return to the community,” or, more precisely, “service to the community.’ Eigen on the other hand, means “individual” or “own.” Eignenutz thus means “returns to the individual,” or “profits”. The exact meaning of the whole expression is “services to the community before profits to the individual”; the American wording is “profits through service.”
This interpretation is in line with an old distinction, running back through several generations of German economic and business literature, between privatwirtschaft and Gemeinwirtschaft, on the one hand, and Gemeinwirtschaft and Sozialwirtschaft on the other. Privatwirtschaft has always been taken to mean an economy of private enterprise in the English, liberal, laissez-faire sense. Gemeinwirtschaft was used to mean a profits economy from the public point of view, or, in other words, a profit economy supplying a service tot he community. Sozialwirtschaft, on the contrary, has long meant socialization. All the Nazi literature emphasizes the present economic system as a Gemeinwirtschaft. (pp. 319-20).
It is thus very clear that the Nazi economy was very definitely capitalist. It celebrated the private businessman as a member of the economic and social elite, and promoted private enterprise and its leaders against state-owned industry, which it also privatized as far as possible. And it made very clear in law that the economy was a private enterprise supplying a public service and not a socialized economy.
Those who claim that Nazism was a form of socialism are wrong, and arguing so in order to try to discredit socialism and the Left through guilt by association. But the Nazis promotion of private enterprise, business interests and management also make it extremely similar to contemporary corporate capitalism, as advocated by the Republicans, Corporate Democrats, Tories and Blairite New Labour.
This is very interesting, and it made me think slightly better – but only slightly – of Alex Jones, the mad right-wing conspiracy theorist and his wretched internet show, Infowars. In this clip from Maoist Rebel News, host Jason Unruhe comments on a little piece of video which shows Jones screaming and cursing Trump for the airstrikes that hit Syria at the weekend. It was clearly shot before Jones went on air, so I assume the footage must have been leaked by someone.
Jones is one of the tin-foil hat brigade, who tells the world that there is a conspiracy by ‘the globalists’ to establish some kind of one world superstate and destroy all personal freedoms along with nation states. It’s standard right-wing conspiracy theory stuff, of the type that’s been a part of the right-wing paranoid fringe since at least the ’70s. Jones identifies the ‘globalists’ with the international business elites, who are under the control of demons or interdimensional aliens. Also involved in this are liberals, socialists and feminists. As for gay rights, they’re a transhumanist space cult to create a new race of genderless cyborgs and deprive us of our humanity.
Obviously, no-one has actually told the gays that. Or indeed, the producers and writers of Dr. Who. Since Russell T. Davis revived the show about ten years ago, it’s been very gay friendly. Which isn’t surprising, as Davis is not only gay himself, but way back in the ’90s made his name with the gay soap/ drama series, Queer As Folk. It’s also quite feminist, in that it’s been doing its best to break the stereotype of the Doctor’s female companions as just being there to scream and have things explained to them by the Doctor. The Time Lords are shown to change genders as well as appearance when they regenerate. The Master regenerated as a woman, and reappeared as Missy. And the next Doctor is going to be female as well.
But this liberal approach to sexual orientation does not mean a rejection of sexuality. Aside from the deep emotional bond between Rose Tyler and David Tennant’s Doctor, which saw Rose eventually settle on a parallel Earth with a human duplicate of the Doctor, there’s the Cybermen. Part of the horror of these monsters is the fact that not only have they had their humanity stripped away and replaced with steel and plastic, but they’ve also been deprived of their gender. They’re mechanical, neuter creatures, devoid of emotion, and determined to perpetuate themselves by turning humans, if not all humanoids, into themselves. All you have to do to see Jones is wrong about gay rights and transhumanism is simply watch a few episodes of Dr. Who.
Jones was initially a very enthusiastic supporter of Trump. He gave him much airtime when the orange buffoon was campaigning for the presidency. Jones thought that Trump was an outsider, who would defeat the globalists and drain the swamp of corruption engulfing American politics.
He’s been gravely disappointed. Trump has carried on with pretty much the same policies as his Republican and corporatist Democrat predecessors, and has, if anything, been even more corrupt in giving government posts to his friends and family, including positions where they would enjoy an unfair advantage as private businesspeople.
Trump’s decision to launch airstrikes against Syria provoked a particularly vehement reaction from Jones. Jones is very much a man of the right, but from here it looks like he belongs to that strain of American Conservativism which states that the country has absolutely no business interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. it’s why some American Conservatives were against the Iraq invasion, including a senior female Pentagon colonel. It’s peculiar, but some Libertarians can be very critical of American foreign policy and its programme of increasing tension with Russia, which can make them seem a bit more left-wing than they actually are.
Of course, Jones doesn’t go the whole way, and wake up to the fact that the reason Trump’s bombing Syria is because of American capitalism and the greed of American multinationals to conquer and exploit yet another middle eastern state, as well as the Neocons to destroy another threat to Israel. Instead he rants about how its all the fault of liberals, Democrats and other members of the left.
Unruhe makes some very valid, pertinent points himself in his comments on Jones’ screams of rage. He states that Marxists realise that the problem isn’t just individual capitalists, but with the system as a whole. But Jones’ anger at Trump shows how profoundly Conservative he is. Jones believes the present system is perfect, and that it’s only gone wrong because of a few individuals. This, Unruhe says, is the psychology behind conspiracy theories, such as those which see the world’s problems as being due to the Illuminati, or, in an anti-Semitic variant, the Jews.
He’s absolutely right on this point. The stupid, malign conspiracy theories which claim that there is a global plot by the Illuminati, the Freemasons, Jews or some other clandestine group, is an attempt to explain the failure of capitalism and laissez-faire economics, without challenging them. They’re seen as perfect, and so if they don’t create the freedom and prosperity their advocates promise, it must be due to some group operating outside the system and trying to pervert and destroy it.
I don’t agree with Unruhe when he says that individual figures aren’t of importance, and that what matters is the system as a whole. There are clearly good and bad employers and some Tories are definitely far worse than others. The present structure of society isn’t perfect, but the extreme right, like the current Tory party and the business people who donate and support it, are making it far worse. They need to be turfed out of office immediately.
Mike and the other peeps in the Labour party, who’ve been grotesquely smeared as anti-Semites because of their opposition to Israel’s brutal, racist maltreatment of the Palestinians, or because they’ve simply defended those who do, aren’t the only victims of the Israel lobby. They’ve also taken down a video that was posted by Maoist Rebel News several years ago.
In this clip from the channel, host Jason Unruhe reports that a video he put up criticising a law being passed in California, that would outlaw criticism of Israel, has been taken down by Google. The reason they give for their decision is that it was ‘offensive’. Unruhe finds the decision peculiar, as the video is years old, and remarks that it’s probably just someone, who’s gone on a massive flagging binge. He remarks that he’s aware of all the conspiracy theories surrounding YouTube – that it’s real name is ‘JewTube’ and that it’s run by the Jews. He finds it quite ironic that the company’s decision, which is aimed at tackling anti-Semitism, instead does the exact opposite, and appears instead to confirm all the anti-Semitic rumours about the company.
This is just another part of the Israel lobby’s campaign to close down any criticism of Israel. As well as smearing decent, non- and anti-racist women and men for criticising Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, including very many Jews and Jewish organisations, a number of American states are trying to criminalise criticism of Israel and the pro-Palestinian movement. There have been a number of moves to ban the BDS movement, which urges consumers and investors to boycott and divest from firms operating in the Occupied Territories, as ‘anti-Semitic’.
There’s nothing unusual in the tactic of smearing their opponents as anti-Semites. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Norman Finkelstein, a Jewish critic of Israel, states that the Israel lobby is a gigantic mechanism for creating anti-Semites – meaning that their standard, default tactic is to accuse anyone criticising Israel of anti-Semitism. Even when it is manifestly untrue. They also grotesquely exaggerate the true extent of anti-Semitism in western society, in order to present themselves falsely as the true defenders of the Jews against anti-Semitism, while spreading fear and distrust of gentiles amongst them. The goal is that by spreading such fear, more Jews will be encouraged to move from the Diaspora to Israel. Thus the other year, the grotesquely misnamed Campaign Against Anti-Semitism claimed that anti-Semitism in Britain was at the same level as Germany in the 1930s, round about the time the Nazis seized power.
There is unfortunately still anti-Semitism in Britain. Several of the Jewish members of the Labour party, who’ve also been smeared as ‘anti-Semites’ for their opposition to Israel’s continued violation of the Palestinians’ rights and dignity, have suffered it, including physical assault. And as their influence has declined, the various sects in the British Far Right have returned to their anti-Semitic roots. The Nazi terror group, National Action, in their private speeches and public demonstrations, have ranted about Jews and the supposed Jewish conspiracy to destroy the White race through racial intermixing, in language that’s almost the same as Hitler’s and the original Nazis. Nevertheless, as Tony Greenstein has pointed out on his site using the appropriate stats, Britain actually has a very low level of anti-Semitism. Only about 5%-7% of Brits consider themselves to be anti-Semites according to polls. The vast majority – over 70% – either have positive views about Jews, or don’t have any strong feelings one way or another. Britain in 2017 very definitely ain’t like Germany in the 1930s.
The fact that the Israel lobby is reduced to such censorship and trying to use legal means to stifle free speech paradoxically shows how weak it actually is. Admittedly, the Israel lobby in America – AIPAC, and the Christian Evangelical Zionist organisations – are very well funded and influential. But as Netanyahu and the other partners with Likud in his right-wing coalition become more extreme and brutal, so more people, Jews and non-Jews, are turning away from Israel. An increasing number of young American Jews are critical, and actively oppose Israel, even those, who have personally suffered from anti-Semitism.
If the Israel lobby genuinely enjoyed popular support, then it wouldn’t need to use the law to clamp down on its detractors. There’d be no need. But the Israel lobby doesn’t enjoy popular support. As Norman Finkelstein has also pointed out, most American Jews had little interest in Israel. They, like other Diaspora Jews, wanted to make their lives in the country they were born in and which they regarded as home. American support for Israel really only dates from the 1970s, when the American patriotic Right turned to Israel after its victories against the Arabs in the Six Day War as psychological compensation for America’s defeat in Vietnam.
The Israel lobby is losing the battle for people’s hearts and minds. More information is coming out daily through the internet and other media about Israel’s true nature as a colonialist, European-American White colonialist settler state, and its massacre, dispossession and ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population. And so Netanyahu’s friends and puppets around the world have to resort to lies, smears and censorship to maintain their power and influence. In doing so, they malign and try to destroy the lives of decent people. But it ultimately they, who are gradually losing the battle. And they know it. Hence the strong whiff of desperation about these measures.
This is another interesting little piece from Jason Unruhe at Maoist Rebel News. Unruhe, sporting a black and orange Mohican, reports that amongst the other recently declassified documents relating to JFK, there were details of a false flag operation planned by the CIA to start a war with Russia. The agency wanted to convert a couple of American planes so that they resembled, at least from a distance, Soviet MIG fighters. Or alternatively, they would use real MIGs purchased from countries outside the Warsaw Pact. The planes would be used to stage an attack on America, which would then be blamed on the Russians.
Fortunately, the plan was never put into action. The costs of converting the American planes was much too high, at over a million dollars for each plane. Technical experts stated that it would be impossible, and the results would not be convincing except from a distance.
Unruhe points out that this shows how far the American military was prepared to go – to start a war that would easily have ended up in a nuclear inferno – in order to attack a nation that had defied American imperialism.
In fairness, American imperialism wasn’t the only issue involved here. The Communist states established by the Soviet Union were dictatorships, and alternative, competing political parties and organisations had been suppressed by force. But it’s also fair to say that what also terrified the Americans, and other, western leaders, was that an aggressive alternative to capitalism had emerged. In the 1950s under Khrushchev standards of living in the USSR rose to such an extent, and the economy prospered, that the Americans were seriously afraid that the USSR would overtake America as the richer, more affluent society. Hence the determination to find any means of discrediting Communism and destroying the USSR.
And this appears to be just one of a number of false flag attacks that the CIA dreamed up to blame on America’s enemies elsewhere in the world. A little while ago I remember posting up a piece about how the CIA also planned a series of bomb attacks in Miami and other cities in Florida, which they hoped to blame on Castro’s Cuba. All in order to start a war there, and restore the brutal Bautista regime, which Castro had overthrown.
There is now a section of the American population which really, really doesn’t trust their government. At it’s most extreme, this milieu is represented by people like Alex Jones, who rants about how the globalist elites are somehow in a weird alliance with evil aliens, or demons, and planning to destroy the world and turn the survivors into genderless transhuman cyborgs. All through socialism and feminism and with the use of FEMA camps. Many others simply don’t believe that Islamist terrorists were responsible for 9/11, and instead think that it was a false flag attack conducted by their own government with the intention of starting a war.
In fact, the line that attempted to connect Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attack was a lie. Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with it, and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hated Hussein’s secular Iraq as much as they hated America. The ultimate responsibility for 9/11 lies with the Saudis. 17 out of the 19 hijackers were Saudi, and the operation was planned and funded by people very high up in the Saudi political hierarchy. But this was far too inconvenient for Bush and later Obama to reveal to the American public, and so they suppressed those pages of the report into the attack.
Given the numerous false flag attacks that the American military has planned and carried out against its own people, including the Gulf of Tonkin incident which provided the pretext for the Vietnam War, it isn’t even remotely surprising that so many Americans are highly sceptical of the official stories about 9/11.
This is another great little video from Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News. I’ve already made my opinion about Mao and Stalin very clear: they were mass murdering monsters, who made their countries great through the deaths of millions of their own countrymen. 30 million + soviet citizens died in Stalin’s purges and gulags. 60 million died of famine and in re-education camps during Mao’s wretched ‘Cultural Revolution’.
Nevertheless, these totalitarian states gave their people some benefits. And it shows in the nostalgia many people across the former eastern bloc feel for the old system. According to a poll by RT, 58 per cent of Russians said they would like the Soviet Union to return. 14 per cent stated it was quite feasible at the moment. Forty-four per cent said it was unfeasible, but desirable. 31 per cent said that they would not be happy even if events took such a turn. And 10 per cent could not give a simple answer to the question.
Unruhe then goes into the reasons why so many Russians want the USSR back. He points out that the majority of Russians are not Communists, do not identify with the Communist party and are not members of it. He says it was because there were better jobs, with better pay, far more stability, better vacation times and a higher standard of living. They also had a better infrastructure, which collapsed along with the USSR. He points out that we’ve all seen the images of abandoned, decaying areas which have had their funding withdrawn due to the collapse of Communism. They had a military that the world feared and that the Americans were terrified was going to destroy them all. They also couldn’t be bullied, and they were capable of retaliating in huge ways. Sanctions couldn’t hurt them, and couldn’t destroy their financial system. The Soviet people had a country they could be proud of, and although Putin is pushing Russian independence, he can’t do it nearly to the extent that the old Soviet Union could. And so it actually means something when people, who aren’t Communists, say they’re in favour of its return.
There’s a quote from one of the old Labour thinkers, to the effect that everyone, who believes in human rights must hate the USSR. But everyone, who genuinely has Socialism in his core also admires it.
As I understand it, They old Soviet system was massively sclerotic, with colossal overmanning in industry and enterprises. For example, you couldn’t simply pick up what you wanted at the shops. You had to queue to be served, then pick out what you wanted, and then wait for it to be served to you, and to pay for it. I’ve read of people in architect’s office spending their days transferring figures from one column to another, in what was supposed to be a good job that some people had been working towards for years. Utterly soul destroying.
But at the same time, the state was expected to provide full employment. And it did it, albeit at the expense of quality work. And I’ve no doubt that the pay was better, that people did have better holidays, organised through the trade unions and state leisure organisations. You could go and take a vacation down at one of the spa resorts on the Black Sea.
And everything he says about the Soviet Union’s industrial and military power is also correct. In the 1950s under Khrushchev, the Soviet Union made such rapid advances that the Americans were terrified that they would win, and overtake capitalism as the affluent, consumer society. Didn’t happen, but it would have been brilliant if it had.
And Unruhe is also correct when he says that the Russians were no threat to Europe or the West. They weren’t. After the initial expansion, the apparatchiks and nomenclature in the Communist party were content with simply holding the system together and feathering their own nests with Western goods they brought back from their diplomatic travels abroad.
As for the Russians not being Communists, I can remember being told by Ken Surin at College, who is now a writer for Counterpunch, that there were more Communists in America than the USSR. Having said that, Soviet citizens grew up in an explicitly political environment, where they were indoctrinated with atheism and the ideal of the Communist regime. Some of that is going to sink in, even if they are otherwise alienated from the Communist party.
But the introduction of capitalism under Yeltsin destroyed Communism, and dam’ near destroyed Russia. The economy went into meltdown, so that instead of paying their workers wages, factories paid them in kind. In one firm making sewing machines, they gave their workers those machines.
And the economic meltdown directly affected people’s health. Russia didn’t have a welfare state as such. There was no unemployment benefit, as you didn’t need one. Unless you were a subversive ‘parasite’ and an enemy of the system, the state found you work. But there was a free, state medical service, with more doctors than America. In practice, how well you were treated depended on your ‘blat’ – your clout, leverage, whatever. It was a very corrupt system. But this melted down along with the economy, and doctors started going private. Just as they’re continuing to do under Putin.
As a result, illness rates shot up. In Lukashenko’s Beloruss, which retained the Communist system, people remained as healthy – or unhealthy – as they were before Communism collapsed in the USSR.
And none of this was done for the Russians’ benefit. Oh, Yeltsin hoped that capitalism would improve things in Russia, but it was all financed, once again, by Clinton and the Americans, who poured tens of millions into political advertising.
I’ve already made my own low opinion of Lenin abundantly clear: but he was right in his pamphlet Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Russia, and other less developed nations like it, were held back by global capitalism. They were then. And it’s the same goal now, except that as Killary can’t have her way she’s starting a new Cold War.
Well, millions of Russians want their country back.
And they’re not alone. You can find roughly the same percentage all over the former Communist bloc. The former Soviet satellites hate the Russians, particularly in Poland. But they had a better standard of living, work, and a system that had larger ideals. They were told that they were the progressive vanguard leading humanity to a brighter, better future. Racism was there, but it was frowned on. Women were treated as second-class citizens, but at the same time the state and Marxist ideology was also concerned with their liberation and getting them into masculine jobs.
And some of the old Communist countries weren’t that far behind the West. I’ve read that if you tweaked the stats a little, then economically the old East Germany was about equal, or just behind, the north of England. Which isn’t an advert for Communism, but even less of one for Thatcherite capitalism.
In short there’s a saying going round eastern Europe: ‘Everything the Communists told us about Communism was a lie. Everything they told us about capitalism was true.’
Capitalism isn’t working. And the peoples of eastern Europe know this. It isn’t working here either, but we’re too blinded by the mass media, and the illusions of past imperial greatness, to realise it.
I found this fascinating little clip of a speech by Lenin, the founder of Soviet Communism, on Maoist Rebel News, presented by Jason Unruhe. I am very definitely not a Maoist, as I think it’s undeniable that he was one of the most murderous tyrants of the 20th century. About 60 million Chinese died in the purges and mass starvation created by the ‘Cultural Revolution’, and countless precious art treasures and other monuments from the country’s rich, ancient past, were destroyed.
Nevertheless, this piece is interesting and important as it shows how the Bolsheviks took seriously the threat of anti-Semitism, and were keen to stamp it out. Unruhe made the video in response to an appearance by Rick Harrison of Pawn Stars on Mark Levin’s radio show. Harrison owns the pawn shop featured in the show. It’s an American programme, but it’s also shown over here on one of the satellite/cable channels. I tried watching it once, when it was on the History Channel, in the vague hope that it might actually be interesting. It wasn’t. The programme largely consisted of the crew musing over various artifacts – in this case, a couple of pistols left over from the Old West – and speculating about how much they were worth. It reminded me a little of the Beeb’s antiques’ programmes, with the exception that the people looking at the antiques didn’t actually seem to know very much about them, apart from the very basics.
On Levin’s show, Harrison went off and laid into Barack Obama. Obama was ‘anti-business’ and blamed the Jews and intelligentsia for everything, just like Lenin. Well, no. Barack Obama is not at all like Lenin. Barack Obama is very definitely not ‘anti-business’, even remotely. As the Jimmy Dore Show and other alternative news shows have pointed out, ad nauseam, Obama is a bog-standard corporatist politician. He tried to privatise the public schools by turning them into Charter Schools, the American equivalent of British academy schools. Even Obamacare is private enterprise. It was originally dreamed up by the right-wing Heritage Foundation and promoted by Newt Gingrich, an arch-Republican. The last time I looked, America was still very much a private enterprise economy. Obama has even said that he considers himself to be a ‘moderate Republican’.
But such accusations are almost par for the course for the bonkers end of the Republican party. There have even been right-wing Christian radio hosts declaring that he was a mass-murderer, who was secretly planning to kill even more people than Mao and Stalin. And this is apart from all the hysterical screaming that he was a Communist-Nazi-crypto-Islamist terrorist intent on bringing about the fall of America and western civilisation.
He also spent eight years in power, and has now departed. Nobody was assassinated, or rounded up in cattle trucks to be deported to death camps. Or incarcerated in FEMA, which would be the modern equivalent, if you believe Alex Jones. But the rhetoric shows the sheer, blind hysteria that gripped some of these maniacs whenever Obama was mentioned.
Unruhe points out that it is factually incorrect that Lenin blamed the Jews for the problems of the nascent Soviet Union. He states that the Soviet leader spent a year touring the former Russian Empire, denouncing anti-Semitism and Jew hatred. How is this known? Because there are recordings of him. He then plays one. It’s clearly from a gramophone recording, complete with crackles and scratches, but it is subtitled in English. My Russian really isn’t very good at all, but from what little I can catch, the translation is accurate, and it states what Lenin is actually saying.
Lenin states that it is the capitalists, the landowners and the tsars, who were trying to stir up hatred against the Jews, as a way of dividing the working people of all nations and getting them to hate each other. He states that it is a medieval, feudal superstition, that exists only when workers and peasants are kept in slavery by the landlords. He says that most Jews are workers, and therefore our brothers. He acknowledges that amongst the Jews there are capitalists, the bourgeois and kulaks, just as there are all of these amongst Russians. He states that this hatred against the Jews is being stirred up by the capitalists to divert attention away from who really is exploiting working people: capital!
He cries out several times ‘Shame upon the tsars’ for stoking hatred against the Jews, for stirring up pogroms, massacres and persecution.
Unruhe points out in his introduction to the speech that it was actually Lenin’s opponents, the tsars, who were anti-Semitic. This is solid, established fact. Nicholas II was viciously anti-Semitic himself, and believed firmly in the ‘Blood Libel’ – the poisonous myth that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make the matzo bread for Passover. One of the issues that discredited Nicholas II’s rule was his repeated attempt to prosecute a Jew, Beilis, on this charge, despite the most anti-Semitic of his ministers telling him that it was stupid and ridiculous.
And in opposition to the workers’ and revolutionary movements, there were the Black Hundreds. These were groups of extreme right-wing supporters of the traditional order, who were viciously anti-Semitic.
It’s obviously glaringly true that Lenin was ‘anti-business’. But saying that makes it appear as though it was just a matter of prejudice. It wasn’t. Russia’s working people and peasants at the time laboured in appalling conditions, with many on literal ‘starvation wages’. And although the serfs had been freed in the 1860s by Alexander I, their lords and masters still treated their workers as unfree slaves. There were cases where factory masters told their workers ‘We own you!’ Hence before the Bolshevik coup there were hundreds of strikes and peasant revolts up and down the Russian Empire. You can easily see why before Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power, there was a revolution that overthrew the Tsar, and the workers began electing left-wing parties like the Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Trudoviks and Socialist Revolutionaries on to the workers’, peasants’ and soldiers’ soviets they set up to represent their own interests against the power of the capitalists.
As for the capitalists and business using anti-Semitism to divide working people of all nations, anti-Semitism in the West has been rightly discredited and regarded with loathing by the majority of people since the defeat of Nazism. But the right has used racism to try and attack the left and organised Labour. You can see it in the way the Tories have tried to stir up nationalist sentiment against Muslims and other ‘unassimilable’ immigrants, quite apart from the fearmongering about workers coming from elsewhere in the EU and eastern Europe.
I’m not a fan of Lenin. He created a very authoritarian system, which eventually led to the murderous tyranny of Stalin. But he was no anti-Semite, and his speech still remains a very relevant commentary on the political uses of racial hatred.
One of the tactics the Right uses to try to discredit socialism is to claim that the Nazis were socialist, based largely on their name and the selective use of quotes from Hitler and other members of the Nazi party.
This claim has been repeatedly attacked and refuted, but nevertheless continues to be made.
In the video below, Jason Unruhe of Maoist Rebel News also refutes the argument that the Nazis were socialists by looking at the economic evidence and the Nazis’ own policy of privatising state-owned industries and enterprises. He puts up several graphs showing how the stock market rose under the Nazis, as did the amount of money going to private industry. Indeed, this evidence shows that the Nazis were actually more successful at managing capitalism than the democratic, laissez-faire capitalist countries of Britain and the US.
Then there is the evidence from the Nazis’ own policy towards industry. He cites a paper by Germa Bel in the Economic History Review, entitled ‘Against the Mainstream: Nazi Privatisation in 1930s Germany’. In the abstract summarising the contents of the article, Bel states
In the mid-1930s, the Nazi regime transferred public ownership to the private sector. In doing so, they went against the mainstream trends in Western capitalistic countries, none of which systematically reprivatized firms during the 1930s.
He goes further, and makes the point that the term ‘privatisation’ actually comes from Nazi Germany. It’s the English form of the German term reprivatisierung.
I am very definitely not a Maoist, and have nothing but contempt for the Great Helmsman, whose Cultural Revolution led to the deaths of 60 million Chinese in the famines and repression that followed, and unleashed a wave of horrific vandalism against this vast, ancient countries traditional culture and its priceless antiquities and art treasures.
But Unruhe has clearly done his research, and is absolutely correct about the capitalist nature of German industry under the Third Reich. Robert A. Brady, in his The Spirit and Structure of German Fascism (London: Victor Gollancz 1937) also described and commented on the privatisation of industry under the Nazis.
He states that the organs set up by the Nazis to ‘coordinate’ the industrial and agricultural sectors were specifically forbidden from giving any advantages to the state sector rather than private industry, and that state industry was handed over to private industrialists.
The same picture holds for the relations between the National Economic Chamber and the organs of local government. As Frielinghaus has put it, “The new structure of economics recognises no differences between public and private economic activity….” Not only are representatives of the various local governments to be found on both the national and regional organs of the National Economic Chamber, but it is even true that local government is co-ordinated to the end that economic activities pursued by them shall enjoy no non-economic advantages over private enterprise.
The literature on this point is perfectly explicit, being of a nature with which the general American public is familiar through numerous utterances of business leaders on the “dangers of government competition with private enterprise.” Under pressure of this sort the Reich government and many of its subsidiary bodies have begun to dispose of their properties to private enterprise or to cease “competition” with private enterprise where no properties are at stake. Thus the Reich, the states and the communes have already disposed of much of the holdings in the iron and steel industry (notably the United Steel Works), coal and electric power. Similarly, support is being withdrawn for loans to individuals wishing to construct private dwellings wherever private enterprise can possibly make any money out the transactions. True, the government has been expanding its activities in some directions, but mainly where there is no talk of “competition with private enterprise”, and with an eye to providing business men with effective guarantees against losses. (Pp. 291-2).
There is a serious academic debate over how far Fascism – both in its Nazi and Italian versions – was genuinely anti-Socialist and anti-capitalist. Mussolini started off as a radical Socialist, before breaking with the socialists over Italian intervention in the First World War. He then moved further to the right, allying with Italian big business and agricultural elites to smash the socialist workers’ and peasants’ organisations, and setting up his own trade unions to control the Italian workforce in the interests of Italian capital.
Ditto the Nazis, who banned the reformist socialist SPD – the German equivalent of the Labour party – and the Communist party, and destroyed the German trade unions. Their role was then taken over by the Labour Front, which also acted to control the workforces in the interests of capital and management.
As for Hitler’s use of the term ‘socialist’ and the incorporation of the colour red, with its socialist overtones, into the Nazi flag, Hitler stated that this was to steal some of the attraction of the genuine socialist left. See the passage on this in Joachim C. Fest’s biography of the dictator. The incorporation of the word ‘socialist’ into the Nazi party’s name was highly controversial, and resisted by many of the party’s founders, as they were very definitely anti-socialist.
Brady himself comments on how the Nazis’ appropriation of the term ‘socialist’ is opportunistic, and disguises the real capitalist nature of the economy. He writes
the principle of “self-management” does appear to allow the business men to do pretty much what they wish. The cartels and market organisations remain, and have, in fact, been considerably strengthened in many cases. These are the most important organisations from the point of view of profits. The larger machinery is, as previously indicated, primarily designed to co-ordinate police on threats to the underlying tenets of the capitalistic system. The fact that the new system is called “socialism,” and that “capitalism” has been repudiated, does not detract from this generalisation in the slightest. The changes made to such as worry compilers of dictionaries and experts in etymology, not economists. For the realities of “capitalism” has been substituted the word “socialism”; for the realities of “socialism” has been substituted the word “Marxism”; “Marxism” has,, then, been completely repudiated. By reversing the word order one arrives at the truth, i.e. “socialism” in all its forms has been repudiated and capitalism has been raised into the seventh heaven of official esteem.
And the structure of Nazi Germany, where there were very close links between local and state government and industry, and where private industry and big business were celebrated and promoted, sounds extremely similar to the current corporatist political system in Britain and America. Here, political parties now favour big business over the public good, thanks to receiving donations and other aid, including the loan of personnel, from private firms, and the appointment of senior management and businessmen to positions within government. While at the same time pursuing a policy of deregulation and privatisation.
And this is without discussing the murderous Social Darwinism of the Reaganite/ Thatcherite parties, including Blairite New Labour, which has seen the welfare safety net gradually removed piecemeal, so that hundreds of thousands in Britain are now forced to use food banks to survive, and around 700 desperately poor, and particularly disabled people, have died in misery and starvation thanks to the regime of benefit sanctions and the use of pseudo-scientific procedures by ATOS and Maximus to declare seriously and terminally ill people ‘fit for work’.
The Blairites, Tories and their Lib Dem partners have set up a system of secret courts, in which, if it is considered ‘national security’ is at stake, individuals can be tried in secret, without knowing what the charges against them are, who their accuser is, or the evidence against them. Cameron and May, and indeed Tony Blair, followed Thatcher’s lead in trying to destroy the unions, and have put in place progressively stricter legislation against political protests.
Meanwhile, under the guise of combating ‘fake news’, internet companies like Google and Facebook are trying to drive left-wing, alternative news networks and sites off the Net.
The Code Pink and Green Party campaigner, Vijay Prashad, gave a speech in Washington, where he stated that Trump could be the last president of the US. If he doesn’t destroy the world, the political processes that are operating under him could result in him being the last democratically elected president, should the elites get tired of democracy.
Trump’s regime is certainly Fascistic, particularly in the support it receives from racist, White supremacist and openly Nazi organisations. If the business elites bankrolling the two parties do get tired of democracy – and due to their pernicious influence Harvard University has described the current American political system as an oligarchy, rather than democracy – then the transition to real Fascism will have been completed.
And where the Republicans go in America, the Tories over here in Britain duly follow.
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