Corporatism: An Introduction to Fascist Economics
1. Introduction and a Basic Argument For Corporatism.
When people hear the word “Corporatism,” they think of cronyism, Fascism, or maybe both. This association is deep-rooted, and it’s one that should be fought against. Corporatism ought to have no connection with cronyism (corporatocracy), and in actuality is diametrically opposed to it. Corporatism calls for a total war against the whole rule of Mammon. Corporatism shouldn’t be associated with the modern capitalist entities we now call “corporations” either. The term itself is much older, it refers to the guilds in Italy called “Corporazioni delle Arti e dei Mestieri” (Corporations of Arts and Crafts). In fact, the doctrine of Corporatism is far older than the guilds in Italy too, with different theoreticians and political figures coming at it from a variety of angles. Elements of Corporatism can be found within feudal societies and in the political writings of Christians like St. Thomas Aquinas.
Corporatism is an essential part of both National Socialism and Fascism, but the scopes of Corporatism go far beyond just these two ideologies. For example, Portugal under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was Corporatist, but he was in no way a Fascist or a National Socialist since for him Fascism was “Pagan Caesarism” and he therefore suppressed the National Syndicalists in his country. Instead, his Corporatism was rooted in his Catholicism. Likewise, in the former Portuguese colony of Brazil, the strongman Getúlio Vargas established a non-Fascistic Corporate state. The same can be said of King Carol II in Romania, after his establishment of a royal dictatorship, during the late 1930’s which violently suppressed the Iron Guard.
There are even older examples, not all using the name “Corporatism,” such as the State Socialism of Otto von Bismarck, which never called its system “Corporatist” but should be labeled as a variety of it.
Now, this leads us to ask, what exactly is Corporatism? Corporatism, simply put, is a system of representation that subordinates all the interests of society to the nation as a whole by forming occupational trade associations like guilds, unions, and labor courts. We have seen many such organizations even in non-corporate states such as In America,which had labor courts in the states of Kansas, and Pennsylvania.
We can also see that unions in non-Corporate societies are poorly run, which makes America a perfect example of this. Under Corporate society, unions are made organs of the state instead of being left to cause untold economic damage.
This is more than a defense of Corporatism but also a defense of nationalism. First, we view them as one and the same. Second, the main argument for Corporatism is built on nationalism. Corporatism not only has a history with nationalism but one cannot be a Corporatist without being a nationalist.
Capital has been seen as an anti-national force as far back as the 18th century. Under liberal capitalism, large corporations benefit from putting their own private interest above that of the good of the national interest. In doing so, they threaten the nation’s customs, culture, and traditions if those very things are seen as barriers to further profit, which is why we see a push for things like globalism, immigration, and other such anti-nationalist policies at the behest of that plutocratic capitalist class who exert their influence on the state apparatus. No group should be allowed to advance itself at the cost of the nation and unified society. Thus, capitalism is, by its very nature, anti-nationalistic. At the very least, a de facto supremacy of the state is needed and for all dogmatism of laissez-faire to be abandoned; however, these two things alone do not create harmony by themselves.
I should start by stating that I will focus on the United States. In 2014 Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page put out a study that looked at 1,779 policy changes from 1981 to 2002, and they found that policy is informed by elite opinion, then to lesser extent interest groups.
“In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.“
—Gilens, M; Page, Benjamin I (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens; page 24.
And in a related 2015 paper, Gilens looked at 2,245 policy changes from 1964 to 2006 and found similar results. “When the preferences of less well-off Americans diverge from those at the top of the income distribution”, Gilens writes, “the preferences of the less well-off appear to have virtually no relationship with policy outcomes.”
What Gilens study shows is that for the bottom 90% of Americans, no matter how popular, or unpopular, a policy position is there is always around a 30% chance that a policy will be enacted. But when it comes to elite opinions, those in the top ten percent, their preferences (especially what they don’t like) are much better approximated through legislation.
“Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened.”
—Gilens, M; Page, Benjamin I (2014). Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens; page 24.
The point is that state decisions are primarily guided by a capitalist elite class. Liberalism is the rule of capital and capital in its earliest stages proved itself to be an anti-national force. Moreover, things like the LGBT movement and the phenomenon of transgenderism can be traced back to the logic and flows of capitalism, namely with both Gender Accelerationism and the private sectors support of the LGBT movement. Former mafia boss of the Colombo family, Michael Franzese provides us with excellent explanations.
“Corporate lobbyists are embedded in Congressional staff. They provide data, polling information, white papers, and policy recommendations that Hill staffers depend on to create new regulations or revise policies.”
—Franzese, Michael (2022). Mafia Democracy: How Our Republic Became a Mob Racket. Nevada: Lioncrest Publishing; page 64.
“Al Capone was right when he said, “Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class.” I couldn’t agree more. Both parties are guilty. In 2015, the billionaire Koch brothers brought together a group of big spenders for a retreat in Palm Springs, California. There, they unveiled a plan to raise around $1 billion dollars before the primaries started, giving the group unprecedented influence over who the likely Republican candidate would be. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Rand Paul all showed up to chat and stick out their hands. Democrats like George Soros and Tom Steyer also dole out millions to progressive candidates, giving the two of them an outsized influence over elections.”
—Franzese, Michael (2022). Mafia Democracy: How Our Republic Became a Mob Racket. Nevada: Lioncrest Publishing; page 77.
“In truth, the CEOs and elected officials on the House Financial Services Committee weren’t adversaries. They were partners. They were conspirators. They relied on each other-the congressman for campaign money and the CEOs for the billions in free money they needed to correct their mistakes. What a life! What’s more, when politicians and policy experts leave Washington, many go to work at places like Goldman Sachs. When the government needs help writing financial regulations, they recruit executives from places like Goldman Sachs. It’s a revolving door. It’s why Capitol Hill is often referred to as government sachs.”
—Franzese, Michael (2022). Mafia Democracy: How Our Republic Became a Mob Racket. Nevada: Lioncrest Publishing; page 79.
Corporatism has the subordination of all the interests of society to the nation as a whole, as it’s goal. It is a fight against the whole rule of Mammon. So in essence this phenomenon of lobbyism would not exist, I will explain this more later on. On the other hand, the class war of Marxism and the original syndicalism (that later became Fascism) is also anti-national. Both Liberal Capitalism and Marxist Communism must be viewed as anti-national. And for Marx Corporatism is reactionary because:
“Marx does not seem to have asked himself what would happen if the economic system were on the downgrade; he never dreamt of the possibility of a revolution which would return to the past, or even social conservation as its ideal. We see nowadays that such a revolution might eventually come to pass; the friends of Jaures, the clerics, and the democrats all take the middle ages as their idea for the future; they would like competition to be tempered, riches limited, production subordinated to needs. These are dreams which Marx looked upon as reactionary, and consequently negligible, because it seems to him that capitalism embarked on irreversible progress; but nowadays we see considerable forces grouped together in the endeavor to reform the capitalist economic system by bringing it, with the aid of laws, nearer to the medieval idea.”
—Sorel, Georges (1908). Reflections on Violence. London: George Allen & Unwin LTD., 1925; pages 91-92.
Marx himself did call a few different forms of Corporatism “reactionary socialism” and “Petty-Bourgeois” in the Manifesto of The Communist Party. Marx however also goes as far as to call Pierre Proudhon a “Conservative” and a “Bourgeois Socialist,” viewing the socialism of François-Noël Babeuf, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Robert Owen as conservatives, even though they were some of the first revolutionary proletarians. Somehow Marx believed they “had necessarily a reactionary character” and all their followers were reactionary.
When Marx calls something reactionary it is because it does not fit into his specific, unrealistic, and truly unscientific view of socialism. Proudhon for Marx is “Conservative” and “Bourgeois” because he advocates for things like protective duties just “for the benefit of the working class.” The mutualism of Proudhon has markets and even with the removal of the state it’s still, for Marx, “Bourgeois.” Utopian socialists did not emphasize class war and “habitually appeal to society at large,” so, for Marx, even if Fourier and Owen are revolutionary, the Owenites and Fourierists are not for Marx. However, Corporatism can be reactionary and conservative (I would argue that reactionaries and conservatives should be), but it can also be revolutionary such as in the case of Fascism.
2. The Problems of Capitalism
All systems of economics are ethical if one admits it or not. In order for any system to be prescriptive, it must be ethical and it is impossible to make prescriptions without ethics. Economics should be subordinate to politics and politics is subordinate to ethics. First, we will talk about how the individualist philosophy of mammon is incompatible with nationalism, then about how capitalism is an anti-national force.
As stated before, Capitalism inevitably creates a plutocratic capitalist elite class that does not care for the nation. These, for lack of a better term, “racist liberals” do not understand this. They romanticize some mythical past heights of the American liberal-capitalist society but are way too mentally challenged to see that it was just the first stages of this cancer. Nationalism proper comes at the birth of the modern republic and the death of the dynastic state, then reaches its true form with the Jacobins. This alone does not make nationalism and capitalism incompatible; however, nationalism has many of the same roots as socialism.
While capital is an anti-national force, there are some things I want to address. Some will point to the racist statements of classical liberals, people who paradoxically call themselves “national capitalists,” or point out that the American founding fathers owned slaves. First, this goes against the view that “all men are equal,” and their views of race are that of “racist liberals” as many Germans, Irish, and Italians were considered “swarthy” while Anglos and Ashkenazi Jews were the only ones who could be considered “white.” I also don’t want to hear about how people like John Stuart Mill, Max Weber, and Isaiah Berlin were sympathetic to the importance of national identity (note that Mill later became more critical of economic liberalism) for the same reasons. People pointing to authoritarian liberals like Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet is just as meaningless. Pinochet was a CIA puppet, while Franco subverted and betrayed a nationalist movement.
Both Liberalism and Marxism see man, not as a communal being, but as an individual. Let me show you an infamous line from Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations compared to a line from Marx:
“It is certainly not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our lunch, but from the fact they take care of their interest. We do not turn to their humanity but to their egoism and we never speak to them of our needs, but of their gains. No one who is not a beggar ever chooses to depend above all on the benevolence of his fellow citizens, and even a beggar does not depend exclusively on it.”
—Smith, Adam (1776). An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. New York: Random House, 1937; page 14.
Here we see how Adam Smith views man as an egoistic and individualistic agent. And before we get into Thomas Hobbes or other individualists that influenced liberalism we will show that Marx too understood man as an individual.
“The only force that brings them together and puts them in relation is that of their own profit, their particular advantage, and their private interests. And precisely because each one looks to himself only, and no one bothers about the rest, they do all, in agreement with a pre-established harmony of things, or under the auspices of an all- shrewd providence, for common profit, and the interest of all.”
—Marx, Karl (1867). Capital, Volume One. British Columbia: Modern Barbarian Press, 2018; page 123.
I know some will argue that Marx is being an agnostic because of the last line, however, to me it, sounds like an egoistic individualism that wears the mask of the “common good.” In fact the philosopher of Fascism Giovanni Gentile, noticed that “liberalism and Marxism are both individualistic insofar as they both deny a reality superior to that of material life which has its measure in the individual.” Gentile then correctly asserts that, “materialists are always individualists.”
For liberalism, man is individualistic and egoist by his own nature, thus, the nation starts to become somewhat of an abstract creation for the protection of property and individual negative rights. We can also see some of these ideas in the physiocrats, and even in some of the market theories of the medieval Islamic world (without the same individualism). So, liberalism will protect capital and economic competition over anything else. Even for the market theories of the Islamic world in men like Ibn Khaldun, there is still a greater “sharia”, the importance of “asabiyya,” and community (Ummah). Other Islamic thinkers like Ibn Taimiyah reach more proto-Corporatist conclusions.
In the West, liberal individualism was already refuted by Aristotle and Hegel. This individualism leaves society atomized and breaks the ethnic bonds and fabric as a whole. Hegel and Aristotle have a similar understanding of the ethical life (see §142 of Philosophy of Right) and remember the context all this must be put in. Here the self-conscious or individual comes to develop themselves in relation to other individuals such as the family, the state, and civil society— the family being the first and most important), showing the falsehoods of Hobbes, John Locke, and others.
“From these things it is evident, then, that the city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and that man is by nature a political animal. He who is without a city through nature rather than chance is either a mean sort or superior to man; he is “without clan, without law, without hearth,” like the person reproved by Homer; for the one who is such by nature has by this fact a desire for war, as if he were an isolated piece in a game of backgammon.”
—Aristotle (350 B.C.E). Politics. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press LTD., 2013; page 4.
The subject can only develop in relation to other subjects and language would seem to point to this, as language is not something you are born with, but something given to you by a pre-existing community. So, the idea of these different atomized and de-ethnicized individuals making up a commonwealth, called the Leviathan, is absolutely absurd.
“In Hegel’s words, ‘ethical powers govern the life individuals and have their representation, their figure and phenomenical reality, precisely in individuals are their contingencies’ (§ 145). The Robinsonian abstract individualism typical of the Enlightenment is dialectically overturned into a concrete, communitarian and historically determined ethics. In such an ethics, the individual is projected into the concreteness of intersubjective and communitarian relations that make him, with Aristotle’s Politics […]”
—Fusaro, Diego (2018). Hegel and the Primacy of Politics: Taming the Wild Beast of the Market. London: Pertinent Press; page 126.
In prescription, Hobbes is reactionary but in description, he is a liberal because much of the liberal capitalistic view is taken from Hobbes. More than this atomized view, liberalism also takes from Hobbes its understanding of freedom. but Hegel attacks this understanding of freedom and of right as it is false and materialistic. (See §40 of his Philosophy of Right) Liberalism is about the preservation of individualistic and negative freedom and rights, caring little for the nation, and even less for a Stoic or Christian understanding of freedom. This view of freedom was shown to be false by the stoics, such as when one asks “how free is a meth addict the next time he takes meth?” And so Liberalism has always been against true nationalism.
We must make clear that nationalism is not just pushing national identity or race-based identity politics or even something fitting into those lines. This is something even so-called “nationalists” don’t even understand. Nationalism is not a mere semantic change from tribalism. What many of these people call “nationalism” is only but a part of the picture. This bastardization of nationalism is why you have things like the National-Anarchist Movement, White Nationalism, to Black Nationalists who use this vulgar understanding of nationalism to justify their contradictory beliefs. True Nationalism, as Eugen Weber points out in his book Varieties of Fascism, has its roots in the Jacobins, more specifically Napoleon Bonaparte (what Marx called Bonapartism). Nationalism promotes unity, harmony and raises up the people of a nation. Liberalism is a type of individualism that creates class conflict and promotes one class above the rest. Corporatism has the same ethics as nationalism, the Volksgemeinschaft (National Folk-Community).
Heavily inspired by Napoleon’s populistic revision of Jacobinism, the Nazis concept of the Volksgemeinschaft reoriented the focus of the subject identity from the soil and territory of a sovereign, to the people and social bonds of a sovereign. Napoleon was not “Emperor of France”, but rather “Emperor of the French”. Adolf Hitler, likewise, was not “Leader of Germany” but rather “Leader of the German People”.
“Adolf Hitler has set his stamp on the word folk-community [Volksgemeinschaft]. This word is to make completely clear to the members of our people that the individual is nothing, when not a member of a community, and that the natural community is only the community of men of the same origin, same language, and same culture, i. e. the folk-community.”
“The folk-community is the natural presupposition for the existence of the whole people and indirectly, in the end, for the existence of each individual. Whoever wants to live and thrive in this world is obligated in the nature of things to orient his struggle for existence mainly toward the struggle for the vital rights of the folk-community and thus of the nation.”
“The folk-community is not spatially bounded; it includes all members of the people, without regard to residence or temporary place of abode; thus it includes also those who live outside the borders of the German state.”
—Murphy, Raymond E.; Stevens, Francis B.; Trivers, Howard; Roland, Joseph M. ed (et al., 1948). National Socialism: Basic Principles, Their Application by the Nazi Party’s Foreign Organization, and the Use of Germans Abroad for Nazi Aims. Washington D.C: Government printing office; page 71.
The Volksgemeischaft was in essence the organic community of ethnic people bound together in language, custom, tradition, economy and heritage, now awoken collectively with the worldview of National Socialism, which has actualized the “race” by harmonizing the concept of the nation and the concept of the state as a singular idea.
Out of this the Volksgemeinschaft ties every German in the world together irrespective of class, social standing, residence, political affiliation or foreign citizenship. Every member of the Volksgemeinschaft has an unspoken duty of obedience to the will of the Volk (people) which is embodied in the Führer via the Führerprinzip (leader principle). As such, the Volksgemeinschaft’s social obligations determine and drive the economic decisions of every German in the world. Borderless and unbound, irrespective of where he may find himself in the world or in what condition, the German is expected to always remain true and loyal to the obligations put on him by the Volksgemeinschaft.
The accusation that capital has no care for the nation or lacks a Volksgemeinschaft is certain to receive some backlash from some right wingers. To use an example that virtually everyone in the so-called “right wing” agrees is bad, as different as we may be, I take immigration and multiculturalism. Immigration benefits a few, and thus it’s pushed for those who benefit from it (reserve army of labour). However, as you will see it harms everyone else and one doesn’t have to look long to see their offspring are left without a culture, and so, turn to empty consumerism. And, as Ryan Faulk shows us here:
“The entire budget deficit, along with some proportion of the national debt itself, are a function of black and hispanic populations. The net effect of these two populations, even after taking away all military spending from them, costs the US $822.5 billion per year.”
—Faulk, Ryan. (2020). Fiscal Impact by Race in 2018. The Alternative Hypothesis. Recovered by: [https://thealternativehypothesis.org/index.php/2020/03/19/fiscal-impact-by-race-in-2018/].
In the case of America, these immigrants are taking more out of our system than they put back in through taxes. One can’t use the argument that “they take too much welfare” because white people take more out; however, white people put more back into the system than Hispanics and Blacks do. This is not just one class benefiting at the cost of another, but at the cost of the whole nation. Why is there such a push for something that creates lower altruism, greater distrust, lower quality of life, and social isolation?
“Diversity does not produce ‘bad race relations’ or ethnically-defined group hostility, our findings suggest. Rather, inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbours, regardless of the colour of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”
—Putnam, Robert D (2007). E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century. The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture. Scandinavian Political Studies, Vol. 30 – No. 2; pages 150-151. Recovered by: [https://www.puttingourdifferencestowork.com/pdf/j.1467-9477.2007.00176%20Putnam%20Diversity.pdf].
Immigration is pushed because it means cheaper labor. The topic of immigration has been a selling point of mainstream Republican politicians in the most recent decades; however, even if they’re “hard on immigration,” they obfuscate by specifying they don’t want illegal immigration. Both legal and illegal immigration have the same effect on the economy and most importantly, on the nation. Even Donald Trump has repeatedly stated he would let more immigrants than ever before— just as long as they’re legal, of course. George J. Borjas even wrote a book on it, We Wanted Workers.
George Borjas in his paper Immigration and The American Worker calculated that all of the money immigrants contribute to the GDP only, 2% (35 billion dollars) redistributes to the native born citizens. Meaning that “immigration surplus” is only around 0.2% of the total GDP. Borjas concludes that:
“Even though the overall net impact on natives is small, this does not mean that the wage losses suffered by some natives or the income gains accruing to other natives are not substantial. Some groups of workers face a great deal of competition from immigrants. These workers are primarily, but by no means exclusively, at the bottom end of the skill distribution, doing lowwage jobs that require modest levels of education. Such workers make up a significant share of the nation’s working poor. The biggest winners from immigration are owners of businesses that employ a lot of immigrant labor and other users of immigrant labor. The other big winners are the immigrants themselves.”
—Borjas, George J. (2013). Immigration and The American Worker. Washington DC: Center for Immigration workers; page 3. Recovered by: [https://cis.org/sites/cis.org/files/borjas-economics.pdf].
Borjas (along with many other studies) in his book We Wanted Workers stated that:
“The most credible evidence based solely on the data—suggests that a 10 percent increase in the size of a skill group probably reduces the wage of that group by at least 3 percent.”
—Borjas, George J. (2016). We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative. New York: Norton & Company, Inc; page 129.
Immigration as it was noted earlier, reduces the social trust in society, that settlement can be felt in the workplace. In this study, Workers of The World Unite (or Not?), found that:
“Behavioral adaptations (also described as behavioral immune system) basically consist of a number of ancestrally adaptive attitudes, social values and norms towards out-group and in-group members, unwillingness to interact with out-group people and prejudice against people perceived as unhealthy, contaminated or unclean.7 In other words, human communities developed a set of cultural norms and social values aiming to be protected by infectious diseases (see e.g. Fincher and Thornhill, 2014 for more details on this). Since contemporary cultural values are affected -at least in part- by the behavioral immune system developed by local communities over the centuries, we expect regions that are located in more lethal disease environments to be characterized by more collectivistic norms (i.e. in-group favoritism, stronger family ties etc) even nowadays.”
—Benosa, Nikos; Kammasb, Pantelis (2018). Workers of the world unite (or not?). The effect of ethnic diversity on the participation in trade unions. MPRA Paper No. 84880; page 6. Recovered by: [https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/84880/1/MPRA_paper_84880.pdf].
This empirical data is exploited by large companies as well. In April of 2020, it was found that Amazon was able to track the risk of its stores unionizing based on how diverse they were. So it should be obvious why these capitalists support immigration. They get the benefit of cheap labor while workers bare the cost of losing the value of their labor by the increase of supply in the labor market. Add on to the fact that more diverse companies are less likely to unionize giving an incentive for companies to become more diverse, to lower the risks of a forced rise in wages. Due to all of this—it is very easy to understand why at the famous American Socialist Congress of 1910, American socialists adopted the following resolution:
“The Socialist party of the United States favors all legislative measures tending to prevent the immigration of strike breakers and contract laborers, and the mass importation of workers from foreign countries, brought about by the employing classes for the purpose of weakening the organization of American labor and of lowering the standard of life of the American workers.”
—Delegates to the 1910 “Congress” of the Socialist party of America, May 15-21, 1910; Chicago Illinois
The shipping of jobs to foreign markets is another good example. Here we will focus on the USA and China. Trade with China has been costing the USA lots of jobs, mostly in manufacturing. This is one class advancing itself at the cost of the nation and of the lower classes.
Our trade with China creates large displacements in jobs, mostly in manufacturing, driving down wages. This does help some US jobs but the impact is an overall net negative. Capitalists want more money and they will use immigration, as previously mentioned, and globalization to further their goals. This may be bad news for American workers but it’s great news for rich Anglo-American Jewish capitalists.
Growth in the US goods trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2013 eliminated or displaced 3.2 million US jobs, 2.4 million (three-fourths) of which were found in manufacturing. These lost manufacturing jobs account for about two-thirds of all US manufacturing jobs lost or displaced between December of 2001 and December of 2013.
“The 3.2 million U.S. jobs lost or displaced by the goods trade deficit with China between 2001 and 2013 were distributed among all 50 states and the District of Columbia, with the biggest net losses occurring in California (564,200 jobs), Texas (304,700), New York (179,200), Illinois (132,500), Pennsylvania (122,600), North Carolina (119,600), Florida (115,700), Ohio (106,400), Massachusetts (97,200), and Georgia (93,700). In percentage terms, the jobs lost or displaced due to the growing goods trade deficit with China in the 10 hardest-hit states ranged from 2.44 percent to 3.67 percent of the total state employment: Oregon (62,700 jobs lost or displaced, equal to 3.67 percent of total state employment), California (564,200 jobs, 3.43 percent), New Hampshire (22,700 jobs, 3.31 percent), Minnesota (83,300 jobs, 3.05 percent), Massachusetts (97,200 jobs, 2.96 percent), North Carolina (119,600 jobs, 2.85 percent), Texas (304,700 jobs, 2.66 percent), Rhode Island (13,200 jobs, 2.58 percent), Vermont (8,200 jobs, 2.51 percent), and Idaho (16,700 jobs, 2.44 percent).”
—Kimball, Will; Scott, Robert E. (2014). China Trade, Outsourcing and Jobs: Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, with job losses in every state. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by: [https://www.epi.org/publication/china-trade-outsourcing-and-jobs/].
The job displacement estimates in this study are conservative. They include only the jobs directly or indirectly displaced by trade and exclude jobs in domestic wholesale and retail trade or advertising. They also do not account for the fact that during the Great Recession of 2007–2009, and continuing through 2013, jobs displaced by China trade reduced wages and spending, which led to further job losses.
“Further, the jobs impact of the U.S. trade deficit with China is not limited to job loss and displacement and the associated direct wages losses. Competition with low-wage workers from less-developed countries such as China has driven down wages for workers in U.S. manufacturing and reduced the wages and bargaining power of similar, non-college-educated workers throughout the economy, as previous EPI research has shown. The affected population includes essentially all workers with less than a four-year college degree—roughly 70 percent of the workforce, or about 100 million workers”.
—Kimball, Will; Scott, Robert E. (2014). China Trade, Outsourcing and Jobs: Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, with job losses in every state. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by: [https://www.epi.org/publication/china-trade-outsourcing-and-jobs/].
“As earlier EPI research has shown, trade with China between 2001 and 2011 displaced 2.7 million workers, who suffered a direct loss of $37.0 billion in reduced wages alone in 2011. The nation’s 100 million non-college-educated workers suffered a total loss of roughly $180 billion due to increased trade with low-wage countries (Bivens 2013). These indirect wage losses were nearly five times greater than the direct losses suffered by workers displaced by China trade, and the pool of affected workers was nearly 40 times larger (100 million non-college-educated workers versus 2.7 million displaced workers).”
—Kimball, Will; Scott, Robert E. (2014). China Trade, Outsourcing and Jobs: Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, with job losses in every state. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by: [https://www.epi.org/publication/china-trade-outsourcing-and-jobs/].
Yes, this supports some US jobs. However, the overall net impact here is extremely negative:
“As shown in the bottom half of Table 1, U.S. exports to China in 2001 supported 161,400 jobs, but U.S. imports displaced production that would have supported 1,127,700 jobs. Therefore, the $84.1 billion trade deficit in 2001 displaced 966,300 jobs in that year. Net job displacement rose to 3,121,000 jobs in 2008 and 4,123,400 jobs in 2013.”
—Kimball, Will; Scott, Robert E. (2014). China Trade, Outsourcing and Jobs: Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 3.2 million jobs between 2001 and 2013, with job losses in every state. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by: [https://www.epi.org/publication/china-trade-outsourcing-and-jobs/].
One of the biggest mistakes that America ever made was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). NAFTA was a free trade and investment agreement that provided investors with a unique set of guarantees designed to stimulate foreign direct investment and the movement of factories within the hemisphere, especially from the United States to Canada and Mexico. The economist Robert E Scott said in his paper The High Price of ‘Free’ Trade:
“Since the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was signed in 1993, the rise in the U.S. trade deficit with Canada and Mexico through 2002 has caused the displacement of production that supported 879,280 U.S. jobs. Most of those lost jobs were high-wage positions in manufacturing industries. The loss of these jobs is just the most visible tip of NAFTA’s impact on the U.S. economy. In fact, NAFTA has also contributed to rising income inequality, suppressed real wages for production workers, weakened workers’ collective bargaining powers and ability to organize unions, and reduced fringe benefits.”
—Scott, Robert E. (2003) The High Price of ‘Free’ Trade. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by [https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/].
“The effects of growing U.S. trade and trade deficits on wages goes beyond just those workers exposed directly to foreign competition. As the trade deficit limits jobs in the manufacturing sector, the new supply of workers to the service sector (from displaced workers plus young workers not able to find manufacturing jobs) depresses the wages of those already holding service jobs.”
—Scott, Robert E. (2003) The High Price of ‘Free’ Trade. Economic Policy Institute. Recovered by [https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp147/].
Free trade absolutely ruined America’s manufacturing industry. In 1960, manufacturing jobs made up 28% of US total employment. In 2017 it was only 8%, in 2026 it’s estimated that it will be around 6.9%. Manufacturing was what made it possible for lower skilled men to find a good paying job, which was what allowed for families to form. Due to liberal trade policies raising the trade deficit, lower skilled workers have had their wages suppressed and jobs displaced which led to the destruction of the middle class and the traditional family.
You even have people like Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist, who push this. Thiel wants the government to empower corporations by putting key functions that are typical of a government into the hands of corporations. This is shrinking the state while expanding business power, at the same time these companies push deracination into society. Not only that, but government is scapegoated when there is a problem, as any problem would be the “fault” of big government and not that of big business.
This is the end goal of capitalism, an atomized anti-cultural society where you are sold corporate products while you slave away in the economy paying for subscription services (ie your fridge, car, home, etc). This is an obvious echo of the World Economic Forum saying: “You’ll own nothing. And you’ll be happy. What you want you’ll rent, and it’ll be delivered by drone.” Notice should be given to the fact that Thiel is close friends with Curtis Yarvin, also known as Mencius Moldbug, who pushes Neo-Reactionary (NRx) ideas, which are aligned perfectly with Thiel’s goals. The NRx movement is one that pushes for corporations to gain dominance in society and to basically transform themselves into “kingdoms” where the corporation is allowed to do as they please. But in a Revolutionary State, this wouldn’t happen:
The key functions of a state are relegated to corporations, who gain massive amounts of power over vast swathes of society while having no accountability for the use of this power. To those who would say that “Fscism is capitalism in decay” the words of Nick Land, another prominent NRx thinker, prove this incorrect as he can be quoted saying that “Fascism is a mass anti-capitalist movement.” The NRx movement is the end goal of the materialist ideologies, it is the “stateless” society with no distinguishing features between people, which would allow a corporation to sell as much cheap product as they can produce for the maximum profit of the capitalist class. And this is confirmed by Klaus Schwab himself:
“‘Stakeholder capitalism,’ a model I first proposed a half-century ago, positions private corporations as trustees of society, and is clearly the best response to today’s social and environmental challenges.”
“Business leaders now have an incredible opportunity. By giving stakeholder capitalism concrete meaning, they can move beyond their legal obligations and uphold their duty to society. They can bring the world closer to achieving shared goals, such as those outlined in the Paris climate agreement and the United Nations Sustainable Development Agenda. If they really want to leave their mark on the world, there is no alternative.“
—Schwab, Klaus (2020). What Kind of Capitalism Do We Want? Recovered by: [https://time.com/5742066/klaus-schwab-stakeholder-capitalism-davos/].
3. The Problem of Marxism
Few Corporatists would have ever called themselves “materialist,” other than maybe Gustavo Bueno in Spain if you want to call him a Corporatist. Marxism, however, is built on so-called “materialism” but, in truth, it is not. Marxism is a humanistic morality based on class struggle, making it incompatible with any form of Corporatism. This is also why the term “National Bolshevik” is an oxymoron. Bolshevism seeks not just class warfare and the disintegration of nation but inevitably the state too. This is why it is not compatible with nationalism or Corporatism. It’s in the ethics of Marx that Marxism gets its actual strength.
“Does not socialism contain the highest morality, anti-egoism, self-sacrifice, philanthropy?”
—Gentile, Giovanni (1899/1937). The Philosophy of Marx. Vitale, Caterina and Simpson, Shandon; Antelope Hill edition, 2022; page 27.
However, the fact Marxism is a revolutionary view makes it ethical as, without it, it would have no reason to engage in revolutionary praxis. Marxism makes prescriptions but because it has no ethics it can not make prescriptions, thus, all the prescriptions of Marxism are bankrupt, as they have nothing underlining ethics to justify them.
Many of the critics of Marx miss this. One may for example say that Marxism fails at materialism because it promotes violent revolution, and:
“We, the ‘revolutionaries,’ are profiting more by lawful than by unlawful and revolutionary means.”
—Sombart, Werner (1909). Socialism and The Social Movement. London/New York: J. M. Dent & Co/ E. P. Dutton & Co, 1968; page 68.
Or that the dictatorship of the proletariat is “absurd” or “unpractical” in democratic countries. In fact Friedrich Engels in his introduction to The Class Struggles In France, Engels (maybe Marx too) changed his views. I hope this helps to cement my point into your mind. They both have ethical end goals, that being socialism.
The so-called “materialism” exists to give a practical direction and the illusion of a solid justification. The problem isn’t that this or that method of reaching socialism is impractical, but that Marxism put itself in contradiction when it made itself revolutionary and socialist. If Marxism was actually materialist it would do as it partly pretends to do, being a passive observer and predictor, and not push for any revolution; however, because it pushes for revolution, it is now a self-fulfilling prophecy that didn’t even fulfill itself. Marx is more of a phantom than the Utopian and Anarchist socialists that he was refuting, showing his own poverty of philosophy compared to Proudhon. Marx is also less grounded than the cloudy and sometimes insane predictions of Fourier. I am not the first to see this. The fact that Marxism projects ethics of class struggle has been stated by other Marxists.
“But is there such a thing as communist ethics? Is there such a thing as communist morality? Of course, there is. It is often made to appear that we have no ethics of our own; and very often the bourgeoisie accuse us communists of rejecting all ethics. This is a method of shuffling concepts, of throwing dust in the eyes of the workers and peasants. […]
In the sense in which it is preached by the bourgeoisie, who derived ethics from God’s commandments. We, of course, say that we do not believe in God, and that we know perfectly well that the clergy, the landlords and the bourgeoisie spoke in the name of God in pursuit of their own interests as exploiters. Or instead of deriving ethics from the commandments of morality, from the commandments of God, they derived them from idealist or semi-idealist phrases, which always amounted to something very similar to God’s commandments.
We reject all morality based on extra-human and extraclass concepts. We say that it is a deception, a fraud, a befogging of the minds of the workers and peasants in the interests of the landlords and capitalists.
We say that our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat […].”
—Lenin, Vladimir (1920). Tasks of The Youth Leagues. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975; pages 10-11.
This so-called “materialism” is best called a tactical weaponized nihilism with the mask of historical determinism. The term “economic determinism” is a bit misleading, however it’s true that Marx frequently refers to processes in which actions motivated by one set of economic priorities lead to new situations producing new economic priorities. But in ways that Richard W. Miller covers political phenomena are core to the views of Marx. Now, what do I mean by this? Marx is not a nihilist, as would be consistent with materialism because Marx and Marxists hold on to a consequentialist morality of class struggle but attack their enemies as being too moral.
“In a very broad sense, Marx is a moralist, and sometimes a stern one: he offers a rationale for conduct that sometimes requires self-sacrifice in the interests of others. […]
At the same time, Marx often explicitly attacks morality and fundamental moral notions. He accepts the charge that ‘Communism […] abolishes […] all morality, instead of constituting [it] on a new basis.’ The materialist theory of ideology is supposed to have ‘shattered the basis of all morality, whether the morality of asceticism or of enjoyment.’ Talk of ‘equal right’ and ‘fair distribution’ is, he says, ‘a crime,’ forcing ‘on our Party’ […] obsolete verbal rubbish […] ideological nonsense about right and other trash so common among the democrats and French Socialists.”
—Miller, Richard W. (1984). Analyzing Marx: Morality, Power and History. New Jersey: Princeton University Press; page 15.
Miller is correct to point out that most of the claims that Marx was a Moralist comes down to just the language Marx uses and not the theory itself. But as he points out “in short, with respect to a very large audience, Marx advocates principles that are supposed to guide present-day social and political choice in the same way as a political morality.”
This is not a replacement of morality as Miller claims and as Marx wants it to be. This is a consequentialist morality of one class, with the other function of being a tactical weaponized nihilism with the mask of historical determinism. However, if it is inevitable, coming from the exploitation and contradictions of capitalism, and if no moral judgments can be made, then it has no reason to engage in the anti-nationalist revolutionary praxis other than to turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Marx will even attack people who side with him on bettering the life of the proletariat. Like with Proudhon, he thinks the views of Mikhail Bakunin to be utopian and too moralistic. For example, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx attacks Proudhon just for believing in good and bad. He tries to show the problem with the example by defending American slavery but there are problems here: Marx viewed slavery as — and I want to be clear — at the time “preventing anarchy.” But, even if Marx was right, slavery can still be argued as being morally bad, as Proudhon does with the state. Marx uses the attack of someone being moral as a tactical weaponized nihilism, but would not do the same to his own views. The same holds present when he attacks Hegel for using “right.”
Marxism hides that this is a moral view with the mask of historical determinism. Here it takes and adapts Hegel’s dialectic of master and slave as we see it in the Phenomenology of Spirit and Encyclopedia, and for this reason, Marx says in the Paris Manuscripts that the Phenomenology contains the fundamental elements of revolution. For Marx, the oppression of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie makes communism inevitable. Parroting Hegel’s view, as stated in his Encyclopedia (§435), the slave ultimately rises above the master. Thus, the proletariat, after it achieves greater self-consciousness, will do the same.
“The full unfolding of conflictuality corresponds, in Hegelian terms, with the dialectical figure of the Servant and Master found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. The bourgeoisie gives work to the proletariat and, at the same time, makes a living of such work; through the latter, the proletarian Servant attains consciousness of himself and of his condition and can act in view of the transcendence of the socio-political order. He can constitute himself as a class an sich und für sich, in-itself and for-itself, as a class that effectively is and knows of being so. The attainment of consciousness may only be given within the conflict, and only because of it; and this according to the idealistic theme of the identity between being and knowing, Which is identified as class consciousness, so that, as highlighted by Gramsci, a worker is proletarian when he knows of being so and when he operates according to this awareness.”
—Fusaro, Diego (2018). Hegel and the Primacy of Politics: Taming the Wild Beast of the Market. London: Pertinent Press; pages 154-155.
Marx’s belief that Communism is the last mode of human life, capitalism has the same belief. In both worldviews, there is nothing other than further “progress” of a technical nature. Both doctrines represent the “end of history.” Marxist types of socialism are “capitalistic” because they do not aim to replace money-based values, “but to possess them.” See, for instance, how Marx talks of Free Trade:
“Generally speaking, the protectionist system today is conservative, whereas the Free Trade system has a destructive effect. It destroys the former nationalities and renders the contrast between proletariat and bourgeois more acute. In a word, the Free Trade system is precipitating the social revolution. And only in this revolutionary sense do I vote for Free Trade.”
—Engels, Friedrich (1888). On The Question of Free Trade. Preface for the 1888 English edition pamphlet. Recovered by: [https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1888/free-trade/#:~:text=The%20question%20of%20Free%20Trade%20or%20Protection%20moves%20entirely%20within,do%20away%20with%20that%20system]
Those who advocate free trade while calling themselves conservatives might like to consider why Marx supported free trade and described it as both “destructive” and as “revolutionary.” Marx saw it as the necessary ingredient of the dialectic process that is imposing universal standardization; this is likewise precisely the aim of Communism.
Marx condemned opposition to this process as “reactionary.” He saw the constant need for the revolutionizing of the instruments of production as inevitable under capitalism, and this in turn brought society into a continual state of flux, of “everlasting uncertainty and agitation,” which distinguishes the “bourgeoisie epoch from all other ones.”
The “need for a constantly expanding market” means that capitalism spreads globally, and thereby gives a “cosmopolitan character” to “modes of production and consumption in every country.” In Marxist dialectics, this is a necessary part of destroying national boundaries and distinctive cultures as a prelude to world socialism. It is capitalism that establishes the basis for internationalism.
So as we can see the ethics of class struggle itself are anti-national. Really, we should not have to go further than that. The contradiction within the ethics of Marxism is almost irrelevant. Even the syndicalists before they became Fascists are anti-national as they believed in class-war, and that:
“The first thing that must disappear is the State, which is the most outstanding representative of non-productive, parasitic Society”
—Berth, Édouard (1908). Anarchism and Syndicalism. Recovered by: [https://libcom.org/article/anarchism-and-syndicalism-edouard-berth].
Furthermore, we can see they attacked the national sentiment:
“Today it is notorious that revolutionary patriotism is dead; something else has arisen to take its place, a new feeling: the class idea which has replaced the idea of the fatherland, defining the split between the people on the one side and the State and democracy on the other. For with the appearance of revolutionary syndicalism a strange opposition has arisen between democracy and socialism, between the citizen and the producer, an opposition that has assumed its crudest as well as its most abstract form in the resolute rejection of the idea of the fatherland, which is identified with the idea of the State. And the strikes, which are becoming increasingly more powerful, more widespread and more frequent, are revealing to a surprised world the collective power of the workers, who are becoming more class conscious and more self-controlled with each passing day.”
—Berth, Édouard (1908). Anarchism and Syndicalism. Recovered by: [https://libcom.org/article/anarchism-and-syndicalism-edouard-berth].
Self-governance of the workers, more than just being anti-nationalistic, has another obvious problem of anarchism. Even if many of the old syndicalists outside of Georges Sorel were hostile to anarchism (to the point of arguing Proudhon was not an anarchist) it was in all practicality Anarchist (as was pointed out by Werner Sombart). Gentile comments on the syndicalist view against the state:
“[…] opposing liberal individualism, which it has considered abstract and therefore unreal. Alternatively, one might consider pure Syndicalism. But pure Syndicalism is not the syndicalism of obligatory syndicates — whose very legal recognition implies a principle of obligation to an entity superior to the syndicates, that is to say to a State to which the syndicates would be subordinate. That relationship would contradict the central principle of pure Syndicalism which does not recognize any legitimate power external to the spontaneous and free syndicate. Pure Syndicalism prefers the de facto syndicate to the legally recognized syndicate. Pure Syndicalism aspires to absorb the State in itself. In the spontaneous and inevitably fragmentary character and multiplicity of the syndicates, essential unity would be destroyed. Pure Syndicalism is an ideal alternative that is antithetical to the most profound principles and inspirations of the Fascist State.”
—Gentile, Giovanni (2002). Origins and Doctrine of Fascism. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers; pages 71-72.
But nationalism, syndicalism, Corporatism, and Marxism are the same in that they all want to raise up the conditions of the proletariat. Marxists and those preachers of class warfare in their naive dogmatic fabrications built off either full-blown lies or half-truths will disagree, bringing up only the weakest of data points. For them, because we do not side with their anti-nationalism, we can only be against the proletariat.
Let me show you the kind of things they will point out, such as one example from New South Wales in Australia. In 1927, Jack Lang from the Labor party lost to Thomas Bavin of the Nationalist Party. Bavin then cut popular social programs put in place under Lang— all during an economic depression. Under Bavin, there were many violent clashes between striking workers and police. Lang was reelected in 1930.
Now, from the viewpoint of proponents of class warfare, Jack Lang may not be the best as he was anti-communist and later formed the Non-Communist Australian Labor Party, still, he was better than Thomas Bavin (unless you are an accelerationist).
Let’s look at the history of the Nationalist Party. Following the 1916 Labor split on the issue of World War I, Billy Hughes forms the National Labor Party. They later merged with the Commonwealth Liberal Party into the Nationalist Party. So, already we see the problem here. The National Party was born out of the Labor Party. The National Party was born out of labor. When you look at Bavin you should see one bad or inconsistent so-called “nationalist.”
Staying in Australia, we see Australian Socialism, Anarchism, and Communism are filled with people who are, for lack of a better way of putting it, racist. The White Australia Policy back in the early 1900s had a lot of support from both socialists and anarchists. These are not nationalists but were, for lack of a better term, racist. William Lane was no nationalist and, at the end of the day, wanted a stateless society but supported the White Australia Policy and wrote about a coming race war with the Chinese. Now, there is also just something about the Australian scene that makes people like this. Arthur Desmond, when he was a socialist politician in New Zealand, was an anti-racist. He attacked racism when writing about Te Kooti, but, upon moving to New South Wales, had become very anti-Semitic.
Maybe this is not the best example. We will go deeper when we respond to attacks made on Corporatism; however, these are proletarian movements but they are also nationalist so we do not want to “eat the rich” so to speak. What we want is Gleichshaltung (synchronization) of all classes and the economy. Fascism was a movement born out of the syndicalist labor movements of France and Italy. Nationalism itself — as I pointed out with Weber — comes from the Jacobins. When the Socialists in France and Italy became militant nationalists, they rejected things like class warfare as this goes against the nationalist ethic of unity and harmony of the nation. Gentile and Weber both correctly point out that Nationalists defending capitalism is paradoxical:
“Because Nationalism had been the first to challenge property rights for the sake of a superior interest.”
—Weber, Eugen (1964). Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company; page 24.
“Men like Maurice Barrès in France described themselves as National Socialist. They realized that national unity implied social justice, that national power implied the planned use of national resources, and that national harmony might mean the equalization or the redistribution of wealth and opportunity and economic power. Yet, they did not feel the need to maintain the established order at all costs. Putting the nation first and property second, they found their theories were leading them toward Jacobinism — even while the official left-wing heirs of Jacobins were moving in the opposite direction.”
—Weber, Eugen (1964). Varieties of Fascism: Doctrines of Revolution in the Twentieth Century. New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company; page 25.
This is the nationalist and the Corporatist view. Nationalism is like Corporatism and promotes unity, harmony, and raising up of the people of the nation. There is a trend leftists have to explain with these groups organized around the proletariat. Labor, unlike capital, is not anti-nation as they make up the workforce of the nation. Labor is only anti-national when made the weapon of class warfare and then, like in Marxism, becomes international. Labor, unlike capital, does not have a natural tendency to go against the nation. However, Marxists falsely view the proletariat as a child of the world.
Marxism and the non-Marxist preachers of class warfare will always view us as a movement that does one of two things: 1 we actively work to lower the conditions of the proletariat or 2 are a movement that adopts proletarian rhetoric as we need to prevent their international revolution. Thus they say:
“It is precisely the attempt to maintain the capitalist system which leads under modern conditions with fatal precision to the resort to Fascism.”
—Muste, A. J. (1935). A Reply to Liberal Critics of Bolshevism. The Position of the Workers Party on Proletarian Dictatorship and Worker’s Democracy in Light of Recent Events. New Militant, Vol. I No. 28, 6 July 1935, p. 4. Recovered by: [https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/muste/1935/07/reply1.htm].
One can simply look to State Capitalism and Dictatorship by Anton Pannekoek to see these baseless and absurd claims about how the capitalists ruled Nazi Germany. Yet Vladimir Lenin in The Tax In Kind pamphlet and Mao Zedong in a 1953 speech called, “State Capitalism”; both defined State Capitalism as just being interchangeable with State Socialism.
In fact this is the fatal flaw of Marxist economics. To make this argument let me appeal to Marx for a moment. According to Marx, Socialism is interchangeable with Communism, while the distinction of Socialism being a lower-phase of Communism was made by Lenin in The State and Revolution. It was also established that this lower-phase of communism, is characterized by a lack of the value form of commodity production in Critique of the Gotha Program, yet it was still present in every Marxist experiment. Another important feature of communism, including the lower-phase of it, socialism, is its absence of a state and classes as well which would mark all so-called socialist countries as only in the transitioning period to socialism. Another important characteristic is that the proletarian dictatorship seizes state power and converts the means of production into collective property, but in doing so abolishes themselves as a class and all class distinctions as a whole, ending the need and existence of the state which presents a problem for Marxists if they wanna call their proletarian states Socialist in the Marxist way despite acknowledging their statehood and class distinctions.
“As I was coming in through your hall just now, I saw a placard with this inscription: “The reign of the workers and peasants will last forever.” When I read this odd placard, which, it is true, was not up in the usual place, but stood in a corner-perhaps it had occurred to someone that it was not very apt and he had moved it out of the way when I read this strange placard, I thought to myself: there you have some of the fundamental and elementary things we are still confused about. Indeed, if the reign of the workers and peasants would last forever, we should never have socialism, for it implies the abolition of classes; and as long as there are workers and peasants, there will be different classes and, therefore, no full socialism.”
—Lenin, Vladimir. All-Russia Congress of Transport Workers, May 27th 1921
“The state is withering away insofar as there are no longer any capitalists, any classes, and, consequently, no class can be suppressed.”
—Lenin, Vladimir (1918). The State and Revolution. Lenin Internet Archive, Recovered by: [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch05.htm].
“Socialism means the abolition of classes. The dictatorship of the proletariat has done all it could to abolish classes. But classes cannot be abolished at one stroke.
And classes still remain and will remain in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship will become unnecessary when classes disappear. Without the dictatorship of the proletariat they will not disappear.”
—Lenin, Vladimir (1919). Economics And Politics In The Era Of The Dictatorship Of The Proletariat. Lenin Internet Archive, Recovered by: [https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/oct/30.htm].
Lenin did indeed imply that the state is only withering away insofar as no classes exist, however it has not withered away. This would mean that the USSR for example was only transitioning to Socialism because, for Marxism “state machinery” or “state function” implies, that the state only exists as a skeleton of its former self, a collection of broad institutions which have no capacity to enforce class rule but only serve administrative purposes of monitoring production while labor vouchers are still in use. And this would lead one to conclude that if Marxists call any country Socialist, this would fly in the face of Marx, Engels, and Lenin’s conceptions of socialism. Hence when Marxists call Fascist states “capitalist” it carries no weight as their own countries were not even socialist by their own standards.
That being said, the distinction between State Socialism and State Capitalism is utterly meaningless. This was the basis of A. James Gregor’s argument in Italian Fascism and Developmental Dictatorship. Fascism according to Gregor’s analysis, mobilizes itself into an economic developmental program of gradual socialization. For Fascism, the economy of Italy was underdeveloped, the proletariat had neither technical competence nor the consciousnesses required for the fulfillment of developmental tasks. In Vladimir Lenin’s essay The Immediate Tasks of The Soviet Government, Lenin was aware about the backwardness of Russia. So a form of Corporatism briefly appeared within the Soviet Union’s State Capitalist New Economic Policy, as as means to catch up with industrialized Western nations.
“The Soviets had made a similar move in the 1920s. Faced with a scarcity of administrative personnel, the state encouraged enterprises to combine into trusts and trusts to combine into syndicates. These large units continued into the 1930s where they were utilized to bridge the gap between overall plans and actual production.”
—Temin, Peter (1990). Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930’s. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; page 18.
Lenin realized that the developmental direction for society could only be moved forward by what he called the “sharp forms of dictatorship”. Furthermore Lenin went on to admit that the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie would be forced into collaboration with the Soviet state. An obvious parallel with Fascism and it’s adoption of class collaborationism. This was a complete departure from orthodox Marxism, in fact:
“Both Lenin and Mao Zedong mention it in their early works and according to Mao the United Fronts operational principle is to unite with secondary enemies against the principal enemy. By means of the united front the CCP won The revolutionary war and the front remained an important tool for maintaining regime stability after the CCP seized power. The CCP used the united front concept to reach out to so-called democratic parties and prominent individuals outside the party allowing it to collaborate with the broadest possible range of social classes thereby strengthening its total social control.”
—Liao, Xingmiu; Tsai, Wen-Hsuan (2019) The United Front Model of Pairing-Up in The Xi Jinping Era. The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Recovered by [https://www.jstor.org/stable/26603249]
Communist China uses the United Front for “pairing-up”, as it stipulates the local governments on all levels to facilitate the relations between members of party committees and specific persons in charge of Democratic parties to further the implementation of united work. This process is class collaboration, the Chinese Communist party (CCP) calls this “making friends”. It allows for a more market oriented model, in this way the CCP can be more accurately described as Corporatist. The CCP uses the United Front inside of its State organs to absorb social organizations into the state apparatus to ensure the regime’s stability and survival. This is a “methodological relationism”, a relationship between cadres and non-party individuals of the capitalist class. Thus the CCP absorbs private enterprises through the establishment of relationship networks on the regional level that are connected to the state trade union. That is to say, if we look at the CCP now or the USSR under Lenin (later with Leonid Brezhnev), we see Corporatism not Marxist Socialism.
Some will try to separate State Capitalism and State Socialism, but they both involve the state owning the means of production. With the former usually denoting more market activity than the latter but this is a superfluous distinction as even so-called State Socialist countries had market activity. In place of commodity production, unified social planning is supposed to take over with the absence of the value form, but financial accounting was still present in all planned economies, meaning remnants of the so-called anarchy of production remained, as a profit incentive still remained which Joseph Stalin realized.
Another distinction made is that one has wage-labor, with State Capitalism and thus the state becomes a new capitalist class while State Socialism has none. But the Soviet Union never abolished wage-labor, as the piece-rate system which the USSR had was even described by Marx as one of the most bourgeois and capitalist forms of wages in Das Kapital Chapter 21 Volume 1. That is to say State Capitalism is the merging of the bourgeois classes into the state via the nationalization process according to Lenin. Mussolini claimed that if Fascism would follow economic development naturally it would:
“lead inexorably into state capitalism, which is nothing more nor less than state socialism turned on its head. In either event, [whether the outcome be state capitalism or state socialism] the result is the bureaucratization of the economic activities of the nation.”
—Mussolini, Benito; Address to the National Corporative Council, 14 November 1933. Fascism: Doctrine and Institutions. Fertig, 1978
Fundamentally this means the economic principles of Marxism were never implemented. Every Marxist experiment has been State Capitalist i.e. a non-Marxist variant of Socialism. These regimes had to adopt economic principles that were more or less Corporatist; for stability and growth. The fact this even happened should be an obvious sign of Marxist economics being a failure. It is therefore understandable why many socialists like Berth to Sombart for example, would abandon Marxism and anarchist variants of Socialism for a more National Socialist program in the end.
4. The Roots and Forms of Corporatism
Feudal Socialism
Some people like to take Corporatism back to the “reactionary socialism” of people like Adam Müller and Leopold von Haller in Germany, along with much of the Tory Party and French Legitimists. The work of Müller and Haller is untranslated; however, while the terms “Reactionary” and “Feudal” may have been given by Marx, it still is fitting. These are men who wanted to go back to the feudal guilds with a strong association with the counter-enlightenment, and so, for them, the term “Reactionary” is fitting. Müller and Haller have different approaches: Müller was a political romanticist and Haller, on the other hand, according to Sombart, was a materialist.
“When the economic differences first showed themselves, and in consequence, anti-Capitalist literature arose, no small part of it advocated that the Capitalist organization of society should be replaced by the organization which had preceded it. I am thinking of the writings of Adam Müller and Leopold von Haller in the first third of the nineteenth century. Men like these desired to see the medieval feudal system with its Craft guilds take the place of the Capitalist system. This point of view may still be met with, though in no wise so clearly and forcibly expressed as when it first appeared.”
—Sombart, Werner (1909). Socialism and The Social Movement. London/New York: J. M. Dent & Co/E. P. Dutton & Co, 1968; page 21.
Christendom and Roman Catholicism
The historic links between Corporatism and Christianity go all the way back to St. Paul the Apostle, who wrote the following:
“[12] For as the body is one, and hath many members; and all the members of the body, whereas they are many, yet are one body, so also is Christ. [13] For in one Spirit were we all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Gentiles, whether bond or free; and in one Spirit we have all been made to drink. [14] For the body also is not one member, but many. [15] If the foot should say, because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?
[16]!And if the ear should say, because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body? [17] If the whole body were the eye, where would be the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where would be the smelling? [18] But now God hath set the members every one of them in the body as it hath pleased him. [19] And if they all were one member, where would be the body? [20] But now there are many members indeed, yet one body.
[21] And the eye cannot say to the hand: I need not thy help; nor again the head to the feet: I have no need of you. [22] Yea, much more those that seem to be the more feeble members of the body, are more necessary. [23] And such as we think to be the less honourable members of the body, about these we put more abundant honour; and those that are our uncomely parts, have more abundant comeliness. [24]”
— 1 Corinthians 12:12-23, Douay-Rheims Bible
Christianity’s link to Corporatism is Biblical, something overlooked by the more modern liberal forms of Christianity. In 1881, Pope Leo XIII sought to expand the understanding of Corporatism and refine it into something more tangible. In 1884 in Freiburg, the commission declared that Corporatism was:
“A system of social organization that has at its base the grouping of men according to the community of their natural interests and social functions, and as true and proper organs of the state they direct and coordinate labor and capital in matters of common interest.”
—Wiarda, Howard J. (1997). Corporatism and Comparative Politics: The Other Great “Ism”. London/New York: M. E. Sharp, Inc., page 37.
One of the main characteristics of Corporatism is economic tripartism involving negotiations between business, labour, and state interest groups to establish economic policy.
Leo penned what is one of the greatest philosophical works of the modern era: Rerum Novarum: Rights and Duties of Capital and Labor. Rerum Novarum, among other things, puts forth that neither employer nor employee is above the other, that both are as important as the other and that their cooperation is necessary for the betterment of society. It advocates that, just as the employee is compelled to perform adequately at their job, so too is the employer compelled to provide adequate wages and conditions. Further, it affirms the natural right of the institution of private property and ownership of industry, while recognizing the need for state intervention in industry. This is a far cry from socialism – which Leo condemns and attacks repeatedly in the encyclical, along with rampant capitalism – which advocates for the destruction of class hierarchy and proletariat dominance over industry.
Whereas Leo XIII addressed the working and economic conditions of workers, Pius XI addressed society as a whole. Quadragesimo Anno (The Fortieth Year) was an incredibly influential document, receiving praise and admiration from politicians across the world, from Mussolini to Salazar. Quadragesimo Anno discusses tripartite Corporatism, a then-novel form that split society into three corporate groups: government, industry, and labor. This was the model adopted by most corporate states of the era. Though the modern church is quite different from the days of Leo XIII or Pius XI, it cannot be ignored that Corporatism is ingrained in the very foundation of the faith.
“It is well-established that Corporatism was not the invention of politics or socio-economic thinking in the aftermath of World War I. It came back into vogue throughout Europe in the 1920s, but actually had a long history behind it, and can be traced to the 19th century when certain currents of political Catholicism voiced their criticism of the liberal order and the legacy of the French Revolution. It was counter-revolutionary Catholic circles in France, Belgium, Austria, and Germany that sparked off the corporate idea, which was to build an organic society by reviving legally recognized trade-related bodies around which social order and harmony could be achieved. —Pollard 2017, p. 42-44
By way of reaction to the conflictual turn that the socio-economic order was taking and the need for a solution to class rivalry, part of Catholic culture harked back to the pre-revolutionary guild system. […] In response to the social conflict engendered by liberal individualism and the capitalist economy, their idea was to revive solidarity between workers and entrepreneurs. Catholicism’s approach to the social question was conservative, anti-revolutionary, and paternalistic. —Vallauri, 1971, p. 15-18.
The problem of poverty and mounting social unrest was attributed to political upheaval under the banner of liberty. Reorganizing society into corporations and boosting the status of occupational groups would counter the modern individual’s growing isolation and redefine the State-individual relationship thanks to the mediation of these intermediate bodies and the spirit of collaboration, solidarity, and mutual acknowledgment between bosses and workers.
To the theorists of Catholic social thinking, the crisis was not so much political or social, as moral. To offset the woes of liberal atomism, one should hark back to the Ancien Régime and its organic model of society. Instead of the highly conflictual socio-economic dialectic underpinning industrial society, one needed mediation: this would be achieved by occupational associations and would diffuse — and hence defuse — class conflict. As Franz Hitze wrote in Kapital und Arbeit und die Reorganization des Gesellschafts (1880), “the solution to the social question […] does not lie in giving free rein to social forces, but in tying them to discipline: the watchword for the future is not individualism, but corporate association.” —Hitze, 1880, p. 412.”
—Cau, Maurizio (2019). An inconvenient legacy: corporatism and Catholic culture from Fascism to the Republic. Recovered by: [https://doi.org/10.1590/tem-1980-542x2018v250112].
Ancient Rome
Corporatism has roots in ancient Rome with the collegia, which is different than the later medieval guilds. Unique to the collegia was its greater focus on religion over occupation. Like medieval guilds, however, members could be easily banned for stepping out of line in either a religious or occupational capacity.
“An historian undertaking to break down the Roman political organisation into its constituent elements encounters in the course of his analysis not a single fact which might alert him to the existence of corporations. As well-defined, recognised bodies they did not figure in the Roman constitution. In not one elective or military assembly did artisans form up in their respective collegia. Nowhere did the professional group participate as such in public. life, either as a body or through its regular representatives. At the very most the question could arise in connection with the three or four collegia which we believe we can identify with certain centuries constituted by Servus Tullius (tignarii, aerarii, libicines , cornicines), but even this is not a well-established fact. As for the other corporations, they certainly stood outside the official organisation of the Roman people.
[…] If later they ended up by being integrated into the state, becoming cogs in the administrative machine, this position was for them not one of glorious conquest, but of irksome dependence. If they then came within the ambit of. the state it was not to occupy the place to which their services to society might have entitled them, but merely so that they might be more skilfully supervised by the government authorities.”
—Durkheim, Emile (1893). Preface to the Second Edition. In Durkheim, Emile (1933). The Division of Labor in Society. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1997; pages xlvi-xlvii.
Medieval Guilds
As previously mentioned, unlike the Roman collegia, the medieval guilds were more focused on occupation mores than religion; however, they did exist in a non-occupational manner in what was normally spoken of as the “religious” or “social” guilds. The guilds vary from nation to nation, but also from town to town. Also, unlike in ancient Rome, they were viewed much more positively. The guilds had to obey the town charter and town government but, other than that, they were free and played a more important role in society than they did in ancient Rome. The oldest statutes on the guilds go back to a statute from Paris in 1061 on candle makers.
Focusing on England, the first guilds were merchant guilds. These guilds were later replaced by the craft guild but there was likely a time when one may have been a member of both. The craft guild was for specialized occupations and ran the whole of that trade, deciding the place where craftsmen could or couldn’t establish their business. More than this, they provided charitable duties and formed strong relationships between members, even running festive activities like mystery plays.
“The whole tendency of medieval society was toward organization, combination, close union with one’s fellows. It might be said that all town life involved membership in some organization, and usually in that one into which a man was drawn by the occupation in which he made his living. These gilds or the town government itself controlled even the affairs of private economic life in the city, just as the customary agriculture of the country prevented much freedom of action there. Methods of trading, or manufacture, the kind and amount of material to be used, hours of labor, conditions of employment, even prices of work, were regulated by the gild ordinances.
The individual guildsman had as little opportunity to emancipate himself from the controlling force of the association as the individual tenant on the rural manor had to free himself from the customary agriculture and the customary services. Whether we study rural or urban society, whether we look at the purely economic or at the broader social side of existence, life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was corporate rather than individual.”
—Cheyney, Edward P. (1901). An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England. New York: The Macmillan company, 1920; pages 61-62.
The guilds continued past the medieval period and did not totally die during the Enlightenment. For example, in Prussia, the 1811 Stein and Hardenberg Laws did great damage to the guilds but the 1871 amendment to the Trade Law reorganized them in a voluntary form. Just about every year after that they made amendments to the Trade Law in favor of the guild movement and were later declared to be an imperial duty.
Syndicalism
The idea behind syndicalism is to create an industrial, fighting union movement. It connects Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s federalism with socialism and industrial trade unionism, syndicalism proposed to organize society through local and partly autonomous workers’ collectives federated into national associations realizing the unity of each industry or occupation. Having sidelined the capitalists, those units would eventually replace the state. Syndicalists often are advocates of direct action, that is to say the use of politically motivated violence. Such as Georges Sorel’s general strike that would bring down capitalism for socialism if it were successful. But these anarchist elements died off as they became militant nationalists. Many became Fascist but some, like the Marxist Antonio Labriola, rejected the evolution Syndicalism was taking.
“From Austria he was expelled after a short stay because of his Irredentist agitation, and he returned to Italy, where he was attracted by the new doctrines of Socialist syndicalism evolved by Georges Sorel. When the World War broke out, Mussolini, imbued with Irredentist sentiments, began his agitation for active Italian participation in the war against Austria. Because of his interventionist propaganda, on November 25, 1914, he was formally expelled from the Italian Socialist party and was asked to resign the editorship of the Avanti, the official organ of Italian Socialism, which had been entrusted to him. He thereupon founded his own newspaper, the Popolo d’ltalia.”
—Welk, G, William (1938). Fascist Economic Policy. Massachusetts/London : Harvard University Press/Oxford University Press; page 7.
Fascism
Fascism was a product of French and Italian labor movements. It was an outgrowth and modification of Syndicalism; however, these modifications were already being made before Fascism as they were made up of the same people. Cercle Proudhon had already rejected things like class warfare. It was the merging of Nationalism and Syndicalism that gave birth to Fascist Corporatism. Mussolini has even wrote that “in the great river of Fascism thou shall find the currents that spring from Sorel, Lagardelle’s Movement Socialiste, Péguy, and from the Italian Syndicalist cohort.” In fact, it can be argued that Fascism is the true intellectual inheritor of syndicalism, not Noam Chomsky or Rudolf Rocker, but because of the different view of class it is fair to say that:
“Having reduced the problem to these terms, only one solution is posible, the realization of justice among the classes by and through the state.”
—Rocco, Alfredo (1926). In Schnapps, Jeffrey T.; Sears, Olivia E.; Stampino, María G. (2000). A Primer of Italian Fascism. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press; page 115.
Of course, this system was first put into practice with Gabriele D’Annunzio‘s takeover of Fiume. The new state had elements that were seen just a few years later as the official Fascist syndical system. The constitution established a system of ten “corporations” to one of which everyone had to belong, and these regulated the economic life of the new state.
“The time has now come when class self-defense also must be replaced by state justice. To facilitate the change fascism has created its own syndicalism. The suppression of class self-defense does not mean the suppression of class defense, which is an inalienable necessity of modern economic life.
Class organization is a fact that cannot be ignored, but it must be controlled, disciplined, and subordinated by the state. The labor union, instead of being, as formerly, an organ of extralegal defense, must be turned into an organ of legal defense that will become judicial defense as soon as labor conflicts become a matter of judicial settlement.
Fascism, therefore, has transformed the labor union, that old revolutionary instrument of Syndicalistic socialists, into an instrument of legal defense of the classes both within and without the law courts. This solution may encounter obstacles in its development (the obstacles of malevolence, of suspicion of the untried, of erroneous calculation, etc.), but it is destined to triumph even though it must advance through progressive stages.”
—Rocco, Alfredo (1926). In Schnapps, Jeffrey T.; Sears, Olivia E.; Stampino, María G. (2000). A Primer of Italian Fascism. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press; pages 115-116.
Guild Socialism
Often called Christian Socialism; Guild Socialism arose in Britain, associated with John Ruskin, A. J. Penty, A. R. Orage, R. H. Tawney, and partly overlapping with G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc’s Distributism. Renovated guilds would unite labor with capital goods outside the logic of capitalism. Guilds, unlike the existing trade unions, would not confine their demands to matters of wages and conditions but would seek to obtain control of industry for the workers whom they represented.
They argued that a government by representatives elected on a territorial basis is incapable of understanding and solving the complex problems of an industrial society. Guild socialists maintained that a system of functional representation based upon industrial unions would be best suited to a modern community.
The guild socialists stood for state ownership of industry, combined with ‘worker’ control through delegation of authority to national guilds organized internally on democratic lines. Regarding the state itself, various theoreticians of guild socialism differed, some believing the state would remain more or less in its existing form and others that it would be transformed into a federal body representing the workers guilds, consumer organizations, local government bodies, and other social structures.
Pluralism, an Anglo-American social theory similar to Guild Socialism, flourished between the world wars and centered on group autonomy while downplaying the state. German expressions of this idea can be found in Otto Strasser’s Black Front and in the National Socialist theoretician Rudolf Jung, Jung outlines this in National Socialism: Its Foundations, Development, and Goals. This was the earliest work of National Socialist political philosophy, which describes a future Germanic society built on council-guilds.
“The guildsmen in their own minds have solved the question of how to conceive a common interest by playing with the word function. They imagine a society in which all the main work of the world has been analysed into functions, and these functions in turn synthesized harmoniously. They suppose essential agreement about the purposes of society as a whole, and essential agreement about the role of every organized group in carrying out those purposes. It was a nice sentiment, therefore, which led them to take the name of their theory from an institution that arose in a Catholic feudal society. But they should remember that the scheme of function which the wise men of that age assumed was not worked out by mortal man. It is unclear how the guildsmen think the scheme is going to be worked out and made acceptable in the modern world. Sometimes they seem to argue that the scheme will develop from trade union organization, at other times that the communes will define the constitutional function of the groups. But it makes a considerable practical difference whether they believe that the groups define their own functions or not.”
—Lippmann, Walter (1922). Public Opinion. New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1997; page 192.
5. How Does Corporatism Work?
Corporatism is an economic and social system that sees every economic factor, labor, and capital unified into a single reality, both coordinating each other for the benefit of the nation. Under Corporatism, employers and employees will be organized into syndicates, each syndicate obtains elected representatives from their particular industry and occupation. These two syndicates will then be tied together under a central organ titled a “Corporation” — hence the name “Corporatism.” Within these Corporations, the representatives of both would coordinate economic activity, determine terms of labor, set wages, and control prices through exercising price regulations. This system as such can be viewed as one of, if not the most, flexible economic systems imaginable. Not only is it capable of limiting economic activity but it’s also capable of freeing it when absolutely necessary.
The corporations that structure the state still play a regulating role by encouraging more businesses to thrive in areas where the generation of privately produced essential goods and services is deemed to be insufficient, and by discouraging business in areas where there is deemed to be a surplus of unessential goods and services. This prevents private enterprise from hijacking government-standardized prices by means of either purposely holding back on the production of certain essential goods and services to force a rise in value, or by fabricating over-demand namely through advertisement and other methods. The economic philosophy that we propose, Corporatism, is extremely flexible. With this position, we can tolerate private enterprise including private property within limits and justify major projects of the state.
The Corporate State is based upon industrial and occupational organization. Every corporate state does this differently. This feature will be common throughout the entire system, both of government and representation in production, and must be grasped as an absolute fundamental principle of Corporatism. This idea proposes that the society and economy of a nation should be organized into major interest groups called Corporations that function similarly to a medieval guild system. Workers would be organized along professional and industrial lines, and representatives of those interest groups would settle any problems through negotiation and joint agreement with State oversight. For example, in the Langnam-Verein, you have the Verein Deutscher Eisen- und Stahlindustrieller for iron and steel.
Under Corporatism, the labor force and management in an industry belong to an industrial organization such as a guild, syndicate, or corporation. Representatives of the groups are elected into an Assembly of Labor and Management that settles issues through collective negotiation. The duties of these Corporations can be divided into three core categories; the regulative, planning, and social aspects. Each Corporation must regulate the relations between the various factors of production in the industry it controls through negotiation; it must also plan the development of the industry or the closing down of redundant plants by working with the state and various entrepreneurs; finally, it must take heed of the social amenities of those engaged in the industry, their industrial insurance, superannuation, etc.
This is not just economic. To show you what I mean, we will look to Italy and the law of May 17, 1928, making the whole state more technocratic. In Article 3, the right to propose candidates for the Grand Council is given to the National Confederation of Syndicates, and as seen in Articles 2 and 6, the final vote comes to the people themselves. After they are approved by Grand Council the vote is held. Thus, this makes the whole state more technocratic as each confederation gets to propose a number of people for the Grand Council. Something similar is seen in article 31 of The Constitution of Fiume.
“It would appear that the corporative organization must be considered as an integral transformation of the concept of the State. By limiting, in accordance with the views of certain critics, the scope of the corporative system to the organization of the occupational groups and not identifying the legal organization of Italian society within the Fascist State with its organization on an occupational basis, the political value of the system would be diminished. Hence the integral transformation of the concept of the State is impeded in so far as the existence of active forces or tendencies outside corporative syndicalism is admitted. Thus the theory of these critics must be rejected on the ground that it is in contrast with the spirit which animates the corporative structure which, in the opinion of the writer, cannot allow the survival of forces which limit its expansion and application to the fullest extent.”
—Pitigliani, Fausto (1933). The Italian Corporative State. London: P. S. King & Son, LTD., page 136.
“The organs which, under the aegis of the State, carry out the integral, organic and unitarian regulation of production with a view to the expansion of the wealth, political power and well-being of the Italian people.”
—Act of February 5, 1934, on The Formation and Function of Corporations
The corporate unions don’t just protect people in their industry, they also protect their political life. And, thus, each industry gets its representation in whoever gets into the Grand Council. This allows for a specialized Grand Council with representation based on areas of economic activity: agriculture, commerce, manufacturing, transportation and so on.
Under Corporatism, policy will follow from the ethics of unity and harmony. For example, the displacement of jobs would be fixed by things like tariffs, policies on outsourcing work, and policies on trade. Any class that tries to advance itself at the cost of the whole — capital or labor — will be suppressed. However, as I stated before, the proletariat and labor are less of a threat to the whole as capital.
“ The Führer himself wrote that bringing a particular class of people into the community ‘does not succeed by dragging down the upper classes, but by elevating the lower. This process can never be carried out by the higher class, but by the lower one fighting for its equal rights’. ”
—Tedor, Richard (2013). Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs. Illinois: self-published by the author; page 57.
We do not want to “eat the rich” but we do want to better the conditions of the lower classes in our society and our nation. We may more than happily bring down the higher classes when it is useful or necessary; however, at our heart is harmony, thus, there should be programs and safety nets to help the poor. It is true that such things exist in non-corporate states; however, under Corporatism, they are improved or made new. It is stated in Articles 26 and 27 of the Charter of Labour that talks about the need for these; however, Fascism started to put in such programs before the Charter of Labor in the law of May 1, 1925, creating the National Leisure Time Organization and, even better, the law of December 10, 1925, National Institute for Maternal and Infant Welfare. And that is not to talk about other programs instituted by the Fascists, but this is only the earliest.
“Besides the government-owned Istituto Nazionale delle Assicurazioni (National Insurance Institute), which underwrites life insurance in competition with commercial companies and occupies a preeminent position in the Italian insurance world, two other governmental insurance institutions have been organized to carry out the government’s program of compulsory social insurance: the Istituto Nazionale Fascista della Previdenza Sociale and the Istituto Nazionale Fascista per l’Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (the National Fascist Institute for Social Insurance and the National Fascist Institute for Accident Insurance.)”
—Welk, G, William (1938). Fascist Economic Policy. Massachusetts/London: Harvard University Press/Oxford University Press; pages 101-102.
It may be said that Corporatism wants to remove class but everyone is moved to something greater: an ideal greater than the accumulation of capital. And, rather than attacking the higher classes, it may be better to help the poorer among us. Now, because the richer is always going to attack the poorer and go against the whole they must be cut down to size. The same goes for labor which, under Marxism, is made above the nation.
Now, it should not be hard to explain the heavy amount of nationalization existing in Italy as Fascism marched on. This is something the Liberal critics of Corporatism actually get right. It does lead to more state control and intervention but this is not a bad thing. Rerum Novarum may have viewed property as a right, but Fascism does not.
In Article 9 of the Constitution of Fiume, it states:
“The State does not recognize the ownership of property as an absolute and personal right, but regards it as one of the most useful and responsible of social functions”
—Por, Odon (1923). Fascism. London: The Labour Publishing Company Ltd, page V in the Appendix.
and Rocco states that it’s only to be a tool in The Political Doctrine of Fascism. Therefore:
“Fascism accepted from Syndicalism the idea of the educative and moral function of the syndicate. But since the intention was to overcome the antithesis between the State and the syndicate, the effort was made to enter the system of syndicates harmoniously into corporations subject to discipline by the State and to thereby give expression to the organic character of the State. In order to give expression to the will of the individual, the organic State must reach him, not as an abstract political individual that the old liberalism supposed — as a featureless atom. The organic State sought to reach the individual as it could only find him, as he in fact is: as a specialized producer whose tasks moved him to associate himself with others of the same category, all belonging to the same unitary economic organism that is the nation.”
—Gentile, Giovanni (1929). Origins and Doctrine of Fascism. New Jersey: Transaction Publishers; page 29.
In fact, this is precisely why in 1934, Mussolini boasted that three-quarters of Italian businesses are in the hands of the state. Making the Italian economy one of the largest examples of economic nationalization. This means that Italy was second to the Soviet Union, in terms of state ownership of the economy. It’s precisely understood that the aim of the Fascist economy can be found as a gradualist approach to State Socialism. Rutilo Sermonti, observed a reform of the civil codes of 1940, the Law of January 3, 1941 Number 14. In this law the responsibility of the employer or who represents him is defined as the “head” of the company and not owner or employer. There we find the responsibility of the employer to the state for his management of the company. Fascism in this way was abolishing class differences through synchronization of the public-private, which required class collaboration (or coercion if necessary).
“Socialization means the slow transformation—taking centuries to complete—of the worker into an economic functionary, and the employer into a responsible supervisory official.”
—Spengler, Oswald (1919). Prussianism and Socialism. Cited by Hughes, H. Stuart (1952). Oswald Spengler. New Jersey: Transaction publishers, 1992; page 109.
6. Corporate Structure
7. Responding to Attacks on Corporatism
Now we go over the attacks made against Corporatism: the view that it is just capitalism, that it is capitalism but worse, and that it drives down wages and makes working conditions worse. But these things can not be put on the fascists. Here too we will begin looking at historic corporate states, and not any modern ones. That is just because with modern examples there is a lot of dust in the air, and not all of it but a lot more has settled with history. We will mostly look at the Third Reich, Fascist Italy, and Bismarck’s state socialism.
Let’s start with wages, as this was an attack often made by American critics like Carmen Haider. First, a livable wage is guaranteed by Article 12 of the Charter of Labor. However, there was a lowering of wages entering the 1930s and even Pitigliani shows this; however, this misses the full picture. Pitigliani, in terms of an argument for Corporatism, lacks information, for these were his writings as of the year 1933. But even as the Italians were conscious of their own politics, the germans were too:
“The decree of February 28, 1933, nullified article 153 of the Weimar Constitution which guaranteed private property and restricted interference with private property in accordance with certain legally defined conditions . . . The conception of property has experienced a fundamental change. The individualistic conception of the State—a result of the liberal spirit—must give way to the concept that communal welfare precedes individual welfare. (Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz).”
—Reimann, Günter (1939). The Vampire Economy: doing Business under Fascism. Alabama: Mises Institute, 2007; page 12.
Now, to give you a full picture of the state of wages under Fascism, I give data from Professor of Economic History Giovanni Favero. Favero was drawing from multiple sources but from all the sources he pulled from we see the same main trends and only one source says wages did not, in the end, rise of that before the Fascists came to power. We do see a fall in wages entering the 1930s; however, that trend changes around 1934-35 and, as Pitigliani points out:
“The recent lowering of wages in Italy is rather a consequence of the economic depression that is affecting the whole of the Western World than a deliberate attempt to adopt the low-wage as against the high-wage theory favored in America.
Wages have a tendency to be equal to the net product of labour, and they undoubtedly decide the degree of specialisation, energy and efficiency shown in the work. Leaving freedom of economic initiative unhampered, as is the tendency of the corporative regime, it would be absurd to suggest as an ideal system the lowering of wages in order to cut down prices. Such a method may considerably assist in the stabilising process and serve to deflate prices, but its value is contingent on prevailing economic and social conditions.”
— Pitigliani, Fausto (1933). The Italian Corporative State. London: P. S. King & Son, LTD., page 54.
The graph you see in Figure 4 is taken from data of the number of unemployed taken from May of each year up until 1935, but the trend continues after that year even according to a mainstream economist like Stefano Zamagni (however the reasons he gives for why; I do not agree with). I believe both the increase in unemployment and reduction in wages have the same root, and really the Fascist took care of both. In fact, and as seen in the 3rd part of the Royal Decree made the 1st of July in 1926, the 44th article establishes employment offices which as:
“To establish employment offices wherever their need shall be felt. Where such offices shall exist a royal decree may prohibit free mediation and the establishment of other employment agencies, the special legal provisions and regulations existing on the subject, however, remaining unchanged.”
—Welk, G, William (1938). Fascist Economic Policy. Massachusetts/London : Harvard University Press/Oxford University Press; page 277.
And if this is made to be an attack against Corporatism, it’s a weak one. You can look to other corporate states like Nazi Germany and to Bismarck’s State Socialism. Carmen Haider in his later works lies about this, despite the fact Hjalmar Schacht suggested that they should reduce wages, Hitler made sure that they went up. The same is true of unemployment because, here too, the Nazis did great work:
“The German economy had created 3.6 million new jobs by 1935. Military recruitment therefore made a small contribution to alleviating unemployment. The government in fact began increasing troop strength by transferring 56,000 policemen to the army. “The frequent argument that Hitler found the unemployed population work and bread solely through a massive build-up of the armed forces is untenable, when the actual statistics are examined,” the historian Ralf Wittrich observed.126 Schacht confirmed this when he stated, “The elimination of unemployment in Germany… succeeded without rearmament.” The American historian David Schoenbaum concluded, “In many respects…the National Socialists went to war with a peacetime economy rather than having created a war-based economy in peacetime.”
—Tedor, Richard (2013). Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs. Illinois: self-published by the author; pages 74-75.
As you can see here in Figure 5 with unemployment in Germany from rapidly decreasing each year. Hitler for many Germans was nothing short of an economic miracle. Then as stated by other historians that if Hitler had died in 1938 he would undoubtedly have been remembered by most Germans as one of their greatest leaders.
“Upon taking office, Hitler had assigned the elimination of unemployment as his first priority. During the first twelve months of his administration, unemployment declined by nearly 2.3 million. In 1934, 2,973,544 persons were still out of work, but by November 1935, 1,750,000 more Germans had found full-time jobs. Addressing the National Socialist party congress in Nuremberg on September 12, 1936, Reinhardt presented statistics demonstrating that ‘mass unemployment in Germany has been overcome. In some occupations, there is already a shortage of workers.’ He stated that among other civilized nations, of the 20 million people out of work in 1932, only two million had returned to the workforce over the previous four years (The statistics did not include the USSR, since no figures were available). During the same period in Germany, the economy created jobs for over five million previously unemployed persons. In addition, the average work day within this time frame increased from six hours 23 minutes to over seven hours per shift.
In November 1938, the German government officially recorded 461,244 citizens as unemployed. The statistic included individuals who were physically or mentally disabled, mostly homebound and hence unemployable. It also incorporated the populations of Austria and the Sudetenland. Germany had annexed these economically depressed lands the same year. Both had suffered massive unemployment, which Hitler had not yet had time to fully alleviate. From 1934 to 1937, the number of women in the workforce increased from 4.5 million to 5.7 million. Despite programs to encourage women to return to traditional family roles, the government did not restrict those choosing a career. They were equally eligible for tax incentives offered for starting small businesses.”
—Tedor, Richard (2013). Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs. Illinois: self-published by the author; page 48.
Less impressive however was the rise in wages. As stated before, Schacht suggested that they should reduce wages to bring down unemployment, but the Nazis did not do that. In my view, there is little ground in the claim that these movements made labor conditions worst but, to show that this is not black and white, I will point out that the Nazis did increase the working day during war-time.
“The Law for Regulation of Wages introduced guidelines for calculating salaries. Based on the principle of comparable pay for equal demands on an individual’s time and energy, its goal was to guarantee a decent standard of living for everyone who worked hard. The law stated, ‘Grading of salaries must correspond to the actual demands of the work involved. It, therefore, doesn’t matter what job the individual has. Personal engagement is the decisive factor.’ The regulation further called for an adjustment in salary for employees with unavoidable financial hardships, in order to guarantee their standard of living. Even time lost from work due to weather conditions became a factor. It also required that every citizen receive pay for overtime. […]
By 1938, the costs to employers for workers’ salaries had risen by another 6.5 percent. They included paid holidays for labor, a measure Hitler personally introduced. The wage law established a minimum monthly income per person, sufficient to guarantee a decent living standard. It affected 96 percent of all salaries nationwide.
—Tedor, Richard (2013). Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs. Illinois: self-published by the author; pages 56-57.
Now we shall move onto Bismarck’s German economy. Let us first talk about the relief societies that were put in place under Frederick The Great. Life working on the railways was incredibly dangerous and wages were low. The relief societies were built to better such conditions by making employers pay for injuries and death caused by such work; however, for much of their run, they failed to do so. In 1838, they:
” […] passed a law imposing upon railway companies and administrations nominal responsibility for the accidents which happened to their employees, save in the case of the latters’ neglect and blame.”
—Harbut Dawson, William (1891). Bismarck and State Socialism: An exposition of the social and economic legislation of Germany since 1870. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co; page 93.
The law as written was ineffective; wages were low, work was dangerous and workers were bullied into keeping quiet.
“[…] making the owners and conductors of railways, mines of all kinds of quarries, and factories liable for the injuries or death caused to their employees through accidents resulting from the pursuit of their callings, so long as the victims were not themselves to blame. In case of fatality the person or persons liable might be compelled to bear the costs of the medical measures attempted, the costs of burial, the loss caused to the deceased’s relatives during eventual illness, and in case the deceased were legally liable to support another or others, the latter might recover the loss thus sustained. In case of an accident, the compensation consisted of medical costs and the loss of wages suffered during illness or through temporary or permanent incapacity. The law was compulsory, and there was to be no contracting out of it.”
—Harbut Dawson, William (1891). Bismarck and State Socialism: An exposition of the social and economic legislation of Germany since 1870. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co; page 93.
And for a while, yearly amendments to the Law of 1871 were made, improving it. And moreover, greater care for the people is shown under Corporatism. Here too we should point to the safety nets given by corporate states. It is true most of these things existed before these corporate states, but such states made them better or built them totally new as we have already seen with Bismarck. In America on the other hand, anti-social views were justified by both liberal capitalism and Social Darwinism.
“The care of the poor of all ages was a responsibility assumed primarily by the private sector, generally through the extended family, friends, and neighbors, and organized private charity.”
—Khoudour, David (2008). Welfare State and Labor Mobility: The Impact of Bismarck’s Social Legislation on German Emigration before World War I. The Journal of Economic History, 2008, vol. 68, issue 1, 211-243; page 27. Recovered by:
I fail to see how anyone looking at Figures 6 and 7 with an honest mind could say that they lowered the conditions of labor. As shown in Figure 7, Bismarck did increase wages. Not shown in Figure 6 is the fact that, after Bismarck, wages stopped following GDP as you can see in Figure 7. You can clearly see that Leo von Caprivi’s movement to free trade broke the bond between wages and GDP.
Some Corporate states are just terrible and something that should also be said is that most of the actual legitimate criticisms made against historical examples of Corporatism only apply during weak periods of its implementation (as I have shown you with the wages in Italy). Just look to the so-called “Clerical Fascism” of Engelbert Dollfuss in Austria. Bismarck may have failed at a lot of things, like turning down what was good legislation that would have improved his Corporate state like he did in 1885 if that can even be put on him.
However, outside of accidentally increasing child labor, he did not make working conditions worse. I bring these things up partly to show that, unlike the critics of Corporatism, we are honest. The so-called “clerical fascism” of Austria, may be one of the worst examples of Corporatism. This was just a failed neutered Corporate state built from a fusion of Catholic clericalism and liberal fiscal policies.
“Beginning with the year 1932, [Austrian] unemployment grew rapidly, reaching a peak in 1933–6, with between 24 and 26 percent of the labour force out of work. […] When, in 1937 and 1938, there was a modest recovery, unemployment never dropped below the 20 percent value. This had a devastating effect on the legitimacy of the Austrian system. […]
As the Austrian government sustained its reluctance to apply Keynesian policies, the economic recovery never entered a serious tale-off phase in the second half of the 1930s. Linked to an exhausted determination of the Austrian government to resist the pressures from Germany, the economic crisis of the 1930s should be seen as an additional reason why the Austrian society was receptive to the annexation by Germany in March 1938.”
—Gerlich, Peter; Campbell, FJ, David. Austria: From Compromise to Authoritarianism. In Berg-Schlosser, Dirk (2000). Conditions of democracy in Europe. New York: Palgrave Publishers; page 55.
Austrian unemployment was also a disaster, they eliminated the work council, Austria made a series of cuts to both welfare and unemployment benefits. Even Hitler would not allow the liberal Schacht to go as far as these so-called “Fascists” let Mises go. Then we also have the series of cuts to both welfare and unemployment benefits, this goes against the trends of all other Corporate states. Other bad example’s could include Francoist Spain.
“The Spanish leader (El Caudillo) did initially employ a corporatist system somewhat modeled off of Italy wherein strikes were banned, independent labor unions lost their free status, and wages were fixed by the government. Efforts were made to ban foreign products from Spain […] but Franco’s model skewed towards his power base of large landowners and rich industrialists, directly conflicting with the National Syndicalist concepts of land reform and dislodging wealthy interests. This rose against the Caudillo’s claim that he was supportive of ‘an integrating National Socialism,’ and was only enhanced by a shift towards pro-capitalist economics in the 1950s and 1960s.”
—Goldberg, Martin (2021). Socialism of The Right: A Historical Study. Illinois: self-published by the author; page 35.
And any claim that Corporatism worsens the economy could not be more off base. Adolf Hitler saved Germany, and as I have partly already covered, the Fascists saved Italy from the economic depression. Both Mussolini and Bismarck helped bring industrialization to Italy and Germany. I also feel at the same time it is better to call Corporatism political more than economic. However, the three examples I have given of working Corporate states did improve the economic conditions. Bismarck rightfully deserves praise for his accomplishments. Ralf Dahrendorf, Thorstein Veblen, and Christopher Dawson are right about German industrialization. What took most nations, like Britain, 150 years to do, only took Germany one-third the time. Thorstein Veblen on the Prussian state says that:
“The Imperial State has come into the usufruct of this industrial state without being the burden of its long-term institutional consequences. Carrying over a traditional bias of Romantic loyalty, infused anew with a militant patriotism by several successful wars, and irritably conscious of national power in their new-found economic efficiency, the feudalistic spirit of the population has as yet been hardly dampened by their brief experience as a modern industrial community. And borne up by its ancient tradition of prowess and dynastic aggression, the Prussian imperial State has faithfully fostered this militant spirit and cultivated in the people the animus of a solidarity of prowess.”
—Koch, H. W. (1978). A History of Prussia. New York: Routledge Barnes & Noble Books, 1993; page 281.
Now, the next lie can be seen in the section on Marxism and class warfare. This lie can be seen in the Communist Internationale of 1928 where Fascism is called a “terrorist dictatorship of big capital” from the view of the Communist Internationale:
“The characteristic feature of Fascism is that, as a consequence of the shock suffered by the capitalist economic system and of special objective and subjective circumstances, the bourgeoisie-in order to hinder the development of the revolution utilizes the discontent of the petty and middle, urban and rural bourgeoisie and even of certain strata of the declassed proletariat, for the purpose of creating a reactionary mass movement.
[…] After capturing power, Fascism strives to establish political and organizational unity among all the governing classes of capitalist society (the bankers, the big industrialists and the agrarians), and to establish their undivided, open and consistent dictatorship.”
—P. D., Rajani (1936). Fascism and Social Revolution. New York: International Publishers; page 89.
All this is without any base in reality. Same when Antonie Pannekoek says that in Germany “the bourgeoisie is in complete power”, as it is in liberal America. Such claims are without a base but are made everywhere even by non-Marxists. People like the anarchist homosexual activist Adolf Brand were all over making claims like this. This view can be best summed up as “capitalism in decay” to take from a fake Lenin quote. I’ve even seen an article from the Jacobin that views Fascism as just a welfare state that suppressed labor. But such claims have no real base in reality, for example in Italy:
“Salvemini continued: ‘now the industrialists are no longer content with Mussolini. They are not as manageable as they wished.’ At the end of actual, referring to information passed along to Donati, editor of the Catholic newspaper Il Popolo, Salvemini noted: ‘An industrialist of Turin told Donati that in his circle people are beginning to ask themselves if it might now be wise to pay the Communists to fight the Fascists!’ In early May, the future Communist leader Palmiro Togliatti wrote to Gramsci in Moscow that ‘The Industrial classes are rather wary of the new regime, fearing unpredictable developments in the class struggle with Fascist syndicates.”
—Adler, Franklin Hugh (1995). Italian Industrialists from Liberalism to Fascism: The Political Development of the Industrial Bourgeoisie, 1906–34. London: Cambridge University Press, 2002; page 311.
It may also be nice to point out that Corporatism in its most complete form is not at all much different from state-enforced mutualism. However, there are too many lies here that we should talk about quickly. And it may be worth noting that we can play the same game as them which I have shown. When they say we are funded by big capital, some things must be pointed out; the rational inconsistency there and the lies. In fact a similar yet opposite attack was made by the economist Ludwig von Mises but there is more truth to his statements, but it’s still ridiculous.
It is quite embarrassing for these Communists — who enjoy the high they get from their pretentious intellectualism and academic prowess — to show themselves unable to have any understanding of these basic things. When a Marxist needs to come up with a “scientific understanding”, they come up with this; however, I don’t think these people are honest actors. Think back to my example of Togliatti who, in the 1960s, compares American Republicans to Fascists after telling Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s that industrialists fear Fascism.
First, we must point out how irrational this view is. They believe that these nations that were destroyed by the forces of capitalist plutocracies are the tools of mammon. They believe, some even now, that these nationalistic proletarian movements that grew out of the most radical socialists are supporters of the bourgeoise. This just does not make any sense. It’s like industrialists paying communists to break up unions, that is to say, it’s odd.
Next, there’s no way you can honestly call it “capitalism in decay.” Even if this point is made dishonestly, I will still respond to some of their points. The truth is like Hitler told Wagener in September 1930;
“Do you think that a die-hard industrialist is ready to suddenly admit that what he owns is not a right but an obligation? That capital no longer rules but will be ruled? That it’s not about the life of the individual, but about that of the whole group? It’s a radical and total adjustment that the grown-up is no longer capable of making. Only the young people can be changed.”
—Tedor, Richard (2013). Hitler’s Revolution: Ideology, Social Programs, Foreign Affairs. Illinois: self-published by the author; pages 60-61.
And with the Nazis, a lot of people like to talk about “the myth of privatization.” Not only is this a myth but the man who caused a lot of the so-called “privatization” (Schacht) was put into a concentration camp. Also, under a state like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, the lines between public and private become extremely blurred. There is a lot that is private on paper but indirectly nationalized, or put under so much regulation that you can’t say they were acting freely. Let me give an example of this indirect nationalization with Ufa Film. Ufa Film was privatized in 1921, but it went under this indirect nationalization. Joseph Goebbels brought Ufa Film under the control of his propaganda ministry in addition to the other media companies. In March of 1937, the Hugenberg Group had to sell its Ufa Film shares for 21.25 million Reichsmarks to Cautio Treuhand GmbH (a quasi-state holding company that worked on behalf of Goebbels). Ufa was practically a state-owned company at that point.
“Both governments reorganized industry into larger units, ostensibly to increase state control over economic activity. The Nazis reorganized industry into 13 administrative groups with a larger number of subgroups to create a private hierarchy for state control. The state could therefore direct a firm’s activities without acquiring direct ownership of enterprises. The pre-existing tendency to form cartels was encouraged to eliminate competition that would destabilize prices.“
—Temin, Peter (1990). Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930’s. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; pages 17-18.
The owners of these companies were either removed from board positions and replaced by Nazi party members or were forcefully sold out to Nazi officials. This included IG Farben and the Junkers airplane factory. IG Farben was a chemical company founded in 1925 by Carl Bosch and Carl Duisberg, who were both Jewish, and had a capitalization of around a billion marks by 1926. By 1938, all of the company’s Jewish workers had been purged and the supervisory board replaced by Nazis as Joseph Borkin points out in The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben.
“The Nazis signed long-term contracts with industry groups to buy their output at fixed prices (Hayes, 1987, pp. 118-19). These contracts were nominally contracts expressing agreement by both parties. But the two parties were decidedly unequal. The Nazis viewed private property as conditional on its use–not as a fundamental right. If the property was not being used to further Nazi goals, it could be nationalized.”
—Temin, Peter (1990). Soviet and Nazi Economic Planning in the 1930’s. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; page 7.
Peter Temin noted that the Nazis centralized most businesses into state owned 13 cartels, while Fascist Italy centralized the economy into 6 state owned cartels. That is to say, they centralized the economy in the hands of the state, with the illusion of privatization. This economic synchronization was then used to fulfill state ordinances.
“Cartels have indeed become of the organs for attaining full unemployment with the collaboration and under the pressure of the state.”
—Neumann, Franz (1942). Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. London: Oxford University Press; page 270.
This economic centralization was synchronization, a way to coordinate all political, social, and cultural institutions in the name of national unity. So the primary goal of synchronization is to reach unity which requires a totalitarian state. In essence “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” This synchronization exists to bring everything under the states control.
Private businesses became merely public entities, and industrialists who resisted the Nazis, were removed from their positions and their businesses were seized. This was possible in Germany because in 1933, the decree of February 28; nullified article 153 of the Weimar constitution which guaranteed private property. Many businessmen worried that they would have their livelihoods stolen from them, as the Marxist Günter Reimann shows:
“I must confess that I think as most German businessmen do, who today fear National Socialism as much as they did Communism in 1932. But there is a distinction. In 1932, the fear of Communism was a phantom; today National Socialism is a terrible reality. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated… The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.“
—Reimann, Günter (1939). The Vampire Economy: doing Business under Fascism. Alabama: Mises Institute, 2007; page 6.
Businessmen and entrepreneurs were smothered by government controls, they were told by the state what they could produce and how much and at what price. This means that employment came under the exclusive control of the government employment offices which determined who would work, where, and for how much. And on June 22, 1938, the Nazis instituted a guaranteed employment by conscripting labor.
Every German worker was assigned a position from which he could not be released by the employer, nor could he switch jobs, without permission of the government employment office. Worker absenteeism was met with fines or imprisonment-all in the name of job security. Fascist Italy did much of the same type of measures against private businesses.
“In addition, the rich often found themselves on the receiving end of Fascist justice due to perceptions that they were insufficiently cooperative. For instance, the police prefect of Sicily openly reported about his arrest of fourteen millionaires, and landlords who resisted Fascist-ordered rent controls found themselves sentenced to prison terms on Mussolini’s island penal colonies.”
— Goldberg, Martin (2021). Socialism of The Right: A Historical Study. Illinois: self-published by the author; page 25.
What evidence do they have when these people say “capitalism in decay?” nothing; it should also be mentioned that in the context of Nazi anti-capitalism. That professor Brendan Simms has noted in Hitler: A Global Biography that Hitler’s fanatical anti-Semitism was intrinsically connected to his anti-capitalism.
After all Hitler and Mussolini identified Corporatism as the quintessential element to a socialist worker state. Both considered the nation as a “proletarian nation”, that would struggle with the “plutocratic nations.” These Third Positionist worker states replaced individual class struggle with a “class struggle between nations.” Enrico Corradini who was appointed to the Italian Senate by Mussolini would profess that, “we are the proletarian people in respect to the rest of the world. Nationalism is our socialism.” Both Nazis and Fascists took up this proletarian mantle and, according to the historian A. James Gregor, “Mussolini insisted that Fascism was the only form of ‘socialism’ appropriate to the ‘proletarian nations’ of the 20th century.”
Mussolini on March 20, 1945, in one of his last interviews declared that, “we are proletarian nations that rise up against the plutocrats.” Similarly during a 1940 speech in Berlin, Hitler targeted capitalists as the enemy; declaring, “they are, after all, plutocracies in which a tiny clique of capitalists dominates the masses, and thus, naturally, in close cooperation with international Jews and Freemasons.” These regimes that implemented Corporatism rejected economic liberalism, embraced closed blocs of protectionism under autarky, were full of industrial technocrats, and became stalwart enemies of liberal capitalism.
This alleged pro-capitalism also can’t be said of Bismarck, who also gets misrepresented. His State Socialism came about as a reaction against Social Democrats, but I would recommend you look to Chapter 2 of Dawson’s book. I do not view Bismarck as the same threat to capitalism as Fascism was (read Dawson and you will see why), but his economic views came as a reaction against liberalism in Prussia: free trade, free competition, and the vague ideas of individualism. And as reaction against the Stein and Hardenberg laws — bringing a lot of these things to Prussia — but it wasn’t that Bismarck wanted to move back to serfdom and feudalism in fact he did radical land reforms, showing he didn’t believe in so-called “property rights”.
None of this worked out for big capital in the end. Something else you see with attacks on historical forms of Corporatism is that they are attacked at their weakest points. Remember back to the point on wages in Fascist Italy, which only represents a short period of the state, but people will point to that short period to show how the Fascists lowered wages.
They will ignore the Corporative structure or will claim it only existed to advance big capital. Here I will address the lie that the officers were “just whoever the Fascists wanted to put in.” To start, as Pitigliani points out that with syndical officers:
“Various ministerial regulations and the practice of recent times show the tendency of the Government to entrust the Officers. The tendency of the Government to entrust the nomination of the responsible representatives of the syndical association to the choice of the members.”
—Pitigliani, Fausto (1933). The Italian Corporative State. London: P. S. King & Son, LTD., page 36.
And elsewhere are elected by other parts of the corporative body. Even going further in the Law of May 17, 1928, it goes into the political representation, and makes the whole state more technocratic.
Moving to another bad argument, Mises attacks Corporatism, syndicalism, and Guild socialism in Human Action. Isn’t it kinda funny for the man who ruined the Corporatism of the Austrian Fatherland Front to be talking about the flaws in this system? For him, these models fail because of the fetishization of production, and for him the “purpose of production is consumption.” Something he misses as many economists do is that theology intersects with philosophy, which intersects with politics which intersects with economics, and one should look to the whole. You may have noticed that our argument for Corporatism is more political than economic, and it is correct to view Corporatism as more of a political view than an economic view. The Fascist starting point in the argument for Corporatism has been built from nationalism.
It is good to act to improve the conditions of labor, and is more than a mere fetishization of production. Here too Mises commits a similar mistake to the socialists he attacks. Unlike the socialists, he is guilty of fetishizing consumption, and it’s a consumption past obesity. An interesting line from Mises, as follows:
“What the syndicalist considers the most serious defect of the capitalist system and disparages as the brutality and callousness of autocratic profit-seekers is precisely the outcome of the supremacy of the consumers. Under the competitive conditions of the unhampered market economy the entrepreneurs are forced to improve technological methods of production without regard to the vested interests of the workers.”
— Von Mises, Ludwig (1949). Human Action: A treatise on economics. Alabama: Ludwig Von Mises, 1998; pages 809.
Thus, for Mises poor working conditions come from people “voting with their wallets.” So, in the view of Mises, at what point would he have to agree with slavery, since now production is almost irrelevant and, under slavery, the product is still made. After all, this “supremacy of the consumers” put around 1 million children in Bangladesh into similar conditions to that of slavery. And here we see that the “democracy of the consumers” is as much of a scam as the so-called “liberal democracy” we have here in America. Ask any American if they support child labor in Bangladesh, and, then, look at how many even look at the tag before buying it. As I have shown with China, this kind of relationship provides us with cheaper products but displaces jobs and lowers wages. I point out that productivity and GDP have not been in line with wages as seen throughout liberalism; however, none of this matters to Mises.
Mises does make a point that holds some truth: he noted that syndicalism, Guild socialism, and Corporatism will all increase state control in the economy. And, we see this with Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and Bismark. Rerum Novarum may view property as a right but, for Fascists, property is just a tool that the Fascists are happy to remove if it no longer has use. This is a rejection of the liberal view that the state should protect property. However, this point does not hold up unless you buy into the liberal nonsense of Mises.
8. Readings on Corporatism Theory
Hegel in Philosophy of Right
§250→ The agricultural estate, in view of the substantiality of its natural and family life, has within itself, in immediate form, the concrete universal in which it lives. The Universal estate, by definition, has the universal for itself as its basis and as the end of its activity. The intermediate estate, i.e. the estate of trade and industry, is essentially concerned with the particular, and the corporation is therefore especially characteristic of it.
§251→ The work performed by civil society is divided into different branches according to its particular nature. Since the inherent likeness of such particulars, as the quality common to them all, comes into existence in the association, the selfish end which pursues its own particular interest comprehends and expresses itself at the same time as a universal end; and the member of civil society, in accordance with his particular skill, is a member of a corporation whose universal end is therefore wholly concrete, and no wider in scope than the end inherent in the trade which is the corporation’s proper business and interest.
§252→ By this definition, the corporation has the right, under the supervision of the public authority, to look after its own interests within its enclosed sphere, to admit members in accordance with their objective qualification of skill and rectitude and in numbers determined by the universal context, to protect its members against particular contingencies, and to educate others so as to make them eligible for membership. In short, it has the right to assume the role of a second family for its members, a role which must remain more indeterminate in the case of civil society in general, which is more remote from individuals and their particular requirements.
The tradesman is distinct from the day laborer, as he is from someone who is prepared to perform an occasional contingent service. The former, who is — or wishes to become a master, is a member of an association not for occasional contingent gain, but for the whole range and universality of his particular livelihood. Privileges, in the sense of rights of a branch of civil society which constitutes a corporation, are distinct from privileges proper in the etymological sense, in that the latter are contingent exceptions to the universal law, whereas the former are no more than legally fixed determinations which lie in the particular nature of an essential branch of society itself.
§253→ In the corporation, the family not only has its firm basis in that its livelihood is guaranteed – i.e. it has secure resources – on condition of its [possessing a certain] capability, but the two [i.e. livelihood and capability] are also recognized, so that the member of a corporation has no need to demonstrate his competence and his regular income and means of support – i.e. the fact that he is somebody – by any further external evidence. In this way, it is also recognized that he belongs to a whole which is itself a member of society in general, and that he has an interest in, and endeavors to promote, the less selfish end of this whole. Thus, he has his honor in his estate.
As a guarantor of resources, the institution of the corporation corresponds to the introduction of agriculture and private property in another sphere. When complaints are made about that luxury and love of extravagance of the professional classes which is associated with the creation of a rabble, we must not overlook, in addition to the other causes [of this phenomenon] (e.g. the increasingly mechanical nature of work), its ethical basis as implied in what has been said above. If the individual is not a member of a legally recognized corporation (and it is only through legal recognition that a community becomes a corporation), he is without the honor of belonging to an estate, his isolation reduces him to the selfish aspect of his trade, and his livelihood and satisfaction lack stability. He will accordingly try to gain recognition through the external manifestations of success in his trade, and these are without limit, because it is impossible for him to live in a way appropriate to his estate if his estate does not exist; for a community can exist in civil society only if it is legally constituted and recognized. Hence, no way of life of a more general kind appropriate to such an estate can be devised. – Within the corporation, the help which poverty receives loses its contingent and unjustly humiliating character, and wealth, in fulfilling the duty it owes to its association, loses the ability to provoke arrogance in its possessor and envy in others; rectitude also receives the true recognition and honor which are due to it.
§254→ In the corporation, the so-called natural right to practice one’s skill and thereby earn what there is to earn is limited only to the extent that, in this context, the skill is rationally determined. That is, it is freed from personal opinion and contingency, from its danger to oneself and others, and is recognized, guaranteed, and at the same time raised to a conscious activity for a common end.
§255→ The family is the first ethical root of the state; the corporation is the second, and it is based in civil society. The former contains the moments of subjective particularity and objective universality in substantial unity; but in the latter, these moments, which in civil society are at first divided into the internally reflected particularity of need and satisfaction and abstract legal universality, are inwardly united in such a way that particular welfare is present as a right and is actualized within this union.
Remark: The sanctity of marriage and the honor attaching to the corporation are the two moments round which the disorganization of civil society revolves.
When the corporations were abolished in recent times, it was with the intention that the individual should look after himself. But even if we accept this, the corporation does not affect the individual’s obligation to earn his living. In our modem states, the citizens have only a limited share in the universal business of the state; but it is necessary to provide ethical man with a universal activity in addition to his private end. This universal [activity], which the modern state does not always offer him, can be found in the corporation. We saw earlier that, in providing for himself, the individual in civil society is also acting for others. But this unconscious necessity is not enough; only in the corporation does it become a knowing and thinking part of ethical life. The corporation, of course, must come under the higher supervision of the state, for it would otherwise become ossified and set in its ways, and decline into a miserable guild system. But the corporation in and for itself is not an enclosed guild; it is rather a means of giving the isolated trade an ethical status, and of admitting it to a circle in which it gains strength and honor.
§256→ The end of the corporation, which is limited and finite, has its truth in the end which is universal in and for itself and in the absolute actuality of this end. So likewise do the separation and relative identity which were present in the external organization of the police. The sphere of civil society thus passes over into the state.
Pope Leo XIII in Rerum Novarum
The discussion is not easy, nor is it void of danger. It is no easy matter to define the relative rights and mutual duties of the rich and of the poor, of capital and of labor. And the danger lies in this, that crafty agitators are intent on making use of these differences of opinion to pervert men’s judgments and to stir up the people to revolt.
In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees it has come to pass that working men have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself.
To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. […] But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community. It is surely undeniable that, when a man engages in remunerative labor, the impelling reason and motive of his work is to obtain property, and thereafter to hold it as his very own. If one man hires out to another his strength or skill, he does so for the purpose of receiving in return what is necessary for the satisfaction of his needs; he therefore expressly intends to acquire a right full and real, not only to the remuneration, but also to the disposal of such remuneration, just as he pleases. Thus, if he lives sparingly, saves money, and, for greater security, invests his savings in land, the land, in such case, is only his wages under another form; and, consequently, a working man’s little estate thus purchased should be as completely at his full disposal as are the wages he receives for his labor. […] strike at the interests of every wage-earner, since they would deprive him of the liberty of disposing of his wages, and thereby of all hope and possibility of increasing his resources and of bettering his condition in life.
What is of far greater moment, however, is the fact that the remedy they propose is manifestly against justice. For, every man has by nature the right to possess property as his own. This is one of the chief points of distinction between man and the animal creation, for the brute has no power of self direction, but is governed by two main instincts, which keep his powers on the alert, impel him to develop them in a fitting manner, and stimulate and determine him to action without any power of choice. One of these instincts is self preservation, the other the propagation of the species. Both can attain their purpose by means of things which lie within range; beyond their verge the brute creation cannot go, for they are moved to action by their senses only, and in the special direction which these suggest. But with man it is wholly different. He possesses, on the one hand, the full perfection of the animal being, and hence enjoys at least as much as the rest of the animal kind, the fruition of things material. But animal nature, however perfect, is far from representing the human being in its completeness, and is in truth but humanity’s humble handmaid, made to serve and to obey. It is the mind, or reason, which is the predominant element in us who are human creatures; it is this which renders a human being human, and distinguishes him essentially from the brute.
[…]
The fact that God has given the earth for the use and enjoyment of the whole human race can in no way be a bar to the owning of private property. For God has granted the earth to mankind in general, not in the sense that all without distinction can deal with it as they like, but rather that no part of it was assigned to any one in particular, and that the limits of private possession have been left to be fixed by man’s own industry, and by the laws of individual races. Moreover, the earth, even though apportioned among private owners, ceases not thereby to minister to the needs of all, inasmuch as there is not one who does not sustain life from what the land produces. Those who do not possess the soil contribute their labor; hence, it may truly be said that all human subsistence is derived either from labor on one’s own land, or from some toil, some calling, which is paid for either in the produce of the land itself, or in that which is exchanged for what the land brings forth. Here, again, we have further proof that private ownership is in accordance with the law of nature. Truly, that which is required for the preservation of life, and for life’s well-being, is produced in great abundance from the soil, but not until man has brought it into cultivation and expended upon it his solicitude and skill. Now, when man thus turns the activity of his mind and the strength of his body toward procuring the fruits of nature, by such act he makes his own that portion of nature’s field which he cultivates – that portion on which he leaves, as it were, the impress of his personality; and it cannot but be just that he should possess that portion as his very own, and have a right to hold it without any one being justified in violating that right.
So strong and convincing are these arguments that it seems amazing that some should now be setting up anew certain obsolete opinions in opposition to what is here laid down. They assert that it is right for private persons to have the use of the soil and its various fruits, but that it is unjust for any one to possess outright either the land on which he has built or the estate which he has brought under cultivation. But those who deny these rights do not perceive that they are defrauding man of what his own labor has produced. For the soil which is tilled and cultivated with toil and skill utterly changes its condition; it was wild before, now it is fruitful; was barren, but now brings forth in abundance. That which has thus altered and improved the land becomes so truly part of itself as to be in great measure indistinguishable and inseparable from it. Is it just that the fruit of a man’s own sweat and labor should be possessed and enjoyed by any one else? As effects follow their cause, so is it just and right that the results of labor should belong to those who have bestowed their labor. […]
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a family finds itself in exceeding distress, utterly deprived of the counsel of friends, and without any prospect of extricating itself, it is right that extreme necessity be met by public aid, since each family is a part of the commonwealth. In like manner, if within the precincts of the household there occur grave disturbance of mutual rights, public authority should intervene to force each party to yield to the other its proper due; for this is not to deprive citizens of their rights, but justly and properly to safeguard and strengthen them. But the rulers of the commonwealth must go no further; here, nature bids them stop. Paternal authority can be neither abolished nor absorbed by the State; for it has the same source as human life itself. ‘The child belongs to the father,’ and is, as it were, the continuation of the father’s personality; and speaking strictly, the child takes its place in civil society, not of its own right, but in its quality as member of the family in which it is born. And for the very reason that ‘the child belongs to the father’ it is, as St. Thomas Aquinas says, ‘before it attains the use of free will, under the power and the charge of its parents.'(4) The socialists, therefore, in setting aside the parent and setting up a State supervision, act against natural justice, and destroy the structure of the home.[…]
It is the Church that insists, on the authority of the Gospel, upon those teachings whereby the conflict can be brought to an end, or rendered, at least, far less bitter; the Church uses her efforts not only to enlighten the mind, but to direct by her precepts the life and conduct of each and all; the Church improves and betters the condition of the working man by means of numerous organizations; does her best to enlist the services of all classes in discussing and endeavoring to further in the most practical way, the interests of the working classes; and considers that for this purpose recourse should be had, in due measure and degree, to the intervention of the law and of State authority. It must be first of all recognized that the condition of things inherent in human affairs must be borne with, for it is impossible to reduce civil society to one dead level. Socialists may in that intent do their utmost, but all striving against nature is in vain. There naturally exist among mankind manifold differences of the most important kind; people differ in capacity, skill, health, strength; and unequal fortune is a necessary result of unequal condition. Such inequality is far from being disadvantageous either to individuals or to the community. Social and public life can only be maintained by means of various kinds of capacity for business and the playing of many parts; and each man, as a rule, chooses the part which suits his own peculiar domestic condition. As regards bodily labor, even had man never fallen from the state of innocence, he would not have remained wholly idle; but that which would then have been his free choice and his delight became afterwards compulsory, and the painful expiation for his disobedience. ‘Cursed be the earth in thy work; in thy labor thou shalt eat of it all the days of thy life.’ […]
The great mistake made in regard to the matter now under consideration is to take up with the notion that class is naturally hostile to class, and that the wealthy and the working men are intended by nature to live in mutual conflict. So irrational and so false is this view that the direct contrary is the truth. Just as the symmetry of the human frame is the result of the suitable arrangement of the different parts of the body, so in a State is it ordained by nature that these two classes should dwell in harmony and agreement, so as to maintain the balance of the body politic. Each needs the other: capital cannot do without labor, nor labor without capital. Mutual agreement results in the beauty of good order, while perpetual conflict necessarily produces confusion and savage barbarity. Now, in preventing such strife as this, and in uprooting it, the efficacy of Christian institutions is marvelous and manifold. First of all, there is no intermediary more powerful than religion (whereof the Church is the interpreter and guardian) in drawing the rich and the working class together, by reminding each of its duties to the other, and especially of the obligations of justice. […]
The following duties bind the wealthy owner and the employer: not to look upon their work people as their bondsmen, but to respect in every man his dignity as a person ennobled by Christian character. They are reminded that, according to natural reason and Christian philosophy, working for gain is creditable, not shameful, to a man, since it enables him to earn an honorable livelihood; but to misuse men as though they were things in the pursuit of gain, or to value them solely for their physical powers — that is truly shameful and inhuman. Again justice demands that, in dealing with the working man, religion and the good of his soul must be kept in mind. Hence, the employer is bound to see that the worker has time for his religious duties; that he be not exposed to corrupting influences and dangerous occasions; and that he be not led away to neglect his home and family, or to squander his earnings. Furthermore, the employer must never tax his work people beyond their strength, or employ them in work unsuited to their sex and age. His great and principal duty is to give every one what is just. Doubtless, before deciding whether wages axe fair, many things have to be considered; but wealthy owners and all masters of labor should be mindful of this — that to exercise pressure upon the indigent and the destitute for the sake of gain, and to gather one’s profit out of the need of another, is condemned by all laws, human and divine. To defraud any one of wages that are his due is a great crime which cries to the avenging anger of Heaven. ‘Behold, the hire of the laborers… which by fraud has been kept back by you, crieth; and the cry of them hath entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabbath.’ Lastly, the rich must religiously refrain from cutting down the workmen’s earnings, whether by force, by fraud, or by usurious dealing; and with all the greater reason because the laboring man is, as a rule, weak and unprotected, and because his slender means should in proportion to their scantiness be accounted sacred. Were these precepts carefully obeyed and followed out, would they not be sufficient of themselves to keep under all strife and all its causes? […]
The Church, moreover, intervenes directly in behalf of the poor, by setting on foot and maintaining many associations which she knows to be efficient for the relief of poverty. Herein, again, she has always succeeded so well as to have even extorted the praise of her enemies. Such was the ardor of brotherly love among the earliest Christians that numbers of those who were in better circumstances despoiled themselves of their possessions in order to relieve their brethren; whence ‘neither was there any one needy among them.’ To the order of deacons, instituted in that very intent, was committed by the Apostles the charge of the daily doles; and the Apostle Paul, though burdened with the solicitude of all the churches, hesitated not to undertake laborious journeys in order to carry the alms of the faithful to the poorer Christians. Tertullian calls these contributions, given voluntarily by Christians in their assemblies, deposits of piety, because, to cite his own words, they were employed ‘in feeding the needy, in burying them, in support of youths and maidens destitute of means and deprived of their parents, in the care of the aged, and the relief of the shipwrecked.’ […]
The foremost duty, therefore, of the rulers of the State should be to make sure that the laws and institutions, the general character and administration of the commonwealth, shall be such as of themselves to realize public well-being and private prosperity. This is the proper scope of wise statesmanship and is the work of the rulers. Now a State chiefly prospers and thrives through moral rule, well-regulated family life, respect for religion and justice, the moderation and fair imposing of public taxes, the progress of the arts and of trade, the abundant yield of the land-through everything, in fact, which makes the citizens better and happier. Hereby, then, it lies in the power of a ruler to benefit every class in the State, and amongst the rest to promote to the utmost the interests of the poor; and this in virtue of his office, and without being open to suspicion of undue interference – since it is the province of the commonwealth to serve the common good. And the more that is done for the benefit of the working classes by the general laws of the country, the less need will there be to seek for special means to relieve them.[…]
There is another and deeper consideration which must not be lost sight of. As regards the State, the interests of all, whether high or low, are equal. The members of the working classes are citizens by nature and by the same right as the rich; they are real parts, living the life which makes up, through the family, the body of the commonwealth; and it need hardly be said that they are in every city very largely in the majority. It would be irrational to neglect one portion of the citizens and favor another, and therefore the public administration must duly and solicitously provide for the welfare and the comfort of the working classes; otherwise, that law of justice will be violated which ordains that each man shall have his due. To cite the wise words of St. Thomas Aquinas: ‘As the part and the whole are in a certain sense identical, so that which belongs to the whole in a sense belongs to the part.’ Among the many and grave duties of rulers who would do their best for the people, the first and chief is to act with strict justice – with that justice which is called distributive – toward each and every class alike.
But although all citizens, without exception, can and ought to contribute to that common good in which individuals share so advantageously to themselves, yet it should not be supposed that all can contribute in the like way and to the same extent. No matter what changes may occur in forms of government, there will ever be differences and inequalities of condition in the State. Society cannot exist or be conceived of without them. Some there must be who devote themselves to the work of the commonwealth, who make the laws or administer justice, or whose advice and authority govern the nation in times of peace, and defend it in war. Such men clearly occupy the foremost place in the State, and should be held in highest estimation, for their work concerns most nearly and effectively the general interests of the community. Those who labor at a trade or calling do not promote the general welfare in such measure as this, but they benefit the nation, if less directly, in a most important manner. We have insisted, it is true, that, since the end of society is to make men better, the chief good that society can possess is virtue. […]
Whenever the general interest or any particular class suffers, or is threatened with harm, which can in no other way be met or prevented, the public authority must step in to deal with it. Now, it is to the interest of the community, as well as of the individual, that peace and good order should be maintained; that all things should be carried on in accordance with God’s laws and those of nature; that the discipline of family life should be observed and that religion should be obeyed; that a high standard of morality should prevail, both in public and private life; that justice should be held sacred and that no one should injure another with impunity; that the members of the commonwealth should grow up to man’s estate strong and robust, and capable, if need be, of guarding and defending their country. If by a strike of workers or concerted interruption of work there should be imminent danger of disturbance to the public peace; or if circumstances were such as that among the working class the ties of family life were relaxed; if religion were found to suffer through the workers not having time and opportunity afforded them to practice its duties; if in workshops and factories there were danger to morals through the mixing of the sexes or from other harmful occasions of evil; or if employers laid burdens upon their workmen which were unjust, or degraded them with conditions repugnant to their dignity as human beings; finally, if health were endangered by excessive labor, or by work unsuited to sex or age — in such cases, there can be no question but that, within certain limits, it would be right to invoke the aid and authority of the law. The limits must be determined by the nature of the occasion which calls for the law’s interference – the principle being that the law must not undertake more, nor proceed further, than is required for the remedy of the evil or the removal of the mischief.
Rights must be religiously respected wherever they exist, and it is the duty of the public authority to prevent and to punish injury, and to protect every one in the possession of his own. Still, when there is question of defending the rights of individuals, the poor and badly off have a claim to especial consideration. The richer class have many ways of shielding themselves, and stand less in need of help from the State; whereas the mass of the poor have no resources of their own to fall back upon, and must chiefly depend upon the assistance of the State. And it is for this reason that wage-earners, since they mostly belong in the mass of the needy, should be specially cared for and protected by the government.[…]
Most true it is that by far the larger part of the workers prefer to better themselves by honest labor rather than by doing any wrong to others. But there are not a few who are imbued with evil principles and eager for revolutionary change, whose main purpose is to stir up disorder and incite their fellows to acts of violence. The authority of the law should intervene to put restraint upon such firebrands, to save the working classes from being led astray by their maneuvers, and to protect lawful owners from spoliation.
Edouard Berth in Anarchism and Syndicalism
Socialism, i.e., revolutionary syndicalism, is a philosophy of the producers. It conceives society in accordance with the model of a progressive workshop without employers; in its view, everything that does not play a role in this workshop must disappear. Therefore, the first thing that must disappear is the State, which is the most outstanding representative of non-productive, parasitic Society. One could say that for socialism, what is most important is the categorical imperative of production. A form of production that is constantly being improved; such is the goal it pursues and the fundamental postulate of its philosophy of life. In this respect it exhibits the same spirit as capitalism, and this is a result of the fact that syndicalism is the legitimate offspring of capitalism: from capitalism it will inherit this progressive workshop and that love of an increasingly more advanced and comprehensive capacity for production. Everyone knows the apology for capitalism set forth by Marx in The Communist Manifesto; and it has often been observed that the Manchester School and the Marxists are in basic agreement regarding the essential trend of economic development; for one could say that these two schools have professed the same horror for protectionism, statism and anything that could present an obstacle for that high level of productivity which is their shared ideal. Thus, while Marxism is the theory that is most appropriate for a truly revolutionary workers movement, that is, it is the theory which represents the most economical, most advanced and most accelerated pace of development of modern production, the Manchester School is for its part the theory that conforms most closely to the most highly developed forms of capitalism.
But if syndicalism considers itself to be the heir of capitalism, upon what premises are its hopes for a possible transition from the capitalist workshop to the socialist workshop based, and what features distinguish the capitalist workshop from the socialist workshop? The capitalist workshop may be defined and characterized briefly by the words, forced cooperation, based on coercion, while the socialist workshop can be characterized by saying that it will be free cooperation. The transition from one to the other is the transition from a regime of coercion to a regime of freedom, the famous leap from necessity to freedom that is mentioned in The Communist Manifesto. The question that arises is thus to understand how such a leap will be possible and upon what premises the hopes for such a challenging and profound transformation are based. Syndicalism responds that this transformation is already prepared by capitalism itself; that within the very entrails of capitalism there is a developmental process underway that is causing it to evolve from its commercial and usurious form into increasingly more industrial forms; that in the most modern industrial plant, it is in the process of replacing at an ever increasing pace the discipline of mindless labor, which recalls more or less that which takes place in a workhouse and demands a totally passive form of obedience, with another more voluntary kind of labor, which is based on the sense of duty; a discipline that is therefore not external to the workers, but internal; and that this evolution may be summed up by saying that the requirements of technical skill are assuming more and more predominance over those of command and hierarchy and that there is a growing degree of autonomy manifested by labor with regard to authority, production with regard to the State, and economics with regard to politics. Syndicalism is nothing but the transition to the culminating point of this evolution; this workshop without employers will not be created overnight, any more than it can be just taken as it is from the hands of the capitalists; to the ineluctable process of capitalist economic development, we must add only a process based on conscious participation, by means of which the workers will prepare themselves to accept their inheritance. For, according to syndicalism, it is only by fighting hand to hand with capitalism that the working class can be trained, and only in this way can it emerge from its passivity and become active and acquire all the necessary qualities for its self-rule, without tutelage, over the great progressive workshop that capitalism has created and must bequeath to it.
In any event, syndicalism does not concern itself, as can be seen, with an abstract opposition between authority and freedom, or between the State and the individual: it is exclusively concerned with a real evolutionary process, one that is engendering an increasingly acute opposition between the demands of a constantly improved system of production and a coercive system of organization, an organizational form that rests on the principles of hierarchical authority. And it is so evident that there is no question, for syndicalism, of an abstract opposition between authority and freedom that it expressly acknowledges that authority has been necessary until now, that it has been the spur thanks to which civilization has been able to advance and extract from human labor all the marvels that it has produced and that, as Hegel said, obedience is the school of command. The recognition that syndicalism grants to capitalism is not just limited to the material wealth the latter has created, but also and even more importantly to the moral and spiritual transformations it has impressed upon the working class masses, who, thanks to its iron discipline, have left their primitive laziness and their individualist anarchism behind them in order to take part in an increasingly more highly advanced form of collective labor. Syndicalism unequivocally acknowledges that civilization began and had to begin under conditions of coercion, and that this coercion was salutary, beneficial and creative, and that if it is possible to hope for a regime of freedom, without entrepreneurial or State guardianship, then this possibility only exists by virtue of that same coercive regime that has disciplined humanity, gradually rendering it capable of participating in free and voluntary labor.
But is there anything more remote from these syndicalist points of view than the anarchist perspective? It could be said that, in opposition to this coercive regime, anarchism has stood for a permanent protest, it has endlessly denounced the civilization that requires such efforts in order to deliver so little happiness, and that this anarchist protest and denunciation originate in the revolt of the lazy individual, the primitive savage, the man in a state of nature who rebels against an iron-fisted regime that seeks to force him to submit to the discipline of work and to leave behind his primitive leisure, inactivity and freedom. One may analyze the writings of all the anarchist authors; one will find this same hatred of civilization, understood as a coercive regime, as a system of discipline that compels man to work, to follow some other inclination than that of nature, creating what are in their view barbarous institutions, because all of them demand an effort from man in order to tame his instincts, his passions and his innate laziness.
Read Rousseau, for instance; his vagrant humor, his love of independence (an entirely natural independence), his misanthropy, and the horror that society inspires in him, are well known. Man, he proclaims, is naturally good, at the moment that he leaves the hands of his Creator; it is civilization that causes him to be depraved. All of anarchist thought is already contained here; a naïve optimism, an ingenuous belief in man’s good instincts, the idea that one can leave human nature alone and allow it to be abandoned to its instincts, that all social institutions have done nothing but corrupt it, and that, in order to return men to their state of primitive goodness, it is necessary to unburden them of that whole collection of demoralizing institutions that go by the name of family, property and State; marriage must be replaced by free unions; property by each person taking what he wants; the State by each person doing what is advantageous for him.
It has often been observed that the anarchists come from artisanal, peasant or aristocratic backgrounds. Rousseau clearly represents the artisanal anarchism; his Republic is a small Republic of free and independent artisans that can only be conceived on such an economic basis. In Proudhon, his individualist anarchism—we must point out that there is more to his ideas than just this aspect, which we shall presently see—is indisputably of a peasant origin; Proudhon is a peasant at heart and it is unfair to call him petit-bourgeois. And if, finally, we consider Tolstoy, we discover in his works an anarchism of an elite or aristocratic stamp. Tolstoy is a weary aristocrat, displeased with civilization, because he had his fill of its enjoyments, which led him to experience the stoical and peace-loving emotions of a primitive nature; to him, all of civilization seemed to be without any meaning, a monstrosity that only creates poverty and crime, which gives birth to war, violence, and cruel hatreds, when the only reality is love. Tolstoy’s thought is verily the thought of a primitive, of a world-weary person who, in an entirely natural reaction, returns to the simplistic thought of primitive man. The jaded spectator of a spectacle that he has seen too many times, he seeks happiness and the meaning of life in every discipline, in science, in philosophy, in civilization as a whole; and it is a simple muzhik who is the only one who responds in a way that he finds valid: To live is to love, to have simple pleasures, to lead a peaceful and God-fearing life. Here we can observe a case of mental regression, a kind of intellectual degeneration that reflects fatigue and exhaustion, natural in an aristocrat; the denizens of high society live in a fictitious world, distant from the real world, alien to all real creation and all productive activity; gamblers, who soon grow tired of their way of life, soon long for a kind of state of nature, the way a sick person looks forward to recover his health in the countryside.
Regardless, however, of whether anarchism is derived from an artisanal, peasant or aristocratic origin, it is always a protest against capitalist civilization, which is considered to be a barbarous and monstrous regime of violence and oppression. And the nature of this protest consists in its purely negative and even reactionary character; it is the protest of the classes on the fringe of capitalism, for whom capitalism has disrupted their way of life, done away with their customs, and constituted an insult to their deepest and most traditional feelings. The syndicalist protest is very different. Syndicalism, as we have pointed out, considers itself to be the direct heir of capitalism and admires the latter’s creative abilities; far from harboring towards it that feeling of revulsion that a savage experiences (I employ this term, savage, as a synonym for solitary, for an individual for whom, given his way of life, there is no social life, so that according to this definition an artisan, a peasant and even a worldly gentleman are savages, because society is a coordination of efforts that are mutually reinforced by the efforts of various individuals, and not just a juxtaposition of egoisms in search of pleasure), syndicalism considers capitalism to be a marvelous wizard who knew how, thanks to audacity combined with individual initiative and cooperation, to conjure all the infinite human productive forces and make them emerge from the depths of social labor, where they had previously slumbered. But it also thinks that the historical role of capitalism, which has awakened the social genie from its sleep, which has rescued the worker from his isolation, and which has subjected men to collective labor, has now come to an end; the workers, now that they have been constituted as production groups and after they have acquired over the course of their long struggles against their employers the spirit of audacity and initiative along with the taste for free association, can carry on with the mission of capitalism without any more need of its tutelage or its compulsion. There is a transfusion of the spirit of initiative and responsibility from the contemporary private manager of an enterprise to the body of the productive group; and at the same time, the power of the workers collective, now its own master, is no longer recruited or alienated for the benefit of just one person.
But it is precisely this social character of freedom that is denied by anarchism; and one can justly say that, in a certain sense, anarchism is nothing but an exaggerated form of bourgeois ideology. Nor are we referring here to anarchism in its early anti-capitalist form, if one can call it that, but to its ultra-capitalist form. This is expressed, above all, in Stirner’s book, The Ego and Its Own. We have said that bourgeois society is divided into two poles: on the one side, individuals, free competitors on a free market; on the other side, the State, administrative centralization. Let us assume that this historical passage has reached the extreme to which we have referred; let us assume that civil society has rid itself of the State, and that all that remains is the individual, the ego and its own. In The Jewish Question, Marx, discussing the rights of man, says that these rights are the rights of the egoist man, because man is considered as an isolated monad, because each man sees in his neighbor not the realization but the limitation of his personal freedom, and because these rights do not extend beyond the individual man, barricaded behind his particular interests and his personal whims, separated from the life and activity of the community. Compared to this egoist man, the member of civil society, the political man is nothing but an artificial man, an abstract man, an allegorical personage. And Marx goes on to quote the following important words of Rousseau: “He who dares to undertake the making of a people’s institutions ought to feel himself capable, so to speak, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual, who is by himself a complete and solitary whole, into part of a greater whole from which he in a manner receives his life and being; of altering man’s constitution for the purpose of strengthening it; and of substituting a partial and moral existence for the physical and independent existence nature has conferred on us all. He must, in a word, take away from man his own resources and give him instead new ones alien to him, and incapable of being made use of without the help of other men” (The Social Contract).
Stirner’s anarchist is simply the egoist man of civil society, who rejects all the abstract and artificial superstructure of political society, and who does not want to have anything to do with that abstract man, that allegorical personage, as Marx called him, known as the citizen. And it should be pointed out that, in the practical sense, anarchism is reduced to not using the right to vote, or not carrying out the duties of the citizen, and rejecting any participation in the abstract life of democratic society. It is well known that the whole metaphysical system of Stirner is based on the negation of the ideas—which are, according to him, chimeras—which confiscate individual freedom and whose despotic and fabulous rule must be overthrown. Stirner claimed to represent the opposition to Hegel; his book is particularly intended to be an attack on the absolute idealism that is for him synonymous with absolute despotism, and he is undoubtedly at least partly correct: did Hegel not make the State the actualization of the Idea? Marxism, however, as everyone knows, reacted no less violently than Stirner against such a divinization of the State; but whereas Stirner, from an extreme simplicity, was content, in order to free the individual, with a pure and simple rejection of the abstract superstructure of political society so as to preserve nothing but the egoist individual of civil society, Marx, who was just as aware as Stirner was of the abstract character of political life, employs a much more concrete and positive procedure to simultaneously overcome both the particularist character of bourgeois civil society and the abstract character of political society, which are resolved into the trade union society. Political emancipation—as Marx wrote in The Jewish Question—is the reduction of man to a member of bourgeois society or the egoistic and independent individual, on the one hand; and, on the other, to a political citizen, a moral and allegorical personage. Therefore, true human emancipation will only be achieved when the real individual man, by reabsorbing the abstract citizen, will be transformed into a social being, in his everyday life, in his work, in his individual affairs; when man, consciously and thoroughly organizing his own powers as social powers, will no longer be separated from social power in the form of political power.
This is the Marxist solution: we need not belabor the fact that it is also the syndicalist solution. The latter rejects the political abstraction, which was considered by Marx, as well as by Stirner, as oppressive; but while Stirner rejected this oppression only to retreat to the palpable particularity of civil society and only becomes free of the yoke of abstract thought by falling prey to pure and simple empiricism, Marx was able to simultaneously supersede both concrete particularity and abstract universality in order to discover the concrete universal; and this concrete universal is precisely the life of the trade unions, in which social forces, without allowing themselves to be either absorbed or transformed by political forces, organize autonomously and freely, where man becomes a social being in his everyday existence, in his individual efforts: the abstract citizen of the political city is reabsorbed and the egoist man of civil society is transformed into the multifaceted and concrete personality of the social trade union worker, in the working class collectivity which, master of the workshop, scientifically and politically qualified, eliminates by way of absorption (aufheben, an untranslatable German term) every kind of parasite, the State such as it exists and Hegel’s thinking State. This also amounts to the end of those ideologies whose chimeras Stirner sought to dispel, as well as that civil anarchy into which his individualism is completely submerged.
But anarchist metaphysics is incapable of understanding this Marxist and syndicalist revolution because, in its view, society does not have an independent existence and is only manifested as a restriction, an abstract repression of individual independence. The metaphysics for which society is nothing but a juxtaposition of individual units is a monadological or atomistic metaphysics; for such a metaphysics, only the individual is real; everything else is only a fantasy, a chimera or an illusion. Anarchism transforms the individual into an absolute, incapable of joining any social combination without having a sense of being arbitrarily oppressed and stifled, and if we recall the economic origins of anarchism—artisanal, agricultural or aristocratic—this is just how anarchism had to conceive of the individual and his relations with society. Socialism has a completely different conception, and in its view society does not mean the arbitrary juxtaposition or sum of individuals who are absolutes and do not join a system of that kind without simultaneously experiencing a mutual restriction and diminution, but rather the contrary, it views society as a system of cooperation in which the cumulative efforts of all its members multiply in such a way that for the individual there is not loss, but a net gain, from his participation in these efforts, because solitude is equivalent to impotence, poverty, and disability, while association means power, wealth and capabilities that are multiplied a thousand-fold; in a word, for socialism, society is the true reality, and the individual is nothing, so to speak, but an abstraction, that is, a part; social existence possesses a reality of which the individual is only one aspect, one phenomenon—which is just what anarchism denies, and instead posits the individual as the only reality.
No one has expounded this theory of the reality of the social being as magnificently as Proudhon, the so-called father of anarchism. Proudhon, of course—according to Marx and Engels—was nothing but a preposterous petit bourgeois who hated association from the bottom of his heart. Nonetheless, this petit bourgeois, this man who hated association, this anarchist, has admirably described the reality of social existence; if you have any doubt of this, just read his Justice in the Revolution and the Church, or his Philosophy of Progress: in these works you will find a theory of collective power and a presentation of a metaphysical doctrine of existence, essentially conceived in the form of the group. More generally, it would not be futile, to cap off this study of anarchism and syndicalism, to take a look at Proudhonian anarchism. We shall see that this alleged anarchism is actually what we call syndicalism. Not exactly, of course, but with regard to its spirit and its most typical tendency. Yes, it is true: Proudhon is, along with Marx, the most authentic theoretical precursor of revolutionary syndicalism; and after demonstrating why his thought has almost nothing in common with traditional anarchism and instead approximates syndicalism, we shall then proceed, in an eminently useful manner, in our opinion, to show how anarchism differs from syndicalism. We shall start by examining this essential theory of the reality of social existence; then we shall see how Proudhon’s ideas about those social institutions that go by the names of the family, the State, and property, or concerning those social realities known as love, war and production, are a thousand miles from anarchist ideas.
We shall therefore introduce a few decisive quotations into the debate. In his admirable First Letter on Progress, we read: “With the idea of movement or progress, all these systems, founded on the categories of substance, causality, subject, object, spirit, matter, etc., fall, or rather explain themselves away, never to reappear again. The notion of being can no longer be sought in an invisible something, whether spirit, body, atom, monad, or what-have-you. It ceases to be simplistic and become synthetic: it is no longer the conception, the fiction of an indivisible, unmodifiable, intransmutable (etc.) je ne sais quoi: intelligence, which first posits a synthesis, before attacking it by analysis, admits nothing of the sort a priori. It knows what substance and force are, in themselves; it does not take its elements for realities, since, by the law of the constitution of the mind, the reality disappears, while it seeks to resolve it into its elements. All that reason knows and affirms is that the being, as well as the idea, is a GROUP…. Everything that exists is grouped; everything that forms a group is one. Consequently, it is perceptible, and, consequently, it is. The more numerous and varied the elements and relations which combine in the formation of the group, the more centralizing power will be found there, and the more reality the being will obtain. Apart from the group there are only abstractions and phantoms…. It is following that conception of being in general, and in particular of the human self, that I believe it possible to prove the positive reality, and up to a certain point to demonstrate the ideas (the laws) of the social self or humanitary group, and to ascertain and show, above and beyond our individual existence, the existence of a superior individuality of the collective man…. According to some, society is the juxtaposition of similar individuals, each sacrificing a part of their liberty, so as to be able, without harming one another, to remain juxtaposed, and live side by side in peace. Such is the theory of Rousseau: it is the system of governmental arbitrariness, not, it is true, as that arbitrariness is the deed of a prince or tyrant, but, what is much more serious, in that it is the deed of the multitude, the product of universal suffrage. Depending on whether it suits the multitude, or those who prompt it, to tighten more or less the social ties, to give more or less development to local and individual liberties, the alleged Social Contract can go from the direct and fragmented government of the people all the way to caesarism, from relations of simple proximity to the community of goods and gains, women and children. All that history and the imagination can suggest of extreme license and extreme servitude is deduced with an ease and logical rigor equal to the societary theory of Rousseau.”
“According to others, and these despite their scientific appearance seem to me hardly more advanced, society, the moral person, reasoning being, pure fiction, is only the development, among the masses, of the phenomena of individual organization, so that knowledge of the individual gives immediately knowledge of society, and politics resolves itself into physiology and hygiene. But what is social hygiene? It is apparently, for each member of society, a liberal education, a varied instruction, a lucrative function, a moderate labor, a comfortable regime: now, the question is precisely how to procure for ourselves all of that!”
“For me, following the notions of movement, progress, series and group, of which ontology is compelled from now on to take account, and the various findings that economics and history furnish on the question, I regard society, the human group, as a being sui generis, constituted by the fluid relations and economic solidarity of all the individuals, of the nation, of the locality or corporation, or of the entire species; which individuals circulate freely among one another, approaching one another, joining together, dispersing in turn in all directions; — a being which has its own functions, alien to our individuality, its own ideas which it communicates to us, its judgments which do not at all resemble ours, its will in diametrical opposition with our instincts, its life, which is not that of the animal or the plant, although it finds analogies there; — a being, finally, who, starting from nature, seems the God of nature, the powers and laws of which it expresses to a superior (supernatural) degree.”
Please forgive the length of these quotations, but they are needed to set the record straight concerning so many prejudices about Proudhon, which so often take the form of a cavalier dismissal of him as an anarchist or petit bourgeois. And I dare to ask anyone who carefully reads this magnificent depiction of the reality of social existence whether it is possible to define Proudhon as an anarchist. Here we touch upon the heart of the matter; here we see the profound difference between the socialist philosophy and the anarchist metaphysics displayed in all its splendor. The basis of all anarchism is, as we have seen, the individual, the ego, considered as a simple thing, as an absolute, as a kind of monad which, following Leibniz, has neither doors nor windows connecting it to the outside, and which, as a result, is incommensurable and unsociable by its very nature. Upon such a basis there is no need to say that it is utterly impossible to undertake any reconstruction of society and the idea of the social, because its starting point is the radical denial of such a possibility, and it would be just as absurd to seek to rebuild society using unsociable and isolated units as it would be chimerical to expect to set unmovable objects in motion; it is first necessary to consider the movement, and to insert oneself in it; then one may conceive of stasis as a kind of arrested development. Likewise, one must take society into consideration, insert oneself into it, and then conceive of the individual as a kind of paralysis. The individual in society, like stasis within movement, are nothing but provisional and temporarily useful abstractions; to construct these abstractions as realities, to transform them into the only realities, is to radically turn your back on life and truth, it is to collapse and lose oneself in the simplistic idea of a false abstract rationalism. This is, however, the essential error of anarchist metaphysics, an error in which socialism is not implicated, and to which Proudhon did not succumb, who, as we just saw, begins by establishing, above all else, the reality of social existence. Socialism gives its primary consideration to society; its starting point is not the individual who is set in abstract opposition to society, but the workshop, the social laborer.
Plekhanov, at the end of his study, Anarchism and Socialism, asserts that in the final accounting the anarchists are nothing but decadent bourgeois. But what does decadent mean in this context? What feature indicates that a society is in decline? Is it not precisely the fact that the social idea loses all of its meaning and the individual is raised to the highest level and is abstractly proclaimed as the final and absolute end, and by means of his formidable egocentrism everything is reduced to the individual? The individual isolated in his private enjoyment: this is the cardinal feature of all decadence. And this enjoyment can take the most varied forms, the most spiritual as well as the most material; egocentrism can call itself art for art’s sake or assume another disguise, more subtle and moralistic: humanitarianism; it can be epicurean or stoic, Christian or pagan, it can invoke Conscience, Science, Freedom or Beauty, but it is always, in the final analysis, the denial of the social idea, the refusal on the part of the individual to devote himself to any collective effort of any kind. It hardly matters that this refusal is concealed under moral, idealist or even humanitarian reasons: for egoism, the love of humanity and the religion of suffering are very comfortable garments and more pleasing than any others. And one of the most profound theses of Proudhon’s moral philosophy is that idealism leads to corruption and that the ideal is itself the origin of evil. What is an ideal? Any ideal whatsoever. It is an aspect of reality, separated from reality and raised to the status of an absolute; it is what Proudhon calls a speculative simplicity—substance, cause, monad, atom, mind or matter—which replaces the essentially synthetic idea of existence. Reality is mobile, it is movement or progress; but the idealist attempts to replace this fluid reality with something immutable, his ideal, and to freeze the whole flow of things into the boundaries of this ideal; it withdraws from movement, it establishes an alleged superior vantage point, and from there it seeks to govern, that is, stabilize and arrest life. Idealism is doomed to end up, then, in immobilism, in stasis, that is, in corruption and decadence; for if, as Proudhon also puts it most admirably, movement is the natural state of matter, then justice is the natural state of humanity. Therefore, justice is nothing but movement in society; it is humanity in a dynamic and progressive state, humanity fighting or producing, whose powers tend towards a continuous adaptation to an always changing reality; corruption or decadence is, on the other hand, the attempt to immobilize oneself in enjoyment outside the social movement, which is the indefatigable creator of new social forms.
Anarchism is a form of idealism or intellectualism; it consists in the transformation of the idea of freedom into an absolute, and we have already seen how it was the ideal of individuals who belong to classes that seek to resist the movement of capitalism and to freeze conditions so they can preserve the economic status quo, or else of individuals who want to destroy bourgeois society and reduce it to one single element: the particularistic egoism of civil society. Anarchism therefore constitutes a response on the part of the resistance against progress, or it is the dissolution of this progress. Syndicalism, on the other hand, not only has nothing to do with resistance to capitalist progress, but currently is acting to spur it on and drive it forward, and thus preventing it from stopping its forward movement and freezing in place, and looks forward to a future where its own productive potential will grow even more than capitalism’s. Syndicalism therefore represents, from a dual motivation, the movement and the progress of today’s society; it is the new and vigorous power which, embodying the new social ideal, fights to prevent social decline and to save civilization.
The fact that the anarchists only represent bourgeois social decadence emerges with complete clarity if, disregarding for the moment the metaphysical theses concerning the reality or the non-reality of social existence, we examine their way of addressing the question of the family, that primary manifestation and unmediated form of social life. Here, too, we notice the same fundamental incompatibility between Proudhon and anarchism. For everyone knows that anarchism conceives of the sexual partnership as a free, temporary and ephemeral union; and that, as a result, love is reduced to a volatile passion and marriage to a revocable ad libitumcontract, a civil contract of the same nature as other contracts, lacking any sacred or religious character. And everyone also knows that, on the other hand, for Proudhon, the sexual union is an irrevocable and indissoluble union; that, for him, love is subordinated to justice by marriage, because the very symbol of justice is the androgynous couple. As you can see, you cannot imagine a more fundamental opposition on such an essential question of such primary significance, a question whose answer will depend entirely on the respondent’s orientation with regard to social morality. Anarchism, then, puts its denial of the social idea into practice; the idea of freedom, raised to the status of an absolute by anarchism, dissolves the family; nothing remains but the individual with his ephemeral passions and his disordered romanticism. And who would dare to deny that this is a frantic and decadent bourgeoisism? It will be objected that Proudhon’s ideas about marriage are ultra-reactionary ideas and that both the socialists and the anarchists have adopted, with regard to this issue, the extravagant ideas of Fourier. In any event, this is not to the credit of socialism, which in regard to this as to so many other questions has deplorably followed in the footsteps of the bourgeois tradition rather than the working class tradition and has sought to inoculate—as Jaurés said—the emerging proletariat with the corruption of the moribund bourgeoisie.
But now let us examine the ideas of Proudhon and the anarchists, respectively, on a no less crucial issue: war. Everyone is familiar with the anarchist abhorrence for war and militarism, as well as the magnificent praise Proudhon bestows upon war in his book, War and Peace. Never before was such a brilliant and exalted panegyric pronounced; you would have to go all the way back to the Greek philosopher Heraclitus to find its equal. We shall not discuss Hegel, because Proudhonian thought displays in this context such obvious evidence of its Hegelian origin that we may dispense with any further mention of this. Is it not significant, by the way, that the two great socialist philosophers, the two great theoreticians of the class struggle—Marx and Proudhon—are Hegelians, in the broadest sense of the word? But what is the main idea of War and Peace? That since conflict is the fundamental law of the universe, peace, if it is ever possible, must be conceived otherwise than as a negation of war; that peace will be nothing but a transformation of war, a new form of that eternal conflict which is the law of the world, both the social world as well as the natural world: that the tranquil and pacifist peace, the universal embrace that all our decadent bourgeoisie, our parliamentary socialists and our humanitarian anarchists dream of, is impossible or, even if it were possible, it would for mankind be synonymous with stagnation, with immobility, with a complete relaxation of the nervous system and death. War will disappear some day; Proudhon announces and proclaims the end of the cycle of wars; but this conclusion will only give way to a warlike peace that will demand of men virtues that are no less great or heroic than those demanded by war itself. For industry is also a battlefield, where the combatants must demonstrate no less bravery, no less scorn for pleasure, and no less indifference to death than in the campaigns of real war; in industry, too, victory will go to the bravest, the most energetic, the most bold and the cowardly, the pusillanimous, and the egotistical will be defeated. But industry is superior to war because, while the latter is a pure destruction of forces, the former repairs any harm that it may cause. Listen to Proudhon: “The objective of war is to determine which of two parties to a dispute has the supremacy of force. It is a struggle between forces, not their destruction; a struggle between men, not their extermination. It must abstain, outside of combat and the succeeding political annexation, from any attack on persons or property. Wherever it can be deduced that we accept the law of humanity and of nature as laws of conflict, this conflict does not essentially consist of a fistfight or a hand-to-hand struggle between men. It could also be a struggle for industry and progress which, in the final analysis, given the spirit of the war and the elevated civilized goals that it pursues, amount to the same thing. The Empire goes to the bravest—that is what war says. But Labor, Industry and Economics respond: Maybe; but whence is the bravery of a man, or a nation derived? Is it not from his resourcefulness, his virtue, his character, his science, his industry, his labor, his wealth, his sobriety, his freedom, and his love for his country? Didn’t the Gran Capitán say that in war moral force is to physical force as 3 is to 1? Don’t they teach us, furthermore, about the laws of war and of the honor of gentlemen, that in combat we must maintain our dignity and abstain from any wanton harm, treason, looting and pillage? So we shall fight; we shall attack each other with the bayonet and will shoot at each other…. In these new battles, we shall have to provide the same proofs of resolve, of sacrifice, of scorn for life and pleasure; the dead and wounded will be no less numerous; and all that is cowardly, weak, coarse, everything that is lacking strength and spirit, must expect contempt, misery…. Thus, the transformation of conflict results from its very definition, from its movement, from its law; hence also from its purpose. For conflict does not have the object of pure and simple destruction, an unproductive consumption, extermination for the sake of extermination; its object is the production of an always-higher order, of an endless improvement. In this respect, it must be acknowledged that labor offers conflict a vast and fertile field of operations that is different from the theater of war. We must note, above all, that on this industrial field, the opposed forces wage a struggle that is no less passionate than the one waged on the battlefield; here, too, there is mutual destruction and assimilation. In labor as in war, the raw material of combat, its primary expenditure, is human blood. In a sense that is by no means metaphorical, we live on our own substance and on that of our brothers. But with the enormous difference that, in the industrial struggles, defeat is really inflicted only on those who have not fought at all or who have only done so in a cowardly fashion, so that as a result labor returns to its armies all that it consumes, something that war does not do, which is capable of creating nothing. In labor, production follows destruction; the forces consumed re-arise from their dissolution more energetic than every. The purpose of the conflict, the advantage sought from it, demands that this take place. If anything else were to take place, the world would sink into chaos; a negation of the fact that, thanks to war, the world is not the way it was at the dawn of creation, nothing but atoms and the void: Terra autem erat inanis et vacua” (“Now the world was formless and empty.” Genesis 1:2 [translator’s note]) (Proudhon, War and Peace).
As you can see, the Proudhon’s essential idea is that labor is the replacement for war: the worker replaces the soldier; industrial struggles succeed military campaigns. Already, in his General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon had written: “In place of public force, we will put collective force. In place of standing armies, we will put industrial associations.” Concerning these industrial associations, he previously said: “Finally appear the workingmen’s associations, regular armies of the revolution, in which the worker, like the soldier in the battalion, manoeuvres with the precision of his machines; in which thousands of wills, intelligent and proud, submit themselves to a superior will, as the hands controlled by them engender, by their concerted action, a collective force greater than even their number”. This constantly recurring parallel drawn between labor and war, between the working class virtues and military virtues, between the industrial associations (today we would call them Syndicates) and the standing armies; is it not curious and suggestive? Revolutionary syndicalism has taken a clear stand against the army, militarism and patriotism; but if we examine the basis of working class anti-militarism, we find something else behind it, ideas and feelings that are different from those of bourgeois anti-militarism. For there is, as everyone knows, a bourgeois anti-militarism, a bourgeois pacifism, and a bourgeois anti-patriotism, that is, a bourgeois cosmopolitanism. The businessmen and the intellectuals—the two essential categories into which the bourgeoisie is divided—have always been distinguished by their pious horror of war; within each bourgeois lives a Panurge and Panurge does not like to receive blows. War is, furthermore, quite expensive and for the businessman, for whom everything is reduced to a question of debit and credit, the resort to the ruinous solution of war seems absurd when there is an opportunity for a diplomatic solution or arbitration, which are so much less burdensome; the bourgeois does not understand honor, a feeling that does not circulate on the market, a value which is not quoted on the Stock Exchange. As for the intellectual, it seems just as absurd to him to fight when it is so easy to reason, and in the market of ideas, where he is a broker, the feeling of honor circulates no more than in the market of financial values; the intellectual is at bottom nothing but a businessman and we cannot ask him to understand the concept of warlike heroism.
But the feelings inspired by war in the businessman and the intellectual are also inspired by the strike. Whenever a strike breaks out, you can read in the bourgeois newspapers reliable statistics which depict the losses suffered by the workers. The strike, like war, appears to our bourgeois to be the very height of stupidity, and our socialists do not know what to do to prevent the workers from indulging in this progressive deterioration, as Jaurés calls it. It would be preferable to accept fair arbitration, even arbitration that is systematic and compulsory! So that reason, law, order and civilization will replace barbarism, anarchy and chaos! Our parliamentary socialists, like good bourgeois, are fervent social pacifists, as well as fervent internationalist pacifists.
The bourgeois does not know what a national or a working class collectivity is, nor can he, without any doubt, understand that the honor of this collectivity is something that is superior to a calculus of profit and loss. The bourgeois is a true individualist anarchist; for him nothing exists except his ego; he is rootless, a cosmopolitan, for whom there are no countries or classes: do not ask him to sacrifice his precious person for anything; he has no social idea, and the words self-abnegation and sacrifice have lost all meaning for him.
Working class anti-militarism is something completely different. This anti-militarism does not originate in an abstract or sentimental horror of war and the army; it originates in the class struggle, it was born in the experience of strikes and trade union struggles, where the worker always faces the army, the guardian of capital and of order, for which reason he has always viewed it as a simple extension of the capitalist workshop and, as a result, as the living symbol of his servitude. Precisely for this reason, however, his anti-militarism is no longer an individual protest against the barracks in the name of more or less abstract principles; nor is it the simple separation of individuals who withdraw from the national collectivity in order to recover an entirely egotistical independence; nor is it mere individual desertion, which can be interpreted as cowardice; it is, rather, the separation of individuals who withdraw from the national collectivity in order to join the workers collectivity and to adopt a new fatherland, to which they pledge themselves forever in body and soul. Working class anti-militarism thus derives its merit and purpose from its close connection with the idea of the class struggle; separate anti-militarism from this idea, and it will be nothing but an expression of individual horror for what the strong spirits call the brutalization of the barracks. The freethinking, democratic, Jacobin, Masonic bourgeois, member of the League of the Rights of Man, is incapable of rising to such a level of thought or feeling: the social idea can only be either military or working class; there are only two noble qualities: that of the sword and that of labor; the bourgeois, the man of business, of banking, of gold and the stock exchange, the tradesman, the intermediary and his colleague the intellectual, who is also an intermediary, all of them strangers to the world of the army as well as to the world of labor, are condemned to an irremediable mediocrity of thought and of spirit.
Anarchist anti-militarism is thus nothing but a derivative of bourgeois anti-militarism. And now, more than ever, we can say that anarchism is only an exasperated bourgeoisism, because this abstract or sentimental revulsion towards the barracks, militarism and war professed by the anarchists, does not arise among them as a result of the class struggle; the anarchists have no idea of class, they only possess the idea of individual rebellion against all servitude and authority, which they present on an abstract and purely ideological terrain and merely take the famous Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen and the philosophy of the 18th century to their logical conclusions, with their rejection of the army (as with their rejection of marriage), which proceed from the same atomist, materialist and simplistic metaphysics, by virtue of which they turn their backs on the entire reality of social existence, in order to leave nothing standing but the individual who is naturally good but who is depraved by social institutions, the individual who is born free but is weighted down by civilization with a thousand chains, the individual who comes into the world bursting with happiness but is made wretched by society. War is the clearest and most striking expression of that reality of social existence that Proudhon told us about in such magnificent terms in the passage quoted above. Please allow us to quote him once more: “War is the most profound and sublime phenomenon of our moral life. Nothing else can compare with it: neither the interesting ceremonial of worship, nor the actions of monarchical power, nor the gigantic creations of industry. In the harmonies of nature and humanity, war sounds the most powerful note; its works sweep over the soul like thunder, like the voice of the hurricane. A mixture of genius and boldness, of poetry and passion, of the highest justice and tragic heroism … its majesty dazzles us, and the more we contemplate it, the more our hearts are filled with enthusiasm. War, perceived by a false philosophy and an even falser philanthropy as nothing but a horrible scourge, an outburst of our innate evil and a manifestation of heavenly anger, is the most incorruptible expression of our conscience, the act that confers the most honor on us in the light of creation and Eternity. The idea of war is equivalent to its phenomenology. It is one of those ideas that, from the very first moment of their appearance, absorb all one’s attention, that make us confess, so to speak, with full knowledge and with full feeling, and to which, by virtue of their universality, logic gives the name of categories. For war is both unitary and triune like God, it is the unity in one nature of these three roots: force, the principle of movement and of life, which is found in the ideas of cause, soul, will, freedom and spirit; conflict, action-reaction, the universal law of the world and, like force, one of Kant’s twelve categories; and justice, the sovereign faculty of the soul, the principle of our practical reason, which is manifested in nature by equilibrium. If we pass from the phenomenology and the idea of war to its object, it forfeits none of our admiration. The purpose of war, its role in humanity, consists in encouraging all the human faculties and thus creating, in the center of and above these faculties, law, and making it universal and, with the help of this universalization of law, in defining and forming society” (War and Peace).
Here, when speaking of war, Proudhon uses the language of poetry or mysticism; as if he were dealing with a supernatural phenomenon that gives birth to supernatural events. This stands in total opposition to anarchist philosophy, which, in the final analysis, advocates that we return to the state of nature and rejects anything that obliges man to emerge from this state, imagined as one of perfect bliss. Man is a being that must be surpassed, the philosopher of The Will to Power says, who is mistakenly identified by some people as an anarchist; and man only overcomes his condition, he only becomes a hero, by participating in the great struggles in which the heroic or divine accomplishments of history are embodied. And it is in this aspect that the greatness of war resides, in that it elevates everything to sublime heights and causes man, as Proudhon also said, to rise above himself. War created law; it created the State; it created the citizen; it has defined and molded society, that supernatural being.
And the Revolution does not owe its heroic prestige to the proceedings of Assemblies, or even to International Congresses; it lived in the heart of the people as a military epic for many years, and the wars of the Republic and the Empire provided the raw material for popular poetry throughout the 18th century.
Today it is notorious that revolutionary patriotism is dead; something else has arisen to take its place, a new feeling: the class idea which has replaced the idea of the fatherland, defining the split between the people on the one side and the State and democracy on the other. For with the appearance of revolutionary syndicalism a strange opposition has arisen between democracy and socialism, between the citizen and the producer, an opposition that has assumed its crudest as well as its most abstract form in the resolute rejection of the idea of the fatherland, which is identified with the idea of the State. And the strikes, which are becoming increasingly more powerful, more widespread and more frequent, are revealing to a surprised world the collective power of the workers, who are becoming more class conscious and more self-controlled with each passing day. These strikes are assuming the form of the social phenomenon par excellence; through their abruptness, their audacity, and the marvelous discipline they impose on the army of the workers, they are acquiring increasingly more martial features, and comprise, on the social terrain, a veritable war on another level, and the words that Proudhon pronounced concerning war can also be applied to the strikes. These strikes are what today sound, in the songs of nature and of humanity, the most powerful note; they affect the soul like the sound of thunder and the voice of the hurricane. They combine genius with boldness, poetry and passion, the highest justice and tragic heroism … their majesty dazzles us.
What kind of birth process are we witnessing? In the face of these volcanic tremors that the world of labor is periodically causing modern society to undergo, we see all the disoriented parties, we see all the decomposing ideologies, all the prudent timidity. What is happening? Something that is at once both simple and formidable: labor is proceeding to occupy the first rank, driving out all parasites, from the most obvious and crude to the most subtle and refined; the workshop is coming into its own, making everything that is not a function of labor disappear; all of social life is being rebuilt on the plane of production, becoming, as was previously the case with regard to war’s impact on the ancient city, the cement of the modern city; in short, what is happening is that labor is creating a new civilization, in which life, once labor has reabsorbed all the transcendent intellectual powers into the world of production and thus put an end to the sterile divorce between theory and practice—in which life, I say, will recover its health, unity and balance. “What neither gymnastics, nor politics, nor music, nor philosophy, bringing together their efforts, knew how to do,” Proudhon writes, “Laborwill accomplish. As in the ancient ages the initiation to beauty came by way of the gods, so, in a remote posterity, beauty will be revealed anew by the laborer, the true ascetic, and it is from the innumerable forms of industry that it will demand its changing expression, always new and always true. Then, finally, the Logos will be manifested, and the human laborers, more beautiful and more free than ever were the Greeks, without nobles and without slaves, without magistrates and without priests, will form all together, on the cultivated earth, one family of heroes, thinkers and artists….” (The Philosophy of Progress). At the sites of strikes, our new battlefields, the workers are conquering their titles of nobility and are founding a new order, just as it was on the battlefields of Valmy, Jemmapes, and Fleurus that the citizen-soldiers of Year 2 of the First Republic won democracy and the right to exist. But pay close attention; I will once again refer to these very important words of Proudhon: “What neither gymnastics, nor politics, nor music, nor philosophy, bringing together their efforts, knew how to do Labor will accomplish.” A few lines before this passage, Proudhon, discussing Plato, said: “Divine Plato, these gods that you dreamed do not exist. There is nothing in the world greater and more beautiful than man. But man, rising from the hands of nature, is miserable and ugly; he can only become sublime and beautiful through gymnastics, politics, philosophy, music, and especially, something which you hardly appear to doubt, the ascetic” (The Philosophy of Progress). And Proudhon explains, in a footnote, what he means by the ascetic, i.e., industrial labor or work, which were viewed as servile and ignoble among the ancients.
Here we have, marvelously highlighted, the opposition between education understood in the classical manner (the way it has always been understood by ancient or modern democracy), and education as understood in the socialist manner. We shall repeat: socialism is a philosophy of the producers; it reduces society to the level of the workshop, and recognizes no right to existence that is not a direct or indirect function of the workshop. Naturally, education, in its view, must not be oriented to the training of a chatterbox citizen, a dilettante who knows a little about a lot of things, as the operation of political democracy requires, but of a producer who knows his trade inside and out and is capable of participating in the collective labor of a progressive modern workshop, such as would be required by the organization of a system of production that is free of all tutelage and parasitism. It is well known that Proudhon, once again in agreement with Marx and in opposition to anarchism, always conceived of education as intimately bound to the workshop, to productive labor, as he maintains in his The General Idea of the Revolution and The Political Capacity of the Working Classes. Against this idea anarchism advocates, as is well known, the anarchist ideal of integral education, that is, an encyclopedic and therefore superficial, mundane, and bourgeois general education; in this respect, as well, anarchism is undoubtedly nothing but a simple echo of the 18th century, the great bourgeois century, as Sorel has justly called it. Was it not natural, on the other hand, that anarchism, nourished on abstractions, just as foreign to economic preoccupations as democracy itself, and granting reality solely to the individual, the abstract, solitary, monadic individual, who is self-sufficient, was it not natural that anarchism would end up by conceiving of education as a kind of universal mechanical transfer of the totality of human knowledge into the mind of this atom-individual? This is yet another manifestation of the metaphysical simple mindedness of our anarchists. They do not transcend the bourgeois horizon any more than our democrats; which is logical, because if our deputies, our masters, have to know everything, since they have to deal with everything in our stead, the anarchist individual must be possessed of an equally comprehensive knowledge, since he must by himself constitute all of society. With respect to both these approaches, there is a denial of society conceived as free cooperation in which productive activities mutually condition and multiply each other.
As one can see, whether we consider the problem of war or that of production, Proudhon and anarchism are totally incompatible. And because we consider Proudhon to be the most authentic theoretician of the past—alongside Marx—whom syndicalism can invoke as a precursor, I think I have the right to conclude that there are profound differences between anarchism and syndicalism. It is quite obvious, furthermore, that the syndicalists must confront not only the open opposition of Socialism, where the remnants of the old Guesdism are still trying to stammer a few words, but also the opposition of Les Temps Nouveaux, where the remnants of the old anarchism are attempting to resist their increasing absorption into revolutionary syndicalism. But even more importantly: the theoretical pretensions of individuals have only a minimal historical value; men rarely have an exact account of what is taking place before their eyes. Revolutionary syndicalism has arisen, it has grown, it is a social movement whose profundity escapes the narrow perspectives of theoreticians who vainly cling to their old ideas. This is enough; syndicalism can say, adopting the motto Marx cited: Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti! (Follow your road and let the people say)
Edward Potts Cheyney in An Introduction to the Industrial and Social History of England
The gild might therefore be defined as that form of organization of the inhabitants of the town which controlled its trade and industry. The principal reason for the existence of the gild was to preserve to its own members the monopoly of trade. No one not in the gild merchant of the town could buy or sell there except under conditions imposed by the gild. Foreigners coming from other countries or traders from other English towns were
prohibited from buying or selling in any way that might interfere with the interests of the guildsmen. They must buy and sell at such times and in such places and only such articles as were provided for by the gild regulations. They must in all cases pay the town tolls, from which members of the gild were exempt. […]
Meetings were held at different periods, sometimes annually, in many cases more frequently. At these meetings new ordinances were passed, officers elected, and other business transacted. It was also a convivial occasion, a gild feast preceding or following the other labors of the meeting. In some gilds the meeting was regularly known as ‘the drinking.’ There were likewise frequent sittings of the officials of the fraternity, devoted to the decision of disputes between brethren, the admission of new members, the fining or expulsion of offenders against the gild ordinances, and other routine work. These meetings were known as ‘morrow speeches’. The greater part of the activity of the gild merchant consisted in the holding of its meetings with their accompanying feasts, and in the enforcement of its regulations upon its members and upon outsiders. It fulfilled, however, many fraternal duties for its members. […]
The guild merchant also sometimes fulfilled various religious, philanthropic, and charitable duties, not only to its members, but to the public generally, and to the poor. The time of the fullest development of the gild merchant varied, of course, in different towns, but its widest expansion was probably in the early part of the period we are studying, that is, during the thirteenth century. Later it came to be in some towns indistinguishable from the municipal government in general, its members the same as the burgesses, its officers represented by the officers of the town. In some other towns the gild merchant gradually lost its control over trade, retaining only its fraternal, charitable, and religious features. In still other cases the expression gradually lost all definite significance and its meaning became a matter for antiquarian dispute. […]
By the fourteenth century the gild merchant of the town was a much less conspicuous institution than it had previously been. Its decay was largely the result of the growth of a group of organizations in each town which were spoken of as crafts, fraternities, guilds, ministries, or often merely by the name of their occupation, as the spurriers,’ the dyers,’ ‘the fishmongers.’ These organizations are usually described in later writings as craft gilds. It is not to be understood that the gild merchant and the craft gilds never existed contemporaneously in any town. The former began earlier and decayed before the craft gilds reached their height, but there was a considerable period when it must have been a common thing for a man to be a member both of the gild merchant of the town and of the separate organization of his own trade. The later gilds seem to have grown up in response to the needs of handicraft much as the gild merchant had grown up to regulate trade, though trading occupations also were eventually drawn into the craft gild form of organization. […] the number of craft gilds in any one town was often very large. At London there were by 1350 at least as many as forty, at York, some time later, more than fifty.
The craft gilds existed usually under the authority of the town government, though frequently they obtained authorization or even a charter from the crown. They were formed primarily to regulate and preserve the monopoly of their own occupations in their own town, just as the gild merchant existed to regulate the trade of the town in general. No one could carry on any trade without being subject to the organization which controlled that trade.
Membership, however, was not intentionally restricted. Any man who was a capable workman and conformed to the rules of the craft was practically a member of the organization of that industry. […]
Another class of rules was for mutual assistance, for kindliness among members, and for the obedience and faithfulness of journeymen and apprentices. There were provisions for assistance to members of the craft when in need, or to their widows and orphans, for the visitation of those sick or in prison, for common attendance at the burial services of deceased members, and for other charitable and philanthropic objects. Thus the craft gild, like the gild merchant, combined close social relationship with a distinctly recognized and enforced regulation of the trade. This regulation provided for the protection of members of the organization from outside competition, and it also prevented any considerable amount of competition among members; it supported the interests of the full master members of the craft as against those in the journeyman stage, and enforced the custom of the trade in hours, materials, methods of manufacture, and often in prices. […]
Thus if there were men in the mediæval town who were not members of some trading or craft body, they would in all probability be members of some society based merely on religious or social feeling. The whole tendency of mediæval society was toward organization, combination, close union with one’s fellows. It might be said that all town life involved membership in some organization, and usually in that one into which a man was drawn by the occupation in which he made his living. These gilds or the town government itself controlled even the affairs of private economic life in the city, just as the customary agriculture of the country prevented much freedom of action there. Methods of trading, or manufacture, the kind and amount of material to be used, hours of labor, conditions of employment, even prices of work, were regulated by the gild ordinances. The individual guildsman had as little opportunity to emancipate himself from the controlling force of the association as the individual tenant on the rural manor had to free himself from the customary agriculture and the customary services. Whether we study rural or urban society, whether we look at the purely economic or at the broader social side of existence, life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was corporate rather than individual.
Edmondo Rossoni in The Significance of Fascist Syndicalism
Labour unions cannot be expected to give up their class position or the weapon of the strike, unless employers change their traditional attitude of shear resistance to labour Captains of industry must undergo a change of heart and even relinquish some of their despotic power, which is incompatible with modern ideas and with the dignity of labour. Whether one likes it or not, the birth of Syndicalism in the world results from the improvement in the conditions of the salaried and wage-earning classes; a new will, strictly controlled and disciplined, is intervening in regulating production and in determining the relations between classes. The aim of fascist syndicalism is unity and collaboration: it does not oppose, but conforms to the needs of production; it does not deny the conscious aims of labour, but harmonies them with the aims and with the industrial experience of the managers. This is the true and fundamental difference between fascism Syndicalism and Trade-Unionism, based as the latter is on class warfare. If this is understood by the capitalist class, the whole position changes, and collaboration finds a fertile soil for development. But, if this is not understood, it becomes futile to cry out for a collaboration which is doomed to die before birth, like seed cast upon stones.
There are clear and definite principles in the syndicalist doctrine of Fascism; and, without a knowledge of these principles, it is impossible to arrive at a clear idea of the social problem which is, after all, the greatest problem of modern life. The different exponents of Socialism strenuously challenge the herd logic of Capitalism, and are mobilizing the masses against the capitalist system. The effects of this socialist movement and the great harm resulting to the workers are known, so that every reaction against Socialism becomes confused with a defense of the employers with all their old prerogatives and attributes. The same conclusions were drawn at first with regard to Fascism. In its beginnings, it was certainly a movement mainly directed against Bolshevism; but, in its recent developments, it has shown itself capable of creating new social instruments and institutions, which have succeeded in bringing the economic conflict between classes into some sort of order and discipline. Naturally it was difficult to make foreigners understand this second and more important side of Fascism, especially when European countries, struggling with Socialism, thought that they could appeal to Fascism simply as an anti- socialist force. Fortunately the efforts of foreign ‘fascisti’ have never been taken seriously, for they have been thoroughly partisan and hurtful, rather than useful to the reputation of our revolution abroad. […] But it is well known that, behind this socialist play-acting, there is a short-sighted and stupid organization of big political and financial speculators whose interest it is to slander Fascism, and through Fascism the new Italy.
These speculators and social-democrats, however, can hardly hold to their position much longer. There are already defections in their camp, either because the hope of unjoining Italian unity grows fainter every day, or because the deeds of Fascism in its five years of life are more eloquent than the persistent lies of interest groups. The Mussolini method is to steer clear of polemics with the internal and external enemies of Fascism, and, instead, to emphasize all that Fascism does to heal and to discipline the life of the country, and to raise the prestige, the dignity, and the value of Italy in the world. This method is showing itself marvelously powerful in winning the admiration of all sincere men. The merely imitative fascists abroad are lessening in numbers and becoming played out, while not a few interpreters of responsible political movements in certain countries are beginning to judge the Italian achievement in a spirit of fair play, and this even when they go to Geneva. Some of them, indeed barely conceal their intention of moving towards ends which have been already worked out and realized by Mussolini in Italy, but which they would naturally adapt to the genius and needs of their own people.
Under the influence of Fascism the old political groups and characteristics are losing their value. Fascism was right to remove all meaning from the old political jargon of ‘right’ and ‘left.’ But what regrets were felt and what tears were shed over the destruction of the innumerable small and big parties which infested the political camp! The unanimous and relentless determination of the militant fascists seemed cruel tyranny to the various parties: the moderate and popular parties, the liberal democrats, the democratic liberals, the radicals, socialists, reformists, maximalists, communists, and so on. But now it is clear to everyone that unification and simplification are elemental necessities to a people who desire good government.
We are convinced that a similar destiny is reserved for fascist syndicalism abroad. The last Labour Conference at Geneva extended far greater sympathy to our movement than the preceding conference had done. As time goes on, those labour delegates who are hostile to us not from conviction, but from a sense of party loyalty, decrease in numbers.
There are even some who admire our achievements, and yet exclaim: ‘What a pity the corporations are fascist!’ […]
The conception of fascist Syndicalism changes the outlook of all those engaged in industry, and takes from Socialism all that it has of value. Even the old terminology of masters and men is changing. The word servitude of labour; a servitude which is in direct contradiction to modern progress. The Italian scheme of corporations brings about a much needed co-operation between the directors and the executors of an undertaking, and is the only present-day conception which entails equilibrium and economic justice.
It should be emphasized that it was these very fascist organizers who were the first to insist that the old expressions, ‘masters’ and ‘men,’ should be abolished and this because master supposes servants. Such terminology belongs to a past civilization. Nowadays we are no longer able to concur with the old absurd idea of class distinctions, nor do we hold that there is by nature any moral inferiority between men. On the contrary, it is fully recognized that all men have the same right to citizenship in the national life.
Fascist syndicalism has a definite programme and definite activities; its deep-lying principles and ideals are destined to illuminate the whole international field of labour. This is inevitable; for the future progress of civilization cannot be ensured either by means of communist negotiations or through the rigid individualistic system of Capitalism. A new moral, political, and economic order can only be achieved through the fascist idea of all workers bound together for the food of all, both in the world of industry and in social life. Thus the very best that Socialism can give is taken, and, at the same time, the government rises to a higher perception of justice. In the light of the twentieth century, there can be no room for any government based on Absolutism, on purely material preoccupations, or on oppression.
Gottfried Feder in The Fundamentals of National Socialist Economic Policy
1. The Purpose and Spirit of the Economy
The national economy in its totality has the purpose above all of adequately providing for the three basic necessities of all folk-comrades in terms of food, housing, and clothing, and beyond that of satisfying every need of a cultural and civilizational nature in accordance with the state of technology and the income conditions of the time. The economy as a whole is a serving limb in the overall organism of the Volk; in the best sense it is of service to the Volk for the greatness and the welfare of the nation.
A nation’s economy is not an end in itself, it is not there to enrich individual business leaders at the expense of their officials, employees, and workers, and even less is it there to serve as an object of exploitation for international High Finance.
2. Form of Economy
There are three possible directions for an economy:
- A free economy without any fetters (capitalist-liberal).
- A tethered, bound, planned economy (Marxist-collectivist).
- A corporatively-structured, genuinely national economy (universalist-National Socialist).
The completely unfettered capitalist economic form leads to ever sharper disparities between rich and poor; it produces methods of exploitation which culminate in the depersonalization and degeneration of the entire economy; and it unleashes prolonged economic struggles which the state itself, impotent and passive, has to sit back and observe. The tethered, bound, and planned Marxist economic form, the socialization of the means of production, leads to the elimination of the most powerful economic factor, the productive personality. Under such a system, economic fruitfulness atrophies and declines.
Only the organically-structured National Socialist economy, which liberates the productive personality from capitalist exploitation and from Marxist homogenization, can become, under the diligent assistance of the state, a source of real welfare for the entire population.
The class-conflict split between employer and employee must be bridged by the National Socialist slogan: “Workers of brain and fist, unite!”
Only in this way will each individual be in the position to be able to do the best for his Volk, and therefore also for himself.
3. State and Economy
In the liberal era the organic management of the economy was dissolved, and a ferocious power struggle between state and economy ensued.
This power struggle can result in two potential outcomes: either pure materialist-capitalist interests triumph over the state and thus over the population (interest-slavery); or political rulers seize the entire economic apparatus for themselves (socialize it), in which case the state itself is transformed completely into an economic machine and descends to the level of a forced labor institution, as in Russia.
National Socialism assigns the state unconditional primacy over the economy, because the state as the representative of the nation, as the guardian of the nation’s power, honor, and prestige, as the Increaser of the Realm, must not involve itself within the productive economy, since it would then all too soon be drawn into the lobbyism of the individual sectors of the economy and would no longer be able to freely care for the common good as a whole.
With regards to the relationship between state and economy, it therefore follows that 1. the state has right of supervision over the economy, and 2. the state has right of intervention through policing, administrative, and fiscal policy (taxation) measures, if the general interests of the state so demand.
4. Economic Principles
Productive, creative work, the labor of brain and fist, is the foundation of all economics. Labor therefore deserves the foremost place of honor within the economy as a whole. Wealth, property, possessions, profit from material goods of all kinds, money, capital, houses, factories, the means of production, machines, building plots and farmland – these are all only the fruits of productive labor. The highest duty of the coming state will be the preservation of the productive personality and the protection of the workforce from exploitation. All labor is worth its wages, and all labor must yield its due reward. From this it follows that the proceeds from diligent and skillful labor, whether through the cultivation of land, whether through tools and assets, pass into the free ownership and possession of the producer and are to be protected by justice and by the law. The same holds true with regards to intellectual property rights.
National Socialism recognizes private property as a matter of principle, and places it under the protection of the state. But it binds the right to own property to a moral duty towards the Volk as a whole. National Socialism also recognizes the right of inheritance, since for it the family is the most important cell of the state.
The right to the proceeds of labor must not be construed as meaning that it will ever be possible to make the sales value of a product the basis of wages. Product prices (their sales price) must incorporate numerous rates for raw materials, machine wear and replacement, buildings, manual labor, commercial and technical management, social and sanitary facilities, as well as for education and training, welfare for the elderly and the sick, and for state institutions to be able to facilitate and secure production, the administration of justice, commercial contracts – and, yes, even national production by the police and the army, etc.
Alongside this most widespread form of private property, collectivist property is naturally also possible in the form of state property and communal property, cooperative property, or the property of legal entities under civil law. In contrast to the capitalist and Marxist systems, the National Socialist state will make it possible once more for every productive worker to be able to acquire property.
In the National Socialist state the dispossessed proletariat shall acquire property through diligence and ability. They should feel themselves to be full citizens, as well as shareholders in the total national production.
5. Labor and Capital
Capitalism has managed to completely subjugate labor, to exploit it and make it subject to interest. In the process it has turned the natural and healthy relationship between labor and capital (money) practically on its head. The current condition of the state, municipalities, and economy illustrates the disastrous consequences of this unhealthy, even fatal development. National Socialism terms this condition: interest-slavery.
The despotism of loan-capital is no longer contented with simple forms of money-lending; through anonymization (the conversion of economic enterprises into share companies) it has long deprived productive personalities of the best part of their potential capabilities, and has transitioned the economy away from its original function of the fulfillment of demand towards a purely profit-oriented standpoint. Moreover, finance-capital has also succeeded in completely converting the financial management of the public sector over to the calamitous loan system (read: the incurment of debts), and on a worldwide scale the horrific treaties between Germany and the Allies (the Versailles Treaty, Dawes Pact, and Young Plan) signify the consummation of High Finance’s interest-domination over German labor.
The Breaking of Interest-Slavery is the biggest and most significant problem of economic policy that the National Socialist state has to solve. It is the prerequisite for economic recovery. Specific details about the measures proposed by the NSDAP are outlined comprehensively within the party’s official publications.
During the interim period, the National Socialist state will make measured use of its right to create money in order to finance large public works and the construction of housing, in the spirit of my well-known proposals (a Construction and Commercial Bank, etc.).
6. The Organic National Economy
National Socialist Economic Development:
The economy is an elaborate, articulated structure. Today’s prevailing cross-relations (workers, employees, officials, entrepreneurs, syndicates) lead to the fragmentation of the economy into disparate interest groups which are in open or covert conflict with one another.
The truly genuine economy strives to dissolve these inorganic cross-relations, seeking the amalgamation of employers and employees within the various sectors of the economy in the form of a structure of Occupational Estates.
The National Socialist state considers it one of its most important responsibilities to lift the relationship between employer and employee out of the poisonous atmosphere of class struggle and class prejudice, and to orient all of those who are faithfully and responsibly involved in the production process towards the common goal of national labor.
Under the concession of extensive self-administration, the Occupational Estates will have to carry out the regulation of wage and leave conditions; above all, they will also have to work for the reawakening of professional honor and the coordination of all personal relationships between those employed in enterprises and those managing them. These Occupational Estates will be consolidated together in district, municipal, and provincial associations, and will be headed by a central authority at Reich level.
Alongside these Occupational Chambers and Chambers of Estates, which regulate personal relationships, so-called Economic Chambers will be established as a new phenomenon in economic life, comprised of independent men who in no way have a personal stake in nor are dependent upon the economy itself. The Economic Chambers have the task of reviewing the significance of the individual occupational sectors and of overseeing them in the spirit of, and in service to, the interests of the general public.
A particularly important task of these Economic Chambers will be the cultivation of the domestic market and the careful supervision of foreign trade.
The Economic Chambers will be integrated together within the Reich Economic Council, which safeguards the general interests of the entire nation against the special interests and wishes of the individual sectors of the economy.
Example:
During the years 1925 – 1930, the Saxon textile industry experienced an extraordinary boom due to the fashion for brightly-colored ladies’ stockings, which went out all around the world. At the same time, German knitting-machine manufacturers were also marketing their warp-knitting-machines all over the world. For the German textile industry, every knitting-machine sold abroad meant competition for the German textile worker, as well as unemployment, hunger, and misery. The Economic Chambers of the Third Reich will bear the responsibility of making reciprocal competition of this kind impossible; knitting-machines which deprive German textile workers of their bread must not be exported. A modern example on a grander scale consists of the orders which Soviet Russia issued to German industry in order to be able to initiate a terrible competitive struggle against the German economy.
7. Trade Policy
The maxim of National Socialist foreign trade policy is:
Every product which is able to be grown or manufactured in Germany may not be purchased from abroad. This means protecting the German economy in the city and country from foreign competition.
When today Germany imports foreign foodstuffs (wheat, barley, fruit, vegetables, butter, eggs, cheese, meat, etc.) for around 4,000 million people, this means misery and hardship within German agriculture, as well as unemployment and a perpetual drain upon Germany’s national wealth. (Example: The importation of frozen meat). Equally outrageous is the fact that more than 2,000 million finished goods (clothes, linen, machinery, automobiles, ironware, etc.) have been imported into Germany from abroad. A German who purchases an expensive foreign car pays around 3,000 RM for it in wages to foreign workers. German workers who could afford to do the same will become unemployed, and the German taxpayer will be forced to throw in 2,000 RM more in unemployment benefits for every such vehicle purchased. The prohibition on importing superfluous foreign goods by no means signifies a foolish and impracticable isolation from foreign countries and from the world market, but just as foreign nations will still need high-end, high-quality German products for many years to come, we will still urgently require the raw materials which are absolutely imperative for our processing industry: wool, cotton, hides, furs, mineral oils, iron ores, etc.
8. Transitional Measures
The Elimination of Unemployment.
Upon its attainment of political power, National Socialism will find the German economy to be in a positively dire condition. An army of 5 million unemployed is demanding reintegration into the production process; public finances have been wrecked; state and economy are thoroughly indebted; the population’s purchasing power and its capacity to pay taxes have been drained; the state coffers are empty; agriculture, industry, commerce, and the trades are on the verge of collapse. In addition, a system of irresponsibility, corruption, and party-political feeding at the trough holds sway, and our spirit has been polluted by the concept of class struggle. As our first task, there is an enormous amount of purifying and educational work to be accomplished.
The Provision of Work and Bread.
The introduction of compulsory labor service will relieve approximately half a million German folk-comrades from the curse of unemployment. The necessary dismantling of tenancy legislation will initially take the form of exempting those subject to taxation on housing rent from at least half of their tax liability, so long as they produce receipts of the repair work on their properties for the exempted amounts. Hundreds of thousands will be fed, and hundreds of thousands will be reintegrated back into the economic process.
Following this, the construction industry will find employment through the promotion of the building and settlement sectors, through the provision of cheap (interest-free) credit along the lines of my proposals, and through the establishment of Social Construction and Commercial Banks.
Under pressure from the state, an extensive restriction on imports will be implemented, with demand channeled towards the domestic market. Agriculture will, with the utmost urgency, be put in the position via interest rate reductions, debt restructuring, tax relief, and the provision of cheap credit, to be able to produce imported eggs, fruit, vegetables, meat, butter, etc. on German soil, and to bring them to market. We must succeed, through domestic production, in making at least 2 billion imported foodstuffs superfluous. This would permit at least 1 million unemployed to be reintegrated back into production. The same goal will be achieved by cutting off the import of foreign industrial products onto the German home market. And, once again, hundreds of thousands will thus be able to find employment in the revitalized economy. In the field of fiscal policy, the strongest incentives and relief will come from the reduction of high interest rates, in the first place by means of nationalizing the Reichsbank and the remaining banks of issue.
The nationalization of real-estate loans and the transformation (conversion) of high-interest-bearing mortgage bonds will stimulate a tremendous revival of the housing and property markets.
The nationalization of the big banks – or, to be precise, their positioning under governmental administration – will pave the way for loosening and releasing the broadest sectors of the economy from their interest-bearing indebtedness.
The nationalization of the electricity supply will result in a very substantial reduction in power costs, and will have an invigorating impact on overall production.
Alongside these measures, which denote a powerful revitalization of the domestic market, there are major foreign policy tasks which can only be intimated here:
The abolition of the Young Tribute, the expansion of our economic sphere through tariff agreements, etc. A vigorous policy of alliances will guarantee the restoration of a German State of Labor and Achievement which, far removed from imperialist goals, will see its only task in securing work and bread, in freedom and honor, for the German population
9. Conclusions
Fascist Corporatism views private property as a useful tool but not as a principle. Exploiting property holders for the social ends of the society was the aim. This adds more context to the fact that both Marx and Engels actually co-opted and flipped the original definitions of utopian and scientific socialism. As the man who invented these terms was Eugen Dühring.
“It was Dühring who first made a distinction between utopian and scientific socialism, which he had cast in just the opposite way from Engels. While a utopian socialism is revolutionary, striving to overthrow and destroy the entire existing order, scientific socialism studies the laws of society and adapts its reforms to them. While the utopian socialist is a dreamy idealist who would destroy the machinery of society, the scientific socialist learns how to make that machinery serve his own ends.”
—Beiser, Frederick C (2016). Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860-1900. London: Oxford University Press; page 110.
These scientific approaches to Corporate socialism include the East Asian and the Islamic fundamentalist regimes of Taiwan, Singapore, and Iran. Syria and Algeria are also both Corporatist, as was Iraq under Saddam Hussain, Egypt under Gamal Nasser, and Libya under Muammar Gaddafi. The South Korean dictatorship of Park Chung-Hee was in fact, Corporatist. The formerly communist regimes of Vietnam and China are now clearly Corporatist, although not in name.
It is essentially the way early humans thought during the ancient and medieval era but translated into modern form. Corporatism is sometimes considered a phenomenon in world history, but that is not true of the social movements that follow Corporatist ideas, as it still lives and likewise different interpretations of Corporatist ideas exist. Corporatism is here to stay as a political and social doctrine, constantly evolving to meet the demands of society. So when considering Corporatism, as a scientific socialism. We can then understand that Marxist Socialism is utopian, therefore humanitarian. While Corporatist Socialism something that is fundamentally scientific, is fundamentally utilitarian. In this context we must also understand the social aspects of humanity.
“Rousseau and Robespierre, Marx and Maurras, all understood this just as well as the theorists of Bolshevik revolution; but the roots of European socialism lay in humanitarian rather than utilitarian concerns. This duality of inspiration has served to confuse most discussions in our time, for the simple reason that humanitarian socialists have nearly always hidden, even from themselves, behind a thick cloud of utilitarian doctrine. They try to justify their charitable intentions with pseudo-scientific rationalizations, disguise moral judgments behind the vocabulary of positivistic analysis,and practice the piecemeal reforms which their humanity suggests.
Once we distinguish between humanitarian socialists and utilitarian ones, the situation becomes much clearer. There is little to prevent the latter from operating on the national and, if convenient, the nationalist plane. We may not like what they do, but at least we shall know a little better what we (and they) are talking about.
Humanitarian socialism is almost necessarily pacifist and internationalistic, because the same concerns that make men care for their fellows at home apply to human beings everywhere. It is idealistic, because it is founded on sentiment and on ideals; and, being so, it will do best in fairly prosperous societies where a margin for luxury exists. This kind of socialism tends to collapse before sterner realities, when self-interest at the individual level or that of the group gets the upper hand. Its adherents, then, have the choice between martyrdom (usually on a small scale, ineffective but self-satisfying as it seems to be in the case of conscientious objectors) and conformity (e.g.: “We shall suspend our pacifism until the war is over.”). Useful as a palliative, and also as an educative force, this kind of socialism is useless at times of crisis and, therefore, in little favor today.
Utilitarian socialism, on the other hand, is opportunistic and empirical, doctrinaire only for technical reasons (not the least dangerous sort), and inclined to consider men and women only as part of groups in which it sees the significant unit of political calculation. Where the former socialism is sentimental, the latter tries to be mathematical. And, given this approach, there is no reason to wonder at apparent changes in orientation, such as can be found aplenty in Soviet history for instance, even though there matters are confused by a Marxist religion that imposes forms of speech and of exegesis which can mislead both faithful and outsiders.
This, then, is the solution to one part of the problem, or at least to its better understanding; national socialism is possible when the socialism in question is of the utilitarian kind,as capable of cold empirical opportunism in its internal politics as nationalism has always been in external politics.“
—Weber, Eugen. Nationalism, Socialism, and National-Socialism in France; French Historical Studies, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Spring, 1962), pp. 273-307. Recovered by [http://www.jstor.org/stable/285883].
Corporatism has essentially shown, that the arms and legs of a nation cannot be in active rebellion to the mind, spirit, and body of the people, everything that constitutes the nation should be in active harmony and union, for the defense of the people. Everything that constitutes a society should be brought under the umbrella of the state, to act in the creation of a higher culture. No longer will a single man be able to usurp power through the acquisition of unnecessary wealth, no longer will an insidious and disgusting bourgeois mindset be able to dictate the affairs of the state. No longer will class warfare disintegrate our new proletarian order. We shall think as one mind, one spirit, and one body. Patria o Muerte!
Great and informative post.