CAPITALIST DECLINE,
POLITICAL REACTION,
AND
CONTEMPORARY RELIGIOUS REVIVAL
INTRODUCTION Much has been made of the recent rise of political movements in the
contemporary world which are typified by certain common characteristics: broad mass
appeal; a reactionary political character; and an irrationalist, corporatist, mobilizing
ideology centered around the association of a particular faith with a particular national
history and a presumed national destiny. Although other examples exist, the four most
widely known and frequently discussed manifestations of such movements are Christian
evangelical fundamentalism in North America; Moslem resurgence in the arc from the Maghreb
to the Indian sub-continent (and even beyond to the Philippines); the militaristic and
expansionistic Zionism associated with the Likud bloc in Israel; and, as perhaps the most
interesting case, a reborn and politically active Polish Catholicism. Although
disconnected in many ways, and in further ways mutually hostile, it is the argument of
this paper that an underlying unity exists among all of these social developments. As a
consequence of this assertion, it is also argued that none of these social tendencies can
be explained as the outcome of particular historical circumstances. Rather, the
essentially simultaneous emergence and maturation of these phenomena should be understood
as the result of general tendencies in the world order of contemporary capitalism,
particularly the deep, broad, and ongoing crisis of the last decade. The special
characteristics of each of these developments then may be perceived most accurately as
culturally and historically situated forms of a common social response to total world
systemic conditions which impinge in a similar manner on societies or sub-societies tied
intimately to but separate from the capitalist metropole of Anglo-America and Western
Europe. Restated more concisely, it is the position of this paper that all of the social
movements enumerated here are isomorphic in essence, differing only in form and then only
insofar as the modes of political discourse and culturally available ideological
formations are historically diverse in each of the instances.
Were it not for the debasement through overuse of the term "fascism" as a
uniquely useful ordering principle for the understanding of the reactionary
socio-political response to capitalist crisis, it could be argued at the outset that the
phenomena at issue here represent nothing more than fascist mobilizing ideology in modern
guise and, at least in the American case, at a relatively early and inchoate point of
development. Certainly, these several ideologies are no more diverse than the variant
forms which fascist ideology took at the time of the earlier extreme crisis of imperialist
capitalism during the time period 1914-1945. Iberian Falangism, Mussolinist Fascism,
German Nazism, the Black Dragon in Japan, the various southeastern European movements of
the period, the Pilsudski regime in Poland (about which more later), Huey Long
"populism," the KKK revival of the 1920's in the U.S., and Peronism all have
rich if repellent special histories and distinctive aspects. Nevertheless, they emerge out
of the same decline in world economy, they develop political organizations, mobilizing
ideologies, state apparatuses (when they come to power), and strategies and tactics, which
show a similarity which is astonishing from the perspective of idiographic historiography.
Furthermore, and perhaps most significantly, they emerge from the interests of class
coalitions which show an equally striking compositional correspondence. The major
assertion of this paper, as above, is that the movement of events since the 1914-1945
period has changed the expressive forms of the reactionary response to capitalist crisis,
but not its fundamental origins, social bases, and goals. In order to support this
assertion, then, several intermediate steps are necessary. First, the common
characteristics of reactionary responses to capitalist crisis must be outlined. Second,
the origins of this commonality should be delineated. Third, the ways in which the current
mass movements which use religious doctrine as a mobilizing ideology and particular models
of this more general phenomenon must be demonstrated. Fourth, the manner in which the
current movements take on their unique character, and how this specificity distinguishes
them from, and links them to the historically distant forms of the past, must be
delineated. Finally, the future of such movements should be considered.
Capitalist Crisis and Political Reaction: General Considerations. In 1918, in the
midst of the most promising moment for proletarian revolution which had hitherto existed,
while playing a prominent role in the central drama of that time - the attempted
establishment of a revolutionary communist state in Germany - Rosa Luxemburg
(1971:367-368) summarized the central message of her intellectual and political
progenitors in the following way:
In this hour, socialism is the only salvation for humanity. The words of the Communist Manifesto flare like a fiery mene-tekel (refer to the biblical story of Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar:MW) above the crumbling bastions of capitalist society: Socialism or barbarism!
Stirring as these words are, they stand in striking contrast to the actual assertions of Marx and Engels in the Communist Manifesto (McLellan, 1977: 231), wherein they state with complete self-assurance that "...the bourgeoisie produces, above all, its own gravediggers. Its fall and the rise of the proletariat are equally inevitable." If the question here were only one of what had happened between 1848 and 1918 to change a simple and mechanical formula into a desperate alternative, simple answers such as "World War I," or "the disintegration of the Second International," or any of a multitude of existing or possible simplifications might suffice. However, the shift from the formulation found in the words of Marx and Engels to the interpretation of Luxemburg represents a movement from the notion of a single possible outcome for world-historical development to a bifurcated and far more pessimistic formulation. Unfortunately, and with bitter irony, an early act of capitalist neo-barbarism was to end Luxemburg's life. Along with this great loss but suffered at different hands came the early suppression of Lukacs and Korsch and the somewhat later abandonment of W. Reich to the vicissitudes of a hopeless and bankrupt coalition politics. As a result, the most creative voices of dialectical analysis were stilled and came to be replaced by the naive official optimism that typifies the dominant "party" Marxisms to this day. Thus, the possibilities for a useful dialectical materialist analysis of historical forces in the development of capitalism ceased with What Is To Be Done?, and any hope for an early understanding of then-emerging fascist reaction was strangled in the cradle, and no larger framework in which to place the reactionary response to capitalist collapse was ever clearly articulated. With the catastrophe of fascism already having occurred, G. Dimitroff (1935) later attempted an analysis which could place capitalist reaction in the larger framework of capitalist decline. However, the rigid ideological constraints which fettered his attempt, those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union during the 1930's, led him to ignore the widespread collaboration of wage-labor with fascist social movements and the generally meek acquiescence (outside of Iberia) of producing classes to the institution of fascist political orders when those movements attained state power. As F. Carsten (Laqueur, 1976:418-419) notes, such naivete was not present in the writings of Luxemburg's Spartacist comrade, Clara Zetkin, when she stated in 1923 that:
The carrier of fascism is not a small caste, but broad social groups, large masses which reach far into the proletariat...Masses of many thousands flocked to fascism.
Carsten also notes that Dimitroff's independent Marxist contemporaries,
Thalheimer and Sering/Lowenthal, were equally impressed and appalled by the participation
of significant sectors of the proletariat in fascism's rise and triumph.
Such analyses, while of the greatest importance in and of themselves, nonetheless
represent a terminal development, bound as they are by the historical specificity of the
overwhelming horror they faced. Because of the limitations of these approaches,
unavoidable though they were due to a lack of long historical perspective,
"fascism" of the period 1914-1945 came to be treated as isomorphic with
capitalist reaction as a general category. The two terms became synonymous and the two
concepts which underlay them became fused and indistinguishable. Once this had occurred,
"fascism" could then be portrayed and/or perceived only as a unique historical
event with diagnostic empirical characteristics. This lead and still leads deficient
leftist analyses to a misdirected vigilance which guards vigorously against fascism only
when it appears in its ancient garb and, worse, allows bourgeois ideology to consign
fascism to the dustbin of an idiographically construed history while giving reaction an
ideational opening to the future. Thus yawns a dangerous abyss, theoretical and practical.
It allows for the intellectual chicanery of ideologues such as Eugen Weber (Laqueur,
1976:450) who develop formulations equating Mao and Castro with Strasser and Hitler.
Rather, the very possibility of the existence of such constructions and the fact that they
are countenanced at all point to a need and a pressing one at that: the requirement for a
general model of capitalist reaction which transcends particular historical conjunctures
while still acknowledging their exemplary significance, and a model which also understands
capitalist reaction to be itself a manifestation of a larger historical process
transcending the limits and dimensions of any one historical epoch. Therefore, the
theoretical import of the most recent form of capitalist reaction, the simultaneous rise
of a world-wide reactionary religious Right, is that said phenomenon provides a crucial
added case which, taken in conjunction with "classical" fascism, allows for the
development of a scientific typification of capitalist reaction which would be impossible
were only the earlier forms of the phenomenon known.
The key to the problem of capitalist reaction as a general phenomenon is to be found in
the nature of imperialism. Not just Lenin, but Marx as early as the Grundrisse, as
well as in his correspondence with Engels and their later individual and collective work,
all understood that the international expansion of capitalism, at its root, was an
internal political solution to the diagnostic and unavoidable economic contradictions of
the capitalist mode of production. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall, along with
the concomitant movement upward of the organic composition of capital, were seen in Capital
to be the structural origin of crises of underconsumption, variously described over their
long history as "panics," "depressions," "recessions", or
whatever other terminology seemed semantically appropriate to ideologists of the existing
order at a particular moment. These crises in turn brought their attendant and familiar
social dislocations and catastrophes: the immiseration of the proletariat, both through
the pauperization of active members of the working classes by means of reduction in
compensation for labor and through the more brutal mechanism of the displacement of ever
greater proportions of the producing classes into the stagnant surplus population.
Dialectical/historical materialism identifies these events and processes as inevitable
outcomes of the core social relations of capitalism; the private ownership of the means of
production, the system of wage-labor, and the transformation of use-values into
commodities. These are seen to be the base from which class conflict grows in the
capitalist mode of production, and thus become the irreducible sub-stratum upon which
political struggle in its myriad forms rests in the current epoch. As has been noted
elsewhere (Wenger, 1978), these formulae, presented in their most elegant form in Capital,
should be taken as analogous to an equation in calculus; a simplified representation of a
complex dynamic process. Therefore, it should also be understood that when Marx asserts a
directional tendency for the level of wages, he is speaking in terms of an
"average" across a whole system. The import of this is that to the extent that
capitalism in its middle period had yet to subsume all lines of historical development
under its universal umbrella, perturbations in the general trend were to be expected and
were in fact to be found. Underconsumption leads to a quest for new markets; which is
hardly a novel insight to be claimed by scientific socialists. To the extent that such
markets come into being, they absorb the accumulated inventories of more mature capitalist
centers. Yet, as Lenin was to elaborate fully, this consumption itself depends on the
ability of new markets to consume, which means a money economy, investment, and crucially,
wage-labor in the new market. In this way, capitalism extends itself outward until it is
all-encompassing. In exporting capital, commodities, and wage-labor, capitalism thus
exports its own contradictions and makes that which was once outside itself a part of
itself. This was the conceptual foundation upon which Lenin built his political theory and
practice. For Lenin, as manifested in Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism,
and its various prefaces through 1920, the keys which unlocked the mysteries of
imperialism were, as is well known, the unavailability of profitable investment
opportunities in already developed capitalist societies along with the possibility of
super-exploitation of labor in the periphery. Lenin recognized quite well the implications
of these realities and paid particular attention to the effects they had on class
structure in the capitalist core. Left somewhat unexplored by Lenin, however, was the
dialectical aspect of class struggle within the capitalist heartland and its relation to
the larger dialectic of core and periphery.
At least in part, the rate at which the rate of profit tends to decline is not subject to
deterministic explanation. That is, the immiseration said decline brings, itself generates
political responses on the part of producing classes. The most notable of these during the
period of late-middle capitalism was the development of large and powerful unions. While
unions never were, and, if Lenin is correct, never will be agents of revolutionary change,
they undeniably raise the average wage of labor and thus reduces return on investment.
Further, reformist political .entities coalesce around these working class combinations,
often taking the form of political parties which tend to move the capitalist state toward
its "welfare" mode, and thus places a burden of taxation on consumption and
capital accumulation which tends to reduce the return on investment further, and thus also
leads to the development of "surplus," or "unusable" capital, a
phenomenon which Lenin analyzed keenly. Thus, the development of monopoly capital advances
its own contradictions through the "automatic" processes described in Capital,
but also does so by means of the political response to those developments by those whom
they immiserate. Imperialism, then, seems on the face of it to solve the problem of
"surplus" capital by international investment. Lenin treats this process
correctly but cursorily. Were the export of capital to go on indefinitely, investment in
the capitalist heartland itself would tend to drop to a critically low level, a problem
with special relevance in contemporary America. This would then tend to heighten the level
of class conflict in the core significantly at least by raising the size of the surplus
population dramatically. (The full significance of this phenomenon will become evident
shortly.) This would make imperialism a revolutionary mechanism at the core, not at the
periphery, as Lenin envisioned. Second, and related, imperialism requires at least the
passive acquiescence of the proletariat to class exploitation elsewhere and, insofar as
imperialism must be enforced at gunpoint, through the active participation of masses of
the producing classes in the huge standing militaries of the center nations. Why then
should the producing classes give their jobs and the lives of their children to this
process? Lenin has a brief and adequate answer for his purposes, but one that requires
considerable elaboration if it is to be used here.
Imperialism produces several central changes in the nature of capitalism. Through
the development of monopolies in particular productive sectors and their global extension,
laboring classes of many countries are united into highly coordinated and complex
processes of production; e.g., the Mexican who makes brake linings for Bendix, the
Zimbabwean who mines chromium, the aluminum processor in Jamaica, and the assembler in
Flint, are all part of an indivisible economic entity. The feature of imperialism which
thereby becomes most prominent at the macro-social level is that capitalist social
relations emerge evermore as processes of unequal exchange between societies as much as
they continue to be unequal exchange relationships between classes. This class relation
realizes itself through a growing international division of labor in which the original
relations of production which typified the internal class structure of the core capitalist
societies replicate themselves between whole societies. Thus, there might be said to exist
bourgeois/managerial, proletarian, peasant, and even lumpenproletarian societies. While
each of these societal types have their own internal class divisions, more and more as
imperialism grows, each society's internal structure is (de)formed by its international
role. This is true not only in terms of the productive relations which generate value, but
also exists in the sphere of the distribution of that value. Thus, super-exploitation
under imperialism means a flow of value from periphery to core which is sometimes
hemorrhagic in volume. However, early on Marxists began to develop the idea that such a
flow would avail the bourgeoisie little in political terms if it alleviated the
contradictions of capitalism for them alone. Once international monopoly integration of
capitalism assured a common ledger book for all wage laborers, the weight of immiseration
would be shifted around across borders, away from more organized proletariats, and to the
more recently afflicted workers of the periphery. Engels and Lenin both spoke scathingly
of the response of some working classes to imperial predation. Lenin quotes Engels (J.
Conner, 1968:144) at length in the 1916 text of Imperialism on this matter:
It must be observed that in Great Britain the tendency of imperialism to split the workers, to strengthen opportunism among them, and to cause temporary decay in the working-class movement revealed itself much earlier than the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries; for two important distinguishing features of imperialism were already observed in Great Britain in the middle of the nineteenth century--vast colonial possessions and a monopolist position in the world market. Marx and Engels traced this connection between opportunism in the working-class movement and the imperialist features of British capitalism systematically, during the course of several decades. For example, on October 7, 1858, Engels wrote to Marx: "The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." Almost a quarter of a century later... Engels speaks of the "worst English trade unions which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by, the middle class." In a letter to Kautsky...Engels wrote: "You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies ... "
In the preface to the 1920 French and German editions of Imperialism, Lenin (J. Conner, 1968:115) reasserts his earlier thesis:
Obviously, out of such enormous superprofits (since they
are obtained over and above the profits which capitalists squeeze out of the workers of
their "own" country) it is possible to bribe the labor leaders and the upper
stratum of the labor aristocracy. And that is just what the capitalists of the
"advanced" countries are doing: they are bribing them in a thousand different
ways, direct and indirect, overt and covert.
This stratum of workers-turned-bourgeois, or the labor aristocracy, who are quite
philistine in their mode of life, in the size of their earnings and in their entire
outlook, is the principal prop of the Second International, and in our days, the principal
social (not military) prop of the bourgeoisie. For they are the real agents of the
bourgeoisie in the working-class movement, the labor lieutenants of the capitalist class,
real vehicles of reform and chauvinism. In the civil war between the proletariat and the
bourgeoisie they inevitably, and in no small numbers, take the side of the bourgeoisie,
the "Versailles" against the "Communards."
Two things need to be noted here: first, the process being described had only
begun to mature in 1858 and had not yet completed itself by 1920. In particular, the full
ramifications of the internationalization of relations of production were still not fully
matured, although the exchange relations which emerged out of them had already been
understood. That is, the gross material inequalities which resulted from international
exchange under conditions of imperial domination were quite evident, but the nature of the
integration of wage labor in one nation with wage labor in another was still opaque.
Second, Lenin's last word on his seminal work was written in the summer of 1920, and thus
understandably tended to focus on the positive revolutionary outcomes of imperialist war.
The disasters of Germany, Hungary, and Poland were yet to be recorded. The same set of
causes which Lenin used to predict, explain, and bring about the Bolshevik victory had a
different set of outcomes in other locales at later dates. Had the consequences of an
international division of labor been understood fully in the 1920's to imply a political
division within the working class, it is possible that then-future history might have been
changed. In any case, history as it actually came to exist makes clear what was in 1920
only dimly seen: the collapse of the Second International, World War I, Soviet isolation,
and the rise of fascism were not isolated "political" events, but rather were
the unfolding and maturation of the fundamental social dynamics of a world in which
imperial expansion was complete and the essential forms of capitalist contradiction had
reemerged.
The Class Politics of Imperialism. As Lenin's analysis indicates, imperialism has
both external and internal aspects. On the one hand, it represents a higher order
articulation of formerly self-contained social units, nations and nations-to-be, while it
also corresponds to, emanates from, and generates the structure of those entities which it
combines. Imperialism also represents an advanced (for Lenin, the highest) point in the
development of the more general social form of which it is but a particular manifestation;
i.e., capitalism. As a result, at any given moment in time during the period of mature
imperialism, the social processes of any society will show both the basic dynamic of
capitalist social relations as well as the distinctive character particular to the place,
historical and political/ economic, of that society within the imperialist system.
Clearly, one of the most important components in determining the life experiences of the
"individuals...as they really are..." of whom Marx and Engels spoke in The
German Ideology, is the birth and death, formation and decomposition, or, most simply,
rise and fall of classes. Imperialism introduces new class relations (and thus new classes
as well) into capitalism, as was suggested earlier. For one, it generates qualitatively
new relations between individuals sharing the same relative positions in different
societies, as between the finance capitalists of the "trilateral" world and the
comprador bourgeoisies of Latin America or Asia, or as exist between the uranium miners in
South Africa and the builders of nuclear steam turbines in North America or Japan. Farhang
(1981:47), summarizing Galtung, states this quite concisely:
...Galtung maintains that any analysis defining imperialism in terms of only two classes or groupings has fundamental shortcomings. The comfortable workers in rich countries cannot be placed in the same class as the miserable workers in poor countries simply because they are all called workers. The rich in different countries cannot be placed in a single class either.
He goes on to quote from Galtung's (1980:111) more specific assertions, which have pronounced and unsurprising resonance with the much earlier observations of Zetkin, which were cited previously:
The total conflict formation, hence, should be conceived of in terms of four classes or groups rather than in terms of two, and analytic schemes that purport to reflect the empirical reality of today should be flexible enough to accommodate some of the many variations found in the conflict constellations.
Alongside of these new international relations between functionally similar
classes, there grow up new relations among classes within single societies in part
determined by the already unfolding pre-imperial trajectories of these classes, in part
determined as well by the nature of the imperial order within which those classes play out
their destiny. Of course, neat formulations of this kind tend to overlook the multiply
recurved convolutions which are definitive of dialectical social processes. For example,
the decline of craft labor under conditions of commodity production is a process which is
one of the most frequently noted and novelly rediscovered of all the social phenomena
associated with capitalism. Its antiquity is prodigious, stretching back at least four
hundred nears and in some sense it represents a central "genetic" starting point
for capitalist social relations as such. Yet, in all capitalist societies, and
particularly those core societies which experienced the feudal/capitalist transition at a
point subsequent to the emergence of imperialism, displaced and dispossessed craft labor
formed a core constituency for colonial expansion. In this instance, the case of early
North American settlement is perhaps the most telling of all. Thus, while the history of
imperialism does in some sense become the history of capitalism as a whole, it is not the
whole of capitalist history. This means that while all "modern" events must be
understood in the context of imperialism, some of them have roots which precede and
transcend that history. In the case of capitalism reaction, just such a situation obtains:
it is a response to capitalist crisis in the period of advanced capitalism; i.e.,
imperialism, but it plays itself out against a background which precedes imperialism while
at the same time being altered by it. This is the first and most general proposition which
is necessary to understanding both what happened from 1914-1945, and also what began to
happen after 1948.
A second major orienting principle in understanding capitalist reaction is that the
politics of the capitalist epoch is hegemonistic, as Gramsci and others have observed, and
that therefore class coalitions rather than single classes tend to determine the outcomes
of class struggle. Without negating the idea that there are fundamental classes in any
epoch, nor in particular disavowing the idea that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat
represent those antipodes in the capitalist epoch, it is still necessary to realize that
other classes play crucial, albeit sometimes negative, roles at given historical
conjunctures. Marx recognized this theoretically in his discussions of the French
peasantry in the Eighteenth Brumaire; Lenin and Mao recognized the same reality in
practice and with a more pleasing outcome in their political analyses. Further, it should
be understood that such coalitions are often composed of classes with oblique interests,
some shared and some opposed. It is the primary task of any class and/or its political
leadership to construct umbrella programs which unite the largest assemblage of divergent
classes while not obviating the interests of the leading or hegemonistic class. This was
no novel insight to Lenin, nor to Hitler and Roosevelt, nor is it now news to Khomeini,
Wojtyla/John Paul II, and Begin. In the context of the first principle above, this second
principle of coalitions and hegemony should be seen as having a corollary wherein it is
understood that during particular historical cusps, classes which have suffered long term
and irreversible decline temporarily may seem to share common interests, cause, and future
with objectively antagonistic classes suffering shorter term reversals. More specifically
and to the current point, a crisis in imperialism may seem to unite the interests of
classes born out of the imperialist epoch with the interests of classes whose last
death-rattle would have been heard had imperialism somehow never existed. The fact that
imperialist crises accelerate and accentuate all the degenerative tendencies endemic to
the capitalist system makes such collective moments of disaster more than chance
occurrences. To modify an old adage of the Detroit automobile industry, a person
hospitalized with influenza tends to take more than a passing interest in a room-mate in
the last stages of pneumonia. In fact, the debate about the class parameters of fascist
appeal which runs within Marxism from Luxemburg to Dimitroff and continues unabated within
and outside it (cf. Laqueur, 1976) is a tacit or unreflexive recognition that the matter
of class coalition formation is crucial to the theoretical understanding and practical
opposition to fascist/reactionary tendencies during capitalist crisis. As was noted much
earlier, such discussions have an unfortunate tendency to be ad hoc in the case of
Marxists and ideologically blind and crippled in the case of bourgeois analysts.
Growing out of the above and in a way contained within it, is a third generalization about
the class politics of imperialism: classes in the capitalist epoch have a two-dimensional
"natural history." As was noted in prior discussion, this dual process of class
emergence, perseverance, and/or decline is in phase with the historical emergence of
imperialism. The classes of bourgeois antiquity have one mode of historical development
which exists prior to the emergency of imperialism and another mode after. Compare, for
example, the warring bourgeoisies of 1914-1945 with the "Trilateral" bourgeoisie
of the 1970's. Although the social role of the bourgeoisie remains the same; i.e., the
private accumulation of surplus value, the internal structure of the class has changed
substantially. Similarly, changes in functional activities have taken place; e.g., as can
be seen in changes in the activities of the first Henry Ford and the second. The
"decline" of a class also tends to be associated with the process of social
"mobility" much beloved of mainstream sociologists. First eliminating
value-laden concepts of "upwardness" or "downwardness" in such
changes, it is still possible to see the decomposition of a class of wage-laborers over
several generations, and their recomposition in another role. For example, the
granddaughters of automobile workers becoming the office workers of the American mid-west.
Of course, many more examples of such transformation exist, and their most fundamental
aspects are often obscured by matters of "collar color," gender, nationality,
etc. Furthermore, some classes or class fragments are brought into being de novo out of
the requirements of advanced capitalism/imperialism. Witness the intellectual fall-out
from this present in the voluminous, provocative, and still somewhat chaotic literature
which has risen around the question of a "new petite bourgeoisie" or, as some
style it, a "professional/managerial class." P. Walker's (1979) collection of
work on the issue, as well as the works cited by the authors in that compendium, agree on
several things if nothing else: that the "new class" is a child of the
imperialist epoch, that it is growing in size, and that it is largely formed out of the
remnants of the "old" petite bourgeoisie and the upper segments of wage labor.
Criticisms aside (cf. Wenger, 1980), this literature points to the existence of a
"class" with essentially no history prior to the age of capital with a high
organic composition, monopolist, and global imperial expansion. However, the lacuna in
this literature which cannot be ignored is the lack of a general historical model which
encompasses the variety of forms which this "new class" takes and explains the
diagnostically volatile politics it exhibits. Progress in the analysis of the contemporary
politics of this class, reactionary or otherwise, therefore depends on a further
elaboration of the class politics of imperialism as an historically situated phenomenon.
Several points still need to be made on this crucial matter.
Earlier on it was noted that the capitalist division of labor changes dramatically under
imperialism. This happens in at least two ways which are primary to the understanding of
capitalist reaction. First, more classically and truistically, the operative unit of
social motion changes from a class within a nation to a dual phenomenal outcropping: a
situation where whole nations take on a class character of a particular kind, as was
already discussed; and another where a class within a particular nation or complex of
nations plays a distinctive role within the context of the total capitalist world order
and thus may be linked intimately to other classes of different kinds located in other
"nations" more so than it is to the other classes of its own land. One of the
several dramatic consequences of this transformation is that certain classes which
hitherto may have been more or less proportionally distributed across all societies in
which capitalist social relations existed can, did, and do come to be demographically
concentrated within particular societies. Thus, even were the relative proportion of the
total population within the span of capitalist social relations to remain unchanged, their
relative mass within the context of a particular nation-state might be considerably
different. As a result, in those nations where they are concentrated, these classes can
come to wield considerable political clout and may even "swing" classes when
class struggle intensifies. However, the fact is that in dealing with classes such as the
"new petite bourgeoisie" in particular and similarly but less so the "labor
aristocracy," the situation is not simply one of redistribution, it is also one of
absolute growth in clearly defined locales. This brings the focus around to the second way
in which imperialism brings about a new division of labor, one which had earlier been
specified to revolve around concrete social relations of production and not only around
the accumulation and distribution of surplus value.
If it were possible to elicit a common thread on the topics of new classes and new class
relations from works as diverse as those of Gorz (1972) and Poulantzas (1975), Mills
(1951), Ewen (1976), and Braverman (1974), and perhaps even Habermas (1975), it would have
to be contained within Gorz's apercu that these new classes, salaried or wage labor though
they be, exist not to produce surplus value, but rather to reproduce capitalist social
relations. In essence, these "classes" come into being to deal with the vast
dynamic stress which the imperialist world order generates, be it social, political,
national, or international. The advertising agent writing copy which de-Nipponizes
Toyotas, the agricultural scientist in Iowa, the purveyor of Polish hams in the local
supermarket, all to the same degree but in radically different ways to the existence of
imperialism. The same may be said of the German anthropologist, the French marine, or the
U.S. Border Patrol officer. Again, somewhat less so but in a parallel manner, the (now
vanishing) U.S. automobile assembler exists at a pinnacle of poorly remunerated extractive
and fabricating labor scattered around the globe. As recent events evince, the social
function of this segment of labor came to be less that of producer and more that of
consumer: easily replaced by machines, the demise of this class seems to have been felt
more in the "sogere of consumption" or the "marketplace" than it has
in the factory. Be this all as it may, piercing through the cloud of historical and social
specificities which surround these diverse "classes" and class relations is the
inescapable objective commonality noted at the outset of this excursus: imperialism brings
forth or transforms classes which are specific to its requirements as an advanced form of
the capitalist mode of production, and it distributes them unevenly across the globe.
Often, these classes are raised out of the ashes/progeny of classes whose class role is
still vital but is now performed elsewhere. None of this should obscure the central fact
that "classes" come into being whose existences are conditioned by the special
vicissitudes of imperialism as much as they are by the general processes of capitalism.
Again, such a distinction is tricky: imperialism is capitalism at its highest stage.
Indeed, there has been no capitalism "outside" of imperialism for at least a
century. Nonetheless, there are classes whose very existence depends on the place of
"their" society in the imperialist system more than it depends on the health of
the imperialist system as a whole. Thus, to be a member of a "class" which is
"rising" with imperialism may be an agony which is particularly piquant if the
society within which that rise is occurring happens to be "falling" relative to
other national contenders for the spoils of imperialism. More generally and in partial
summary, functionally identical classes generated in different places at different times
may suffer radically different fates and thus come to exhibit diametrically opposed
political stances.
As a negative corollary to this, there are classes whose history, as a general
rule, terminates with the advent of mature capitalist social relations but whose velocity
of decline and ultimate longevity fluctuate according to the place of their society in the
unfolding world-system. Examples of classes of this kind include the "old"
petite bourgeoisie of shop-keepers, small landholders, independent artisans, and
"free" professionals. The first two of these have tended to disappear altogether
while the last have tended toward absorption and/or conversion into parts of the mosaic of
the new petite bourgeoisie, their progeny often becoming salaried employees of
monopolistic enterprise or the capitalist estate. In the more successful imperial
societies which themselves were of long-standing antiquity, the decline of these classes
has been cushioned and on the average gradual; in the less successful imperial societies,
their decline has often been abrupt and catastrophic. This fate has also befallen
feudalists in societies such as China or Japan, but these are somewhat idiosyncratic cases
which require precise treatment. For general purposes, however, the enumeration of those
instances where the decline of classes corresponds to the rise of imperialism also serves
to fill the category of classes whose destiny fluctuates with the vicissitudes of
imperialism. Further, it becomes obvious that such fluctuations are themselves of two
types: those which are tied to the history of the imperialist system as a whole, and those
which are derived from the national experience of single societies which are a part of
that system. Such a distinction is analogous to one which can be made in a more mundane
sphere of existence; i.e., the difference which exists between the genetically determined
life-history of all humans (birth, growth/senescence, death) and the actual life
experience of a particular individual as they play out that process. Extending the analogy
further, it is unquestionable that all humans are born of women; it is equally certain
that a person born of a fifteen-year-old will differ from one whose mother is fifty-five.
A proletariat whose emergence is coterminous with the origins of capitalism itself, such
as the British, will show characteristics all along its own developmental path which are
different from those of proletariats born on capitalism's withered loins, such as the
Mexican. Some of these differences manifest themselves in the most crucial way: in the
variant political history of the classes. Among the more salient observations which arise
from this is the idea that these variations in class politics do indeed arise in response
to the specifications of the world-historical moment which give context to the appearance
and/or disappearance of the classes. Also operative and of equal importance is the fact
that classes appear and disappear in the context of other classes, some rising or falling,
some better or more poorly organized, some geographically or temporally more central or
peripheral to the arenas of previous class formation. Thus, as Galtung and Farhang were
seen to indicate, imperialism is a complex relationship, conditioned by the
"unevenness" of historical development. Land-holding classes on the capitalist
periphery which have arisen in the period of international finance capital have been
required either to perish or collaborate in the extension of imperialism into
"their" native lands when faced with the overwhelming power and wealth of the
"developed" capitalist core. Acknowledging such dynamic processes allows for an
understanding of the class politics of imperialism which is neither mechanistic nor
"economistic"; it thus responds to Galtung's (1980:108) well-warranted
apprehensions about some of the more simplistic models of imperialism:
It is strongly felt that imperialism is a general structure that may be filled with very concrete economic, political, social, cultural, and communicative content--singly or in any combination. It may well be that at the present juncture in world history, in looking at international relations at large, an economic point of view would be the most fruitful in explaining what is going on. However, it is felt that there is a need for a broader theory of imperialism that also can come to grips with other phenomena, some of them very contemporary, some of them from the past, some of them to come in a possibly very near future.
The model of class politics generated here remains firmly established on the
foundations of dialectical/historical materialism: it is based on the formal relationships
of social entities to the means of production. Yet, it also rests on the history of the
"real" humans which Marx and Engels spoke of in the German Ideology--humans
whose life experiences are determined by and are determinative of the unceasing
dialectical flux of class emergence, perseverance, transformation, and/or decline. By
constructing an historically grounded model of imperialist class structure of the kind
generated here, it becomes possible not only to avoid the error of rejecting a materialist
analysis of history, but also tends to blunt the tendency to succumb to the Idealist
analysis of Schumpeter (1951), wherein imperialism is seen, not as the most advanced form
of class society, but rather is portrayed as a kind of mindless error or
"atavism." Obviously, the "error" is not in the nature of imperialism
but rather in the work of the student who wishes to run the hands of History's clock
backwards. More important than blunting such theoretical errors, however, is the potential
for an historically grounded model of the class politics of imperialism to produce an
accurate comprehension of the class coalitions, progressive and reactionary, which
typically emerge out of moments or capitalist/imperialist crisis; most important of all is
the generation of a sound sociopolitical analysis of the current moment of crisis. As has
been indicated, no mere laundry list nor sterile typology of class names of the past or
present are adequate to such a task. The analytical tool which is needed is one built on
the realization that in specific circumstances, classes can and do develop a community of
interests which is bound to a shared time and/or a common place within the evolution of
the imperialist world-system regardless of whether they have arisen together or separately
and regardless of whether their class interests are antagonistic by any external,
"objective" criterion. Once this is understood and applied, it is possible to
comprehend both the reactionary class coalitions of the past and those which represent the
main danger to humanity at the current time.
Class Decline and Reactionary Coalitions. From the time of the earliest students of
capitalist reaction-cum-fascism onward, the most popular thesis concerning the class
composition of rightist coalitions has been that of the "intermediate classes."
This could be seen in the comments of Zetkin cited earlier on; it is also the core of
Dimitroff's position, and it has had persistent appeal for social and political theorists
from the academic center left-ward to the official ideologists of historical and
contemporary party Marxists. Salvatorelli (cf. DeFelice, 1977) in 1923, Geiger from the
1930's onward, Lasswell (1933), Gramsci, Saposs (1935), Fromm (1941), Kornhauser (1959),
Lipset (1960). Trow (1958), Bell (1963), and Guerin (1973) are only a few of the more
prominent exemplars among many others of the viewpoint that locates the origin of the
appeal of fascism in the "marginal" position of "intermediate"
classes. This marginality is often expressed metaphorically as a "squeezed"
position between the proletariat and capital. Associated with this position is the
"displacement" hypothesis, which attempts to account for the notable appeal of
fascism to displaced World War I veterans in Germany (as existed in the infamous
Freikorps) and also to the disenchanted middle-class youth who constituted the
"hippie"-like Wandervogeln of the same time. This hypothesis of fascism
appealing to socially-disconnected youth is more often found in centrist social rather
than leftist political analyses of the social appeal of fascism, but it is no less valid
for that, and no more satisfactory. That is, both of these theses are "correct"
insofar as they go descriptively, but they are equally invalid to the extent that they are
both ahistorical and partial. The "squeeze" theory fails to define clearly the
dimensions and sources of the compressive forces being placed on the old petite
bourgeoisie, artisans, middle peasants, and other wells of popular support for classical
fascism; it also fails to adequately account for the observations of Zetkin and Lenin as
to the shaky allegiance of "labor aristocrats" to the proletarian cause.
Similarly, the "displacement" argument fails to explain adequately the lack of
integration or reintegration of certain class segments into "society." Thus,
useful and accurate descriptions of some of the class actors in reactionary coalitions
come into being, but those descriptions lose their value when they come to replace
explanation. This becomes most obvious when it is noted that historically, after World War
I, all European societies contained "squeezed" petite bourgeoisie, displaced
veterans, etc. Further, all of those societies developed reactionary and progressive class
politics alongside one another. However, only in some did these reactionary coalitions
have sufficient strength to seize state power, and to do so by the techniques of mass
mobilization typical of the form of capitalist reaction which has come to be known as
fascism. The question of why this occurs can be reduced to the level of parsing national
differences in political cultures, etc., which many of the earlier-cited bourgeois
ideologues and idiographic historians tend to do. On the other hand, the question can be
elevated to the level of seeking common national historical experiences which account for
the breadth of narrowness of the reactionary base in given societies. This course is the
one being endorsed here and it is supported because it allows for a template applicable to
social developments occurring at times other than 1918-1945 and in places other than
Central Europe and Japan. As was argued previously, the orienting principle operative in
such a course of theoretical action ties class politics to the history of specific classes
and the history of those classes to the total history of capitalism.
Why, then, did fascism find its origins and bourgeois liberalism its grave in Vienna
(Schorske, 1981)? Why did a popular front leftist government come to power in France in
the 1930's? Why did Germany and Hungary end up fascistic after a flirtation with
socialism? Why did the U.S., beset by the Klan revival, the American Legion, the Dearborn
Independent, and Father Coughlin end up with a centrist bourgeois regime in the
1930's? Clearly, the millions of pages devoted to each of these topics are warranted and
cannot be adequately summarized here. Synopsis, however, is not synthesis. All cases need
not be considered to test the adequacy of a model. Perhaps as it was the cases of the old
and new petite bourgeoisies along with the "labor aristocracy" which elicited
this long discussion, it should be these cases which test the rule.
The conflicts which begin between the capitalist societies in the 1850's are imperial in
nature; this fact is commonplace and requires no further discussion. More provocative,
however, is the idea that these conflicts begin to become conflicts between types of
capitalist societies: socio-temporally, they may be separated into societies which formed
and matured in the womb of feudal social relations alone, and those that came into being
and developed out of feudal social relations and in the presence of other capitalist
societies. In the cases of Europe, Anglo-America, and Japan, the slow rate of early
capital accumulation and the facts of geographical isolation did not permit the permanent
territorial incorporation of any of these societies into any of the others. The historical
sequence in which they appeared, however, meant that some had reached the stage of
imperial expansion well before others, and some had arrived on the world stage so late as
to be forced to attempt to build empires out of territories wrested by main force from the
already existing dominions. The 1898 attack against Spain in its Caribbean and Pacific
colonies by the U.S. is archetypal in this respect. Further, in some cases, geography
conspired with history to force at least two of the newer capitalist societies into direct
attacks on their capitalist neighbors: Germany against France in 1870 and Japan against
Russia in 1905. In the same way, the triple curse of France, Alp, and Gibraltar was later
to force Italy into grisly opera bouffe adventures in Ethiopia. The results of this
division of the capitalist world into imperial antagonists had both long-term endemic and
short-term catastrophic outcomes for old petit bourgeois, artisan, feudalist, and
proletarian in the latecomer societies. It is this fact that is of current interest.
The late advent of capitalist social relations in the societies in which fascism was later
to triumph had early and direct impact on the life history of their classes; impact which
sharply differentiated them from objectively identical classes in the other capitalist
societies of greater antiquity. First, feudal social classes persevered well into the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Germany, Japan, Italy, Austro-Hungary, Russia and
Southeastern Europe. Other than in Japan, that was also true if the "old" petite
bourgeoisie. When imperial constriction began to be felt in the form of heightened class
conflict, falling rate of profit, increased bourgeois competition, and so on, the decline
of those classes became precipitous when compared to the slow disappearance of their
cognate classes elsewhere. This is the historical reality which underlies the
"marginality" of these classes. In terms of the formal collective experience of
actual class members, it meant a relatively abrupt rather than a slow multi-generational
decline into the proletariat or lumpenproletariat. In no small part this was due to the
more aggressive competition present in closed capitalist systems, where large capital
tends to look more carefully for "inward" expansionary opportunities than it
would were "easier" external paths open to it. Further, the higher level of
organization which develops among wage-homogeneous (read non-aristocratic) labor also
tends to make gains against the petite bourgeoisie more easily than against the more
formidable resources of large capital. This is the phenomenology of the
"squeeze" much beloved of formalistic class analysis. Where imperialism was
widespread and prosperous, the petite bourgeoisie tended to disappear at an earlier date,
by the universal calendar, but with far more gentility. Also, where empire was puny, the
decomposing "middle classes" tended to fall further; there was little or no
rising labor aristocracy to serve as a lateral economic cushion for the social step
downward. In addition, the late arrivals on the imperial scene provided considerably fewer
positions of the type which were precursors to the "new" petite bourgeoisie,
tied as that class is to well-developed and expansive empire.
Given that much of the analysis of classical fascism is based on the German case, it
deserves more attention even in a cursory overview such as this. Its perennial popularity
is no accident; however, it results from the dramatic turn-about in German politics in the
period 19181 932. This left-right reversal is itself a superb example of how the
short-range vicissitudes of imperialism can have dramatic impact on the fates of classes
and on their eventual political alignments. In this light, it should be recalled that
following upon the heels of the successful Franco-Prussian War, Germany was able to
acquire a substantial amount of overseas territory. Between 1884 and 1898 it counted a
substantial piece of sub-Saharan Africa as its own, as well as smaller holdings in
Oceania. This start on "real" imperialism, fueled with the money capital
extracted from France as tribute, in part set in motion the social processes which were to
eventually produce the nucleus of a professional managerial class/new petite bourgeoisie
and allow for the growth of a later aristocracy. Further, the presence of ethnically
distinct minorities in East Prussia also provided a potentially super-exploitable
population from whose toil the means to placate militant German labor could be extracted.
Perhaps as important as the actual history of Germany for its class structure was the
future its ruling classes had planned for it. The goals of Germany, Austro-Hungary, and
the pathetic Ottoman Empire were clear: to fracture Anglo-French hegemony and divide up
the spoils of that earlier empire. To do so, the German bourgeoisie and militarists
developed a technical, professional, and bureaucratic structure of a size more in
proportion to their dreams than their reality. Had Germany achieved its World War I aims,
its veterans would have had good jobs awaiting their return, and its former petite
bourgeoisie and its offspring would have had more than enough to do administering to the
needs of the expanded German Empire. In other words, the "displacement
hypothesis" seems to dissolve into little more than a descriptive portrayal of the
social outcomes of imperial disaster. Having examined, however briefly, the way in which
imperialist history, general and social, relates to the class composition of reactionary
coalitions, one major analytical question remains: what converts a group of dying,
starved, and stricken classes into an actual political coalition with a common purpose?
Ideological Mobilization and Imperialist Crisis. In the past, debate has
arisen over the question of whether the successful reactionary coalitions of the classical
fascist period represent combinations of classes or class fragments with actual material
interests or, conversely, whether they represent temporary alliances with great internal
contradictions that are blunted only by the invocation of uniquely powerful ideological
constructions. This issue is taken up in one form or another in almost all the works cited
here. Less frequently considered is the connection between the answer to this question and
the varying forms of fascist ideology itself. Sternhall (Laqeuer, 1976) manages to devote
over forty pages to the question of the forms of fascist ideology without once inquiring
as to its material base (he also omits any reference to Nazism). He notes that until the
mid-1960's, no serious inquiry into the general ideological forms of fascism was available
in English. In listing the works which did appear, such as Nolte (1975), Eugen Weber
(1964), Gregor (1969), Mosse (1964), and others, he correctly observes that there exists a
split in the literature over whether the various fascist ideologies have more or less
commonality; that is, whether they can be considered as outcroppings of a single
phenomenon or fairly unique national experiences. Unfortunately, as his discussion
reveals, much of the debate has taken on the character of a quarrel in the History of
Ideas; i.e., did fascist ideology draw on a long-standing and widespread current in
European thought, or, was "fascist ideology" instead only a later, synthetic
principle by which historians overgeneralized a highly idiosyncratic ideological complex
which arose at only a single moment in time. Both of these approaches tend to treat ideas
as abstractions without a material base, and also tend to ignore the differential success
of the ideas in different national contexts. While it is undeniable that reactionary
ideology has broad and deep historical roots, it seems that the very fact that it enjoyed
success in such a constrained and spotty fashion should have recommended an inquiry into
the connection of its forms to the societies which produced it. This seems not to have
occurred, however. Marxist treatments seem to have done little more, other than to have
identified fascism as false consciousness built upon "chauvinistic demagoguery,"
as Dimitroff put it. Why this demagoguery should be so appealing is left unclear. Fromm
(1941) resorts to psychological explanations based on "cravings for submission and
domination," thus giving birth to the authoritarian explanation for fascist appeal
which was later to be expanded by Adorno and his colleagues. Guerin (1973), Saposs (1938),
and others also resort to the "status panic" hypothesis which Fromm and Lasswell
originally advanced. Fromm (1941:244), however, did make some connection to the political
economic infrastructure of the times when he observed that the "panic" he spoke
of was mobilized and directed "...in the service of German imperialism." Neumann
(1943) and others tended toward the "resentment" mode of this argument, wherein
the discrepancy between the social standing and salaries of the "old middle
classes" provoked hostility toward the proletariat and its political representatives.
The source of these low salaries was not questioned. Further, as Burris (1982) shows in
his insightful analysis of fascism and the various petite bourgeoisies, the entire
empirical justification for the idea that the economic disaster of the classes at issue
was a result of events beginning in the period of proletarian advance in Germany is, in
fact, false:
In Germany, for example, the real incomes of salaried employees increased by an average of 13 percent between 1929 and 1932, while those of manual workers declined by 7 percent. Between 1927 and 1932, the rate of unemployment among salaried employees increased from 2.4 percent to approximately 13.6 percent. During the same period, unemployment among manual wage-earners increased from 4.5 percent to a high of 38.4 percent. Relative to manual workers, the economic position of salaried employees deteriorated much more during the First World War than the postwar inflation.
Clearly, the decline of the "middle strata" is tied closely to the
disaster of German imperialism and not the rise of the proletariat. Indeed, Burris
(1982:33) goes on to observe that it was during the period of greatest decline relative to
the German proletariat that the "intermediate strata" most supported social
democracy and organized labor. Burris, however, attempts to explain the rise of fascism by
its support among the haute bourgeoisie and by the sectarianism of the left. While both of
these factors are crucial to the success of fascist political movements, they still fail
to account for the broad appeal of reactionary ideology across class lines which Burris
himself acknowledges, drawing on much the same literature as this discussion. The enigma
of reactionary ideology and its broad appeal thus remains.
Based on the above, it is clear that reactionary coalitions during the capitalist epoch
have a contradictory character; that they unite classes which have objectively opposed
class interests; and that they unite classes at radically different points in their
"life-cycles." It then follows that the key to understanding these apparent
contradictions is to be found in the dual reality of capitalism in its imperialist form:
that at any given moment as a general system it has sets of effects which act differently
in each society which is encompassed by it, and that the variation in its effects has a
great deal to do with the historical sequence in which societies enter that system.
Further, it seems that imperialism as a special form of capitalism generates sets of
objective class interests in historical societies which are not coterminous with the
objective class interests to be derived from the dynamics of capitalism as a general
system of social relations. This contradicts Marx no more than did Lenin; in fact, it
doesn't contradict Marx at all. It does recognize, as did Lenin, that capitalism has an
internal dialectic which causes it to transform itself; it is not so much like a machine,
as Bernsteinian socialists would have had it, as it is like a butterfly. It is the genetic
code of the lepidoptera that leads to the succession of caterpillar and butterfly, yet
caterpillars and butterflies are not the same. Although all of the implications for the
future history of capitalism are as yet unclear, and although the detailed minutiae of
capitalism's past have not been fully comprehended, it still seems possible to say that at
a given moment in time and in a given place, classes as diverse as feudal militarists,
finance capitalists, privileged proletarians, and professional/managerial
bureaucratic-technical functionaries, can unite around a set of real and common interests.
In fact, it would be absurd to argue otherwise--they have done so on many occasions as the
history discussed here indicates.
It should also be noted that the dialectical opposite of this is also true: that the petit
bourgeois, the displaced peasant, the intellectual, the priest, and the wage-slave can
unite for progressive change as in the cases of Russia, China, Viet-Nam, Cuba, and
Nicaragua. What seems to differentiate the relative occurrence of these two tendencies is
whether classes or class fragments perceive and/or act as if the system of social
relations in which they exist is a relational matrix of classes, or whether they perceive
and/or act as if it were something else. The existence of imperialism has a powerful
effect on the perception that nations are the operative unit of social destiny. As was
discussed at some length, nations are indeed the basic building blocks of imperialism, but
as was also indicated, nations are what they are only in terms of their place in the more
fundamental class relations of the modern capitalist world system.
In a theoretical sense, this formulation is only a complex restatement of the mundane
Marxist thesis that the only accurate perception of the world is a perception which holds
human society to be class society and, as a negative corollary, that any other perception
is objectively false and thus useless for social progress. At the level of actual events,
however, such an understanding is less banal. The main theses being advanced here are in
some ways quite simple and straightforward: when the fate of classes within a society is
dramatically changed for the worse by changes in that society's place in the imperialist
system, the interests of classes so affected may come to be self-perceived as a matter of
the future place of that society within the imperialist system. It is also possible that
the fate of said classes can be perceived as tied to the dissolution of imperialism itself
and the internationalization of the process of production and distribution of the useful
products of labor. It is not difficult to understand why societies which were relatively
privileged prior to an imperialist crisis tend to move toward imperialist renaissance as a
cure for their problems, while those which were less privileged tend to gravitate toward
an anti-imperialist solution. It is not quite as easy to understand the modern crop of
reactionary social movements in this way, as their political-economic distribution ranges
across societies as different as the United States and Egypt, and their geographical span
is unbounded. Thus, something more is required than crude notions of national interest.
Earlier on, it was noted that imperialist crisis can generate class disaster in two
dialectically opposed ways: first, it can destroy classes (like the labor aristocracy)
whose fate is tied to the success of imperialism; second, it can gravely injure classes
(such as the "old" petite bourgeoisie) which had already begun to decline - as a
result of imperialism. Obviously, the articulation between these two types of class
difficulty and imperialist crisis must be different. Nevertheless, it must be stressed at
the outset that the fate of these classes is more or less the same. A good example of the
differences in the mechanisms of class decline can be seen in some of the earlier
discussions here. When German imperialism entered crisis, competition for capital within
the bourgeoisie heightened. The inability to avoid the tendency of the rate of profit to
fall by seeking cheap labor elsewhere forced a drive toward greater investment in constant
capital--machines and technique rather than labor. Such a drive raises demand for capital
among investors and pushes smaller capitalists to the wall. In the long run, small capital
is doomed no matter what the fortunes of imperialism might be; this is a basic dynamic of
capitalism--the bourgeois cannibalism of which Marx spoke. Imperialist crisis accelerates
this tendency to an intolerable rate--witness the beginning wave of business bankruptcies
in the U.S. today. On the other hand, the fate of large sectors of the state bureaucracy
is tightly tied to the advancing prow of imperialism. When imperialism halts, so does its
growth. As a result, at the exact moment when imperialism experiences crisis, it damages
two classes which are not only opposed, but are even in a successive relationship to one
another. Clearly, an "objective" analysis makes such an antagonism obvious;
however, reactionary social movements are not organized around objective analyses--indeed,
that is one of their hallmarks. Moving along, one can consider the plight of the
"labor aristocracy"; its privileges are based on its politically privileged
integration into an international system of economic production. Thus, the advance of
imperialism seems to be in its interest. Yet, over time, that very "wage
privilege" encourages automation of core economies and capital investment at the
periphery. As a result, the programs necessary for short run gains lay the groundwork for
future catastrophe and class decomposition. It is undoubtedly in the short and long-range
interest of the haute bourgeoisie to invest capital where labor is cheapest regardless of
national boundary; Lenin correctly identified this as the ultimate functional destiny of
this primary class of the capitalist epoch. Again, a scientific analysis of the situation
would show these interests to be inextricably and diametrically opposed. Yet, in the U.S.
and some other parts of the imperialist core, organized labor and capital have almost
never broken ranks over imperialist expansion, as the Viet Nam experience made clear.
Vulgar analyses of such phenomena sometimes refer to the "bought" leaders of
producing classes who take positions which are self-destructive. While there is no
shortage of empirical evidence to support such an assertion, there is also no reason to
believe that such "class traitors" are Svengalis able to mesmerize and dupe
millions of individuals. George Meany's appeal was not charismatic; it rested on the
establishment of an ideological hegemony based on the elimination of competing ideologies
and on the promulgation of a plausible--albeit utterly incorrect--view of the world which
nonetheless corresponded to selected elements of the life experience of individual class
members. Once this is recognized, the significance of the general form and content of
capitalist mobilizing ideologies becomes clear, particularly so when it is also understood
that capitalism has outlived its historical usefulness by many decades. In other words,
any ideology which serves to maintain such a system is almost by definition reactionary.
Nationalism, Racism, and the Community of Believers: the Forms of Reactionary
Ideology. Any ruling class which attempts to preserve capitalist social relations at a
time during or immediately following imperialist catastrophe is in a situation from which
there seems to have been only one historical exit. It must form a coalition of disparate
and antagonistic classes at a time of tremendous social upheaval and political volatility,
and it must do so in the face of competing class-hegemonic attempts which are relatively
uncontaminated by responsibility for the crisis. In order to form this coalition, it must
create a mobilizing ideology which convincingly asserts the existence of a common class
destiny which transcends class interests themselves, and it must do so on the basis of
little more than the shared misery of political economic collapse. This promise of the
state of things to come must also be seen as equally salubrious for all members of the
class coalition, and thus once more not a matter of classes at all. The ideological battle
must also be fought against a revolutionary opponent whose counter-proposals have the
intrinsic virtue of being objectively correct; i.e., of having accurately identified the
class basis of national trauma and in the process, having also brought into visibility the
deeper historical processes upon which rests the class phenomena itself. The struggling
bourgeoisie must do these things because imperial disaster, with its attendant wars and
social dislocations rips the fabric of legitimacy which veiled the obsolete social nature
of its class hegemony. These rather straightforward and compelling constraints are not
only the motivation for the development of reactionary ideology, they are also the
determinants of the parameters which define its form.
A relatively small set of characteristics occurs most frequently in comparative historical
discussions of fascist ideology, many of which treatments were cited earlier. These
include a false universalism, anticommunism, irrationalism, and totalitarianism. Each of
these main principles is well-articulated with and overlaps the others. The seeming
conceptual contradiction of a "limited universalism" is a reflection of the
actual contradiction of the reactionary class coalition and its ultimate program: the
combination of antagonistic classes under a single umbrella for purposes of
re-establishing or advancing previously existing social relations. The
"umbrella" in question usually has several stripes, but it is never
class-internationalist in perspective. Nationalism is ubiquitous in this respect, since
the problem of imperialist collapse has historically varied in its magnitude and points of
impact from society to society. As was suggested previously, it thus becomes possible to
treat the social problematic as a national one. However, the nation is never treated as
primarily a political economic unit with a specific history; rather, it is always modeled
as a form of Hobbsian whale: transcendent, towering above all other social divisions, and
immortal. This leads to an ideological emphasis on a mystified history which looks
backward to a glorious past which has only been derailed from its journey into the future
by evil, external elements and/or malefic traitors. It is in those very contexts where
nationality is weakest that the mystical nature of the nation is most emphasized. Further,
in such circumstances, the character of the national experience is distorted so that a
particular tradition which exists outside of the universal culture which capitalism brings
is brought to the fore as representative as the "true" roots of nationality.
There is not a single example from the period of classical fascism where such ideological
outcroppings do not hold. This aspect of reactionary ideology undergoes some modification
where the state is poorly developed or is distant from the everyday experiences of the
masses. In such circumstances, pseudo-national bases for unity outside of class lines
develop, often around concepts of peoplehood tied to "race," language, and/or a
particular, definitive, and exclusivistic tradition of worship. Regardless of the
particular blend of these elements, or of their relative primacy, reactionary ideologies
are all "universalistic" in that they ideologically unite objective class
antagonists under a transcendent rubric. This universalism is always limited in that it
adumbrates community quite sharply, and usually on the basis of precapitalist social
formations. In an obvious way, this is one of the dimensions of "reactionary"
ideology which makes it, by definition, reactionary.
The basis of belief in such ideas is always irrationalist in nature. This only makes sense
in that reactionary ideology is an objectively false definition of social reality. It thus
must depend on feeling, mystical insight, faith, experiences of mass catharsis, and
psychological insecurities of the type W. Reich (1972) discussed to validate it. The
well-known anti-intellectualism of reactionary ideology is a contained aspect of its
general irrationalism. Book-burning and the endless citation of segments of holy texts are
only the behavioral correlates of the essential obfuscation upon which reaction rests.
Anti-communism is perhaps the most obvious of the essential elements of reactionary
ideology; however, its ideological rational is multiple. First, communism rests on an
appeal to reason--it is materialist in its analysis and seeks an objective appraisal of
class interests. As such, it challenges the form as well as the content of reactionary
discourse. In this, it finds itself lumped by reactionaries with "bourgeois
liberalism, "cosmopolitanism," etc. Second, socialist and/or communist parties
form the basis of the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist coalitions which arise as polar
challenges to reaction at times of crisis. The motive for their ideological elimination is
therefore obvious. Third, communism is always internationalist in perspective; it argues
for a true universalism, one which is humanist rather than exclusivist. A characteristic
aspect of reactionary anti-communism is its use of epithets and mystification in the
portrayal of communism; it does not meet it on its own analytical grounds, but relies
instead on the negative form of its mystical appeals to de-legitimate the very
consideration of communist analysis. Thus, the "Red Menaces," "godless
Communism." "the Yellow Peril," and "Jewish Bolshevism" are
brought into being.
The fourth characteristic, totalitarianism, grows out of both the ideological means
and political ends of capitalist reaction. For all its being over-used to the point of
abuse, the concept still has validity in its original context. First, it reinforces the
belief in a supra-rational community by submerging the significance of the individual and
thus his/her interests as real historical beings. Needless to say, such interests are in
fact class interests when socially expressed. Sternhall (Laqueur, 1976:346) quotes
Mussolini to good effect on this:
'(T)he fascist view of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State, which stands for the conscience and the universal will of man as an historic entity ... Liberalism denied the State in the name of the individual, fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual.'
Such ideological outcroppings also reveal the essentially bourgeois nature of fascist/reactionary ideology; i.e., the view of the individual as a thing, an alienated object rather than a subject with species capacities and needs. Sternhell (Laqueur, 1976:346) amplifies on this by other references:
The individual was only seen in terms of the social function he fulfilled and his place in the community. For Gentile, 'the only individual who can ever be found' is 'the individual who exists as a specialized productive force,' and for Oswald Mosley 'real freedom' was 'economic freedom.'
Second, more pragmatically, totalitarianism is a political necessity in a time
of heightened class conflict, class-hegemonic challenges, and social disruption.
Totalitarianism as an ideological principle becomes the basis for the political
suppression of opposition and the regulation of social behavior in a time of
delegitimation and normative flux. Finally, totalitarianism may be seen as a necessary
principle for the restraint of self-awareness, reflexivity, and even conscience. As Orwell
made clear, it is often in the margins of the day, in moments of quiet or of intimate
conversation that revolutionary consciousness is born. By filling those margins and
moments, a liberated zone of some consequence is occupied.
Contemporary Reaction and the "New" Religious Right. It would be gross
understatement to describe as merely "many" the changes which have taken place
in imperialism since crisis erupted into war in 1914. However, underneath the
kaleidoscopic seethe of discrete historical events, fundamental transformations have been
few, if major, and the multitude of new phenomena produced by capitalist social relations
still tend to have been variations on old themes. This is due in no small degree to the
most astonishing fact of this century; i.e., that capitalism has survived at all. It has
done so as a result of the recapitulation at the level of national societies of the
processes which mark the internal history of each capitalist society: crisis,
"shake-out," and monopolism. That is, during the period following the expansion
of productive forces beyond the ability of existing social relations to contain them,
capitalist competition heightens, weaker competitors are destroyed and absorbed, and the
resulting reduction in and concentration of the number of operating units of capital
accumulation allows for a respite, however temporary, from the stagnation which is
capitalism's perpetual nemesis and final outcome. At the level of the world system,
however, this process is not considered to be "merely" an economic one; the
concept of "monopoly" is replaced by that of "hegemony," and the
shake-out which takes place is bloody. In any event, by 1945, hegemony had been
established within the imperialist system which was nearly total. Three important factors
formed the primary lineaments of the contemporary imperialist world. One was the
destruction of the European, Russian, and Japanese industrial bases; the second was the
coup-de-grace administered to non-American finance capital at Bretton Woods in 1944 (the
only non-Axis country which refused to sign this agreement besides the USSR was Argentina,
a most interesting fact given its perpetual invalidism as a capitalist society and its
long fascist tradition); and the third was the dissolution of the European and Japanese
empires and their reconstitution under the domination of American capital and military
power. For present purposes, only one aspect of this massive metamorphosis of imperialism
need be considered: the fact that imperialist crisis, when it reoccurs in the mid-1950's
and onward, is a universal crisis. That is, the emergence of American empire no more
solved the fundamental disorders of capitalism-cum-imperialism than the disappearance and
disincorporation of Studebaker-Packard into a larger structure solved the problem of
"non-production" in the American automobile industry. Although minor and
short-lived perturbations in the relative fates of capitalist societies are common in the
current period, capitalist disaster is no less universal now than it was in earlier times;
Germany and Japan are becoming just as ill as America and no amount of Idealistic
obfuscation about managerial style and/or national culture can obscure this. In fact, with
the existence of a single investment currency and a "locomotive-and-train"
relationship between American consumption and world production, the harmonies of crisis
are finely tuned: the ill health of any part of the imperialist system sickens all of it.
Thus, a primary characteristic determining or conditioning the fate of classes today is
the general inability of one advanced capitalist society to make permanent gains at the
expense of others. (This has an important effect on the relative strength of nationalism
as a component of reactionary ideology, about which more will be said.) Further, the
possibility of imperial expansion is foreclosed. The single, "trilateral" empire
has left no corner of the world untouched. In fact, its crises of
"underconsumption" and capitalist accumulation have become so conditioned by
this essential fact that history is treated to the spectacle of Pepsi-Cola and Coca-Cola
competing for franchises in socialist societies, and massive investment by finance capital
in the societies of "actually existing socialism." About this more will also be
said later. For the moment, however, three facts need to be reemphasized; after this an
analysis of the specific cases which originated this discussion can be pursued
expeditiously. First, imperialism has nowhere left to go in terms either of geographic
expansion or vertical integration; second, it is still a mode of capitalist production,
and thus is characterized by structural flaws leading to economic collapse; and third, the
hegemonic class of modern capitalism, the bourgeoisie of international finance capital,
still is not "decadent" in the sense that elitist theorists have used the word.
Put another way, finance capital not only shows no sign of class abdication, it seems to
be rejuvenating itself politically.
What then may be made of the seemingly unconnected movements led by Falwell, Begin,
Walesa, and Khomeini when they are viewed in the context of this analysis? First, it
should be understood that these examples are seen not as idiosyncratic but as part of a
broader phenomenon--however, the special characteristics of the histories of Poland,
Persia, Israel, and the United States tend to carve their experiences in bold relief.
Other manifestations, such as the increased xenophobia in France along with a parallel
renaissance of French Catholic reaction also could have been considered, as could the
cases of Argentina, Egypt, or China. Even it if is realized that the selection paradigm
for investigations of this kind is often arbitrary and dictated by current events, each of
the societies chosen as exemplary is either singular in importance or particularly
representative of a much larger aspect of the total process at issue. The important point
is that the fundamental questions would remain the same in any instance: what are the
operative class coalitions; in what way are they reactionary; how is that reaction tied to
imperial crisis; and how does the content of the reactionary mobilizing ideology conform
to the general model established here?
Iran. Iran, after the fall of the Pahlevi dynasty, is interesting in that it is
seen by its antagonists as a carrier of a "communicable" social disorder. That
is, it is often seen as a possible precursor of social movements with a potential
geographical range stretching from Saharan Africa to Pakistan. Of course, Iran has a long
and rich special history, and recent events haven't impoverished that record. Therefore,
it should be recognized that the present goal is not an unrealistic attempt to elaborate
on that which is already voluminous; rather, it is an attempt to see how easily a special
case can be matched to a general model.
In the Persian case, the mature operative class coalition is straightforward, albeit not
quite as obvious as it might seem at first. While almost all classes opposed the Shah, the
coalition which was finally to emerge was composed largely of precapitalist social sectors
and the urban masses recently displaced from the countryside. Various "liberal"
groupings emerged who were associated with foreign enterprise and the technical
intelligentsia, and much smaller and leftist groupings also sought to construct
alternative coalitions. They all failed, however. The connection between the
dissatisfaction of the bazaar, the mullahs, and the displaced rural population, and
imperialist crisis is clear and unambiguous. The regime of the Shah had largely served as
a two-day conduit for international finance capital. Capital flowed in rapidly to develop
the oil industry(an industry with an extremely high organic composition of capital) and
left just as rapidly to be absorbed by foreign investors directly or to be invested by the
regime itself in European and North American financial institutions and enterprises. Thus,
while Iran in the 1970's completed the economic integration into the world imperialist
system which had begun over a century ago, it did so as a vassal state with a classically
distorted imperial/ peripheral economy. As a result, the advance of imperialism left a
social wasteland in its wake, with almost all classes except for the functionaries of the
state and international capital decimated and with no alternative social destination. The
crisis Iran experienced was not in any obvious way one which was associated with a shift
in its relative position in the imperialist world system. However, the deformed social
structure which finally cracked in the late 1970's only existed and functioned in the
harsh way it did because of the demands of the imperialist center. The heedless creation
of a barbaric regime sitting on a one-legged economic stool took place largely because of
the insatiable need for cheap petroleum products to fuel the high energy, high profit
machine economies of the capitalist core. If imperialism had not been against the wall of
its own limits it seems likely that more "liberal" (farsighted?) elements in
finance capital would have prevailed as they did under Carter in southern Africa and in
Latin America. This is an excellent example of how the unifocal "Americentric,"
character of imperialism as it coalesced after 1945 produces a typical reactionary
politics different from that of imperialism in its earlier multi-focal period. Once more,
under contemporary imperial conditions, it is the international more so than the national
class contradictions that a society experiences which shape its class politics.
As to whether the class coalition which holds in Iran today is reactionary, little need be
said. The religious character of that reactionary ideology is the focus of interest. To be
sure, Persian nationalism is woven through the fabric of the ideology, but far more
prominent is the "Islamic fundamentalism" much feared by the geo-politicians.
The fact that the only organized power outside of the Shah's regime after a quarter
century of oppression was located in the mosque has a great deal to do with the Koranic
focus of Iranian reactionary ideology. However, the question needs to be raised of whether
any alternative mobilizing base was possible in Iran even had its history been different.
With a demographically insignificant proletariat of partially alien ethnic origin, a
displaced peasantry, and no domestic bourgeoisie independent of foreign capital and the
ruling dynasty, liberalism and internationalism were both foreclosed progressive options.
Reactionary ideology could not depend on the irrationalist nationalism of the flag any
more than could the German bourgeoisie albeit for different reasons. Whereas the German
state was a recent novelty, the origins of the Persian state were do distant in time and
so irrelevant to the present, that its appeal was limited in advance as a rallying cry.
Further, any appeal to the unique language of Iran and its independent history would
isolate it in its region at a time of great weakness and external threat. The Shah had
also tainted Persian nationalism by attaching his dynasty to the Aryan past.
"Race" was never an operative issue, because such pseudo-scientific notions had
never developed and diffused outside of the European cultural orbit. The only bond which
united the fragmented, dislocated, and predated Persian people was that of a common
religious belief system. If Iran were not to suffer partition or imperialist revival, that
single unifying character had to be emphasized to the maximum. Based as its tenets are on
the life-conditions of feudalistic and pastoralist experiences, the Koran became a useful
ideological tool which allowed for the resolution of Iran's dilemma of "Western"
imperial domination without threatening the class interests of its theocrats and remaining
landholders, which any class analysis of necessity had to do. Unlike the earlier situation
in the case of German or Italian imperialist adventurism, however, Iran is not a developed
capitalist society, nor can it soon move out of its materially distorted role in
world-economy. Thus, as powerful as its mobilizing ideology is at the moment, the regime
which promulgates it already shows chronic instability. Again unlike the situation in
Europe, there is no plausible program for material well-being which can be tied to the
existing irrationalist unifying base. Perhaps it is for this reason that the Koran is
repeatedly probed for references which will justify the socialism of oil, but not of land
and labor. The significance of this for the general model at issue will be considered at a
later point.
Poland. Because of its putative status as a socialist society, Poland's recent
troubles have led to analyses which gravitate around the question of pro- or
anti-Sovietism. With the limited and ambiguous exception of an analysis on the order of
Szkolny's (1981), this has been the theoretical fate of Poland's ills as, ironically, its
actual history has been a residue of its relation to Russia. The Russian issue today,
however, is the symptom of a larger problem and not the problem itself. The problem per se
is again that of imperialism as a world system and Poland's past and present place in it.
At the present time, the uneasy class coalition which operates around
"Solidarity" and KOR in Poland consists of wage laborers in Poland's export
industries, agricultural small-holders, and the clerics and secular intelligentsia
associated with the Catholic Church. Although the broadest based on the four coalitions
being considered here, it is in some ways the most ideologically inconsistent. Whether one
of these phenomena is an outcome of the other is largely irrelevant; the main prefatory
questions (not present in the Iranian case) are whether this class coalition combines
contradictory interests, whether it is reactionary, and the manner of its connection to
imperialist crisis.
The key economic contradiction of Polish society is that it is only partially socialist
and is also well within the imperialist orbit. While industry is socialized, agriculture
is largely in private hands. Poland experienced rapid reindustrialization after 1945, and
a further jump in urbanization and industrialization after 1956. This vast industrial
base, among the ten largest producers in the world, was only poorly fed by horse-drawn
feudal agricultural organization. Unable or unwilling to undertake the necessarily arduous
political task of collectivizing Poland's archaic farms, the less-than-orthodox ruling
party in Poland instead chose the path of yet greater industrial growth in the hope that
sufficient export goods could be produced to offset the need to import agricultural
commodities. As is well known, the source for the investment funds this plan required was
found in imperialist finance capital. Imperialist crisis becomes intertwined with Polish
politics at this point in two ways: first, were it not for the lack of suitable investment
opportunities in the capitalist core and in the already incorporated periphery, European
finance capital--and by proxy its American cognate--would have been unlikely to have
invested capital in a place where it had so little political control. This is the
phenomenon of exhausted opportunities for imperial expansion arising once again. Second,
as Szkolny (1981:12-13) correctly notes (in a rather slanted way), actual crisis occurred
simultaneously with the drop in capitalist import abilities and the heightened competition
for markets which goes along with such contraction. By 1976, Poland was unable to export
sufficient manufactured goods to subsidize its fossil agricultural base. The original
outlook of anti-government protest followed the consequent raising of agricultural prices.
Szkolny (1981:20) also reports the supporting fact that by 1979, Poland was using 92% of
its export earnings to service its debts to finance capital. In the face of this, however,
Polish politics stands itself on its head.
Rather than demanding the collectivization of agriculture, the three-quarters of the
population which labors for wages joins in the demand of small-holding peasantry for the
institutionalization of the latter's position in Polish society. Equally remarkable,
rather than demanding default on obligations to imperialism, Polish intellectuals seek
closer ties to the capitalist world. Further, the Catholic Church, which in return for a
cessation of state hostility cooperated in the legitimation of the ideologically absurd
and politically corrupt Gomulka regime, provides the rallying point around which
opposition to the Polish regime revolves. While a more unlikely coalition can hardly be
imagined, the means by which it comes to pass are less obscure.
It should be remembered that Poland's political history during the previous period of
imperialist crisis was unabashedly reactionary. The Pilsudski government, supported by a
virulently anti-Communist and anti-Semitic Catholic Church, provides the ideological
context out of which modern Poland emerges. Further, the eradication of the Jewish
population during World War II, the expulsion of ethnic Germans from East Prussia, and the
later exile in 1968 of the remaining cosmopolitan intelligentsia, leave Poland in the same
kind of political and ideological vacuum as Iran experienced. The only organized body
outside of the state was the Church, and when mass dissatisfaction with Poland's patchwork
socialism surfaced, the Church and the State faced a common dilemma. Any real satisfaction
of the demands of Polish workers would have meant the radical reform of Polish
agriculture. Any such reform would have meant the eradication of the core of support for
the Catholic Church. Similarly, an adequate program for social reform would have meant the
complete dissolution and reform of the so-called Polish Workers' Party and the extension
of socialism into the political process. Such democratization brings class radicalizations
at all levels, including the cultural, as the Chinese experience demonstrated. Thus, the
Catholic Church was forced into a dual strategy of edging Poland toward open anti-Russian
rebellion, while still maintaining the legitimacy of the pseudo-socialist regime with whom
it had collaborated. Out of such inconsistencies irrationalist ideologies are born. In
order to execute this strategy, it first had to establish control over the ideological
opposition to the regime, and then to transform proletarian demands into nationalist ones.
It did so by silently countenancing the purges of 1956 and 1968 and by encouraging the
growth of a radical Catholic intelligentsia in the same period. Szkolny (1981) provides a
brief but telling account of the delicate process that this involved. Such coups, however,
eradicate potential opposition, but they do not mobilize masses, even when events have
premobilized them. In accomplishing this, the Catholic Church used techniques which are
well-known aspects of classical reaction and which were also present in Iran--the mass
iconic rally which is the street seminar of fascism.
Guy DeBord (1970) in his "Society of the Spectacle" provides an extremely deep
analysis of how class interests are subordinated to false unities by massified public
experiences. In some ways his thesis parallels Reich's mass psychology, although it never
intersects with it. The world is quite familiar with the mobilizing effect of the
demonstrations in front of the American Embassy in Tehran, in which iconographic displays
were prominent. The Nuremburg rallies are equally well-known. Perhaps not surprisingly,
the demonstrations at Czestochowa and the display of the Black Madonna are portrayed not
as political acts but as expressions of piety. That which they did in fact was to
re-invigorate Polish nationalism in its Russophobic form, and make nationalist expression
religious in form. In terms of the general theses presented here, this clericalization of
nationalism is required where nationhood is insignificant or awkward for reaction, as in
Iran, or where it is politically irrelevant, as in Poland. As in the general model,
Poland's current crisis and that of the Polish proletariat is a result of its class
relationship to finance capital, more so than to its national/political relationship to
Russia. Yet, any attempt to solve this problem within a class context would mean the final
socialization of Poland, a course which the Catholic Church correctly foresees as its own
end. Thus, all the techniques and processes are deployed by which class analysis is
submerged and nationalism expressed in its most irrational form, allegiance to a
particular belief system. This is the most irrational form because it is based on no
material interest at all, merely a set of ideas which form mythic representations of a
mythic unity where only opposition exists. In the case of Poland, given its history, only
two dimensions of nationalism could exist--Russophobia and Catholicism. The first is on
one level irrelevant and on another impossible in practice; in this way Catholicism
becomes the only means to express the nationalism which itself obscures the class
contradictions of Poland. Were solidarity "only" a nationalistic movement, it
would still have found its way to the Black Madonna; it had nowhere else to go. However,
by its militant class motivation and organization, "Solidarity" became a threat
to the Polish Catholic Church and this had to be blunted or usurped. As a result, when
solidarity moves away from nationalism and toward class analysis, the Church admonishes it
to "social responsibility"; when it moves toward nationalism, it is sanctified
by the Church. In any case, Poland becomes one of the more interesting and elaborate
examples of how the erosion of the fact of nationality in the face of the actual existence
of imperialist social relations transforms the experience of capitalist crisis into a
religiously expressed nationalism. Israel under the Likud is equally instructive.
Israel. Where Poland has Czestochowa, Israel has Masada; for Katyn, there is the
Holocaust--both share Auschwitz; Poland frightens itself with Russia, Israelis confront
their Arab bogeymen. Poland is plagued by chronic food shortages, Israel has astronomical
inflation. The two peoples who shared a long and unhappy history together now share an
unhappy present separately.
The analogies between the two situations are many; the major thesis deployed here argues
that there should be. The common root of Iranian, Polish, and Israeli trouble is their
connection to imperialism; their common inability to resolve their problems arises from
their unwillingness and/or inability to confront this fact. For all these parallels,
however, the situations of the two societies are as fundamentally different as their roles
in the contemporary imperialist system. Whereas Poland's troubles arise largely from their
economic role in that system, Israel's arise from its geopolitical function. As the above
recitation suggests, a coalition of antagonistic classes is to be found in Israel as it is
in Poland, the coalition is reactionary, and it is mobilized around an irrationalist
nationalism growing out of a religious belief system. The particulars are as follows.
Although Israel was originally founded on the basis of a racist philosophy with its roots
in the same purulent Viennese soil as Nazism, until 1948 it was largely a homogeneous
colonialist movement of the dispossessed, similar to the Boer or Algerian colon variety.
At that time, with the replacement of British and French condominium in the Middle East by
its geographically distant American successor, the function of Israel in the imperialist
world system also changed: it became an important base for the extension of American
imperial power into the oil-rich region. At the same time, the migration and/or expulsion
from Palestine of large numbers of its native population along with the influx of large
numbers of "Oriental" Jews displaced from Arab lands changed the class
composition of Israeli society substantially. It began the long process of transformation
from a settler-colonial society to the sub-imperial regional power it now is. As was
noted, in the early years of settlement, the Zionist enclave was largely inhabited by
displaced Eastern European artisans, craft laborers, and intellectuals with a
nationalist/socialist ideological orientation. While maintaining the socialist principle
of common ownership of the means of production, it shared the easy European racism of the
time, seeing Arabs much the way Europeans viewed Native Americans: as sub-human
impedimenta to a manifest destiny. However, alongside this socialist Zionism there existed
another variant which was explicitly racist toward all non-Jews, and which viewed the
construction of any form of socialism as epiphenomenal to the assertion of the
"rightful" place of Jews in the world. This tendency was associated with
Vladimir Jabotinski and was unashamedly a negative dialectical counterpart to Nazism in
almost every respect. This Zionist tradition tended to draw its support from the urban
Jewish petite bourgeoisie and professionals of Eastern Europe, which class was relatively
privileged compared to the conditions of many of its co-religionists, but which was
relatively underprivileged compared to its Christian counterparts. Because of their social
status, relatively few Jews of this class migrated to Palestine prior to 1939. When
members of this class were Zionist, they oriented themselves more toward the parlor than
to the East. Only the most zealous of this tendency ended up in Israel, before or after
1939. Among them was Menachem Begin, who from the time of his migration onward represented
an explicitly capitalist, racist, and authoritarian brand of Zionism. As long as the
Jewish settlement in Palestine was largely composed of European Jews whose interest was
the creation of socialism for Jews, the Jabotinskyites were a minority tendency with no
significant political base. However, once Israel became an explicit extension of American
hegemonic power and once it became something akin to a caste society, Begin's position
began to improve rapidly. Within the context of already settled European Jews and a
subject Arab population exploited as cheap labor, Oriental Jewry had little opportunity to
move in Israeli society. It suffered high unemployment, social discrimination, poverty,
and in general provided little more than cannon fodder for the Israeli military and a
surplus population to be drawn upon when needed. The establishment of the Zionist state
was, in fact, an unmitigated disaster for this population segment, first having displaced
them from their homelands and then having given them no satisfactory role at their
destination other than to die in its wars. Oriental Jews seethed as a "social
problem" in Israel for many years; their relatively high birth rate accentuated this,
but as a result of it, in the long run they were to become the majority of the Jewish
population in Palestine.
When Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956 and Eisenhower aborted the Anglo-French
and Israeli onslaught that followed it, a process was set in motion which was to alter the
class politics of Israel permanently. At that point in time it became clear that Israel
was to be no more than a vassal state whose interests might be subordinated to those of
American-dominated international finance capital. It also became clear that the function
of Israel within the imperialist system was to blunt the thrust of Arab re-awakening and
to prevent the establishment of anti-imperial regimes "from the Nile to the
Euphrates." The details of this strategy and the tactics by which it was executed are
far beyond the scope of this discussion. The result of this new role for Israeli politics
was not.
The transformation of a marginal foreign intrusion in the Levant into a bristling garrison
state brought with it new internal relations in Israel as well. The grave limitation of
opportunity and the abandonment of even partially socialist social relations were among
these. As a result, the life-chances of the Oriental Jewish population became increasingly
bleak. By the middle 1950's, serious class conflict had begun to erupt around this issue.
Simultaneously, a militant resistance movement began to develop among the far-flung
Palestinian exiles. While this movement was scarcely a threat to Israel's existence, it
was proletarian internationalist in orientation and became the nucleus of class-based
organization and analysis wherever it arose. Once organized under the umbrella of the PLO,
it became a significant political threat to all the corrupt Arab regimes which had made
their separate deals with foreign capital. At this point something new began to occur.
Given the upheaval in Arab social structure of that time, and given the vital nature of
Arab oil to capitalist industrial society, and also given the close ties which began to
grow up between the USSR and some Arab societies, a confluence of interests began to
develop between Oriental Jews, Jewish fascists, and American finance capital. For finance
capital, the end of this road brought the proposed destruction of the Palestinians as a
"destabilizing" political force; for Oriental Jews, there lay new lands to
settle and a new population, subordinate even to themselves, to exploit. For fascist
mystics like Begin, there lay a giant step in the direction of a long-delayed Jewish
destiny. At the same time that this dynamic had been set in motion, a new wave of
immigration, small but influential, had begun to arrive in Israel from North America and
Europe. It was composed largely of partially unassimilated Orthodox Jews who were
themselves encountering the blocked opportunity structures of the declining capitalist
heartland. They found even more difficult situations in Israel. The obvious solution to
this problem was a devastating assault on and occupation of those areas contiguous to
Israel where an organized Palestinian presence still existed. The problem remained of
developing an adequate mobilizing ideology.
It should be noted that the Israeli situation is in some ways more analogous to the
classical mode of capitalist reaction than it is to that of Iran or Poland. This is due to
more than common roots in the rightist culture of fin-du-siecle Europe. As a colonial
society, Israel and much of its population did stand to make substantial gains by
territorial expansion. However, returning to the matter of conflict between imperial and
national interests, imperialism stood to gain only by the repeated battering of the
Palestinians, not by their further dispersal as a radicalizing influence in the Arab
World. Thus, the interests of imperialism and of Israel came more and more to be
contradictory. Israel was to bloody the Arabs and throw the Palestinians into disarray,
but it was not to do so in so complete a manner as to upset the whole imperial applecart
in the Middle East, as it almost did in 1973. Thus, the ideological task which faced
Jabotinskyite or "Revisionist" Zionism was to find an ideology which would
generate sufficient internal support for extended military occupations, new settlements,
and heavy external influence by the imperialist centers. Such an ideology began to gain
ground in Israel in the early 1970's.
Simple appeals to material interest seldom succeed as mobilizing ideas when those
interests remain unfulfilled. The promise of security which Zionist expansion made to the
Jewish population in Israel was not fulfilled. Promised economic gains did not
materialize. Isolation from the rest of the world increased. For those (mostly European)
Israeli classes with something to lose, the entire Zionist project began to seem
precarious. Many voted with their feet, emigrating to the imperialist core. Others began
to seek an accommodationist path, moving toward the idea of rapprochement with the
Palestinians. No such solution held any promise for the interests described earlier. How
then to mobilize those who would die and become impoverished for (sub-)Imperial Israel? In
a sense, the religious solution was the most natural for Israeli reaction from the outset,
both for obvious and subtle reasons.
A nation created by imperial fiat (Balfour and the United Nations) and with scarcely
thirty years of history is not going to endure constant war on the basis of tradition. A
nation which speaks an intentionally revived and imposed fossil language and which
disavows the former traditions of its people will not persevere on the basis of a common
culture. A nation composed of peoples from scores of lands will not struggle endlessly
because of an ever-receding catastrophe that befell the ancestors of less than half of its
population. Such resoluteness requires a myth of peoplehood which negates history and
common sense, which is based on faith and a mystical community, and which defies the
apparent and actual divisions of everyday life. Despite the prevailing atheism and/or
agnosticism of the majority of Israeli Jews, a mythic system was constructed around the
historical references of the Old Testament, around the experience of the holocaust, around
the hopelessness of Bar Kochba's Rebellion, and around the dream of manifest destiny. In
many ways, this reactionary ideology resembles the volkisch and Aryanist constructs of
Nazism. It is just as romantic, no less irrational, and equally as dangerous to those who
hold it. It rests, as do all the modern reactionary religious ideologies, in the false but
persistent belief in nationhood where nationality has been dissolved, peoplehood where
there is only humanity, and destiny where there is only the future. It is brought forth by
the impossible ideological contradiction of capitalism in its imperialist form: the
organization of politics by nation-states in the face of the organization of production by
classes. Indeed, this is the source of the romanticism, fatalism, and fanaticism
associated with all such ideological forms: the belief in that which is objectively
unbelievable.
The United States. For a number of reasons, the Israeli case is the proper prelude
to that of the United States. In a mechanistic sense, as a "sub-imperial" proxy
for American interests in the Levant and the Middle East as a whole, Israel should be
expected to recapitulate to some degree the internal structural forms of its generative
model. Less formalistically and at a phenomenologically more profound level, Israel shares
with the United States several salient social and historical characteristics: relatively
recent nation-formation, polyglot origins, a settler colonial past, and a history of
exploitation of ethnically distinctive wage-labor. The United States, to be sure, is
unique in its own formidable way: it is the primary hegemonic power of mature imperialism.
While this fact richly colors its present social dynamics, it also emphasizes another
contrary fact that ties it to the processes of the classical period of capitalist
reaction. That is, at one time it was but one of plural contenders for imperial hegemony.
As shall become evident, in conformity with the dialectical principles of transformation
and the interpretation of opposites, its great success also becomes its great failure.
This conundrum must await elaboration; for the moment, it should be understood that the
United States, as it emerged successfully from the earlier moment of imperialist crisis
(19141945), comes to represent the achievement of the goals of capitalist reaction: a
(temporarily) viable social, economic, and political structure in which class conflict is
negated and the accumulation of surplus value by means of the private ownership of the
means of production remains unimpeded. Paradoxically, the United States is unique in that
it is archetypical: it is the model toward which capitalist reaction strained upon
attaining its maturity. As in the drive toward monopoly, however, all aspire to it but
only one can achieve it.
On the basis of much earlier discussion, a number of assertions can be made: first, on the
basis of its imperial success, the United States was able to bring into being a
significant labor aristocracy; second, the decline of its old petite bourgeoisie was
cushioned, enough so that the decomposition of this class meshed fairly smoothly with the
emergence of the professional/managerial/technical new petite bourgeoisie to which so much
attention was earlier devoted. This overlap seems to have occurred in such a way that the
"old" class elided into the "new," as much of the literature on
American social "mobility" in the 1950's and 1960's suggests. Further, the new
petite bourgeoisie of the United States came to be the proportionally largest class of its
kind in the world, as occupational/demographic data from the other societies of the
trilateral metropole clearly indicate. It is also the largest class of its kind in terms
of absolute numbers. Prior to the time of the first post-World War II crisis of
"underconsumption," i.e., during the period 1945-1957 and for some time
thereafter, the centrality of the American economy to the world system of production,
consumption, and finance, led to a period of unparalleled prosperity and capital
accumulation. However, as was understood by Marx and Lenin, this very success in capital
accumulation negates itself in a crucial way.
Imperialist triumph has its costs, subtle as well as overt. Steak and butter cost a great
deal at the check-out counter; they also have hidden costs in the arteries. The explosion
of capital accumulation in the United States during its hegemonic heyday recreated the
ancient nemeses of capital-a rising organic composition with its concomitant decline in
the rate of profit and increase in the size of the surplus population, and the lack of
profitable investment opportunities in areas of "overdevelopment," i.e., at
home. If these problems seem familiar, they should. These are, of course, the very
problems which give impetus to the outward expansion of capitalism and its transformation
into imperialism. As was noted earlier, however, at some point there is nowhere left to go
that does not represent an absurdity of some kind or other. When Polish hams and
Mauritanian rope appear in K-Mart on "dollar days," that limit has been reached.
The Polish situation, where proletarians strike against a putatively socialist state which
is a massive debtor to finance capital, is but one of the not-very funny punch lines to
this historical jest. Given that one of the main aspects of imperialism is its attempt to
maintain prices and capital accumulation through export, the society which gains the
lion's share of the world-systems' liquid wealth must also consume its products; if parts
of that system are not to sink into depression. Were this to occur, the possibility of
proletarian revolution or counter-hegemonic revival in other core economies would become a
perpetual threat to the imperialist system and capitalist social relations as a whole.
Thus, poor trade balances, inflation, unequal tariffs, high borrowing,
deindustrialization, and the other chords of the familiar litany of current American
economic woes become ever more frequently heard. Once more, these were precisely the
problems which led to inter-imperialist conflict from 1850 onward. It is sometimes
difficult to comprehend that these are the wages of imperialist success, as American
workers looking to their Japanese and German counterparts of the 1960's and '70's learned.
Another part of the burden that falls to the hegemonic winner is the maintenance of that
very tool which itself produced hegemony--a massive standing military. The grave economic
and social effects of trillion-dollar expenditures on war need not be recounted here, nor
need the catastrophically delegitimating political consequences of imperial "police
actions" such as Korea or Viet Nam- This aspect of the problem of
"successful" imperialism also tends to expand over time: as the hegemonic domain
becomes ever more impacted in terms of investment, the need for vigilance and response
increases. Even if the dimensions of empire remain constant rather than diminishing, the
export of capital brings with it the concomitant export of capitalist contradictions,
primary among them being the necessary creation of the class which Marx and Engels
identified as capitalism's gravedigger: the proletariat. Once more, the creation of this
external proletariat brings with it "superexploitation" and utter degradation;
consequently, it also tends to bring class conflict and revolution in the imperialist
hinterland. Thus, for the labor aristocracy of the capitalist center, the question becomes
not merely one of guns or butter, but equally one of sons or butter. The problem which
then faces the ruling class of the capitalist heartland (which is simultaneously the
ruling class of the imperialist world system) is how to garner support for imperialism and
capitalist social relations in that which must be the worst of circumstances. The
constraints are indeed daunting: the situation is one where capitalist failure followed
quickly on the heels of heady success (cf., Blumberg, 1980), where all "normal"
(read "bourgeois") solutions have been tried and found wanting (high taxes and
low, tight money and loose, "detente" and confrontation, etc., ad infinitum),
and gravest of all, where the class coalition of imperialism must be preserved in the
actual face of its hereditary and potentially most dangerous class enemy: the declining
classes of its own societies of residence--classes which it brought into being itself. In
this it confronts the same problem which plagues the confused and/or malevolent
reactionary leaders of its Iranian and Polish victims and which troubles its reactionary
Israeli analogues. It should not be surprising that the solution which it finds is equally
similar.
As in the other cases considered here, reactionary ideology in the United States is
constrained by the requirement of plausibility; however, in the present instance, that
plausibility is further constrained by the special place of the United States in the
world-system. For the United States, the objective enemy of imperialism is in a very real
sense itself. That is, the conditions of imperialism create imperialism's problems. The
commonplace nature of this Marxist observation should not obscure its significance. While
Poland, Iran, and Israel all have immediate objects around which to focus fear and hatred,
the United States has only the Soviet Union.
While the significance of anti-Sovietism as a bulwark for American reaction
should not be underestimated, it provides only an antinomial object. Sufficient for the
"background level" of reactionary ideology necessary for the strategic defense
of imperialist interests, as was evident in Southwest Asia, Russophobia is insufficient
for the tasks of class mobilization during times of crisis on the periphery. However,
anti-communism is as much an indispensable part of reactionary mobilizing ideology as it
was in the capitalist core in the period of classical reaction, and for obvious reasons. A
positive component sometimes expressing itself as a sense of historical mission, an
expression of collective selfhood, or some combination of the two, is necessary to
overcome the palpable differences between antagonistic classes within a society. In
Poland, this has tended to center around reactionary concepts connoting
"Westernism," as it is expressed in the use of the Latin alphabet and the faith
of Rome. In Israel, the Biblical mission and a distorted sense of being "chosen"
are satisfactory, as is Koranic purity in Iran. Since the filling of the North American
continent was completed, however, concepts of "manifest destiny" have tended to
be consigned to the dustbin of history or treated as an embarrassing atavism, and for good
reason. With the end of territorial expansion, America's destiny has become ideologically
more metaphysical than it is manifest. The polyglot origins of the society and the extreme
social heterogeneity which characterizes it, as well as its youth as a completed nation,
have presented it with problems which classical reaction in Europe did not share. Mom is
no substitute for the Black Madonna, baseball is no substitute for Marianne, apple pie for
the faded Roman Empire, nor Chevrolets for Barbarossa. Simply put, it is only in the
formative capitalist societies of Europe (and the societies of Asia) that a fairly
homogeneous nationality has lasted long enough to be able to stimulate a sufficient level
to sustain the terrible losses of imperial war. For this reason, American political and
military strategy in both World Wars to no small degree were structured around the
minimization of casualties.
While racism has been a potent reactionary ideological force in American society,
it has served to fracture class coalitions rather than cement them, as it does in Israel
or as it did in Germany. While the utility of racist ideology has served to propagate the
exploitability of some national minorities, it is certainly inadequate to the tasks of
global empire. This was reflected in America's time of hegemonic struggle when racist
mobilizing propaganda was heavily skewed against the Japanese rather than the Germans or
Italians. It is difficult to mount a strong campaign against the alleged intrinsic evil of
an enemy when the commanding general of one's own military is of the same descent as his
opponents in the field. This was again shown in the hysterical tone of the anti-Chinese
ideological campaigns of the 1950's and 1960's, when an inconsequential threat was
elevated to the level of that presented by the Soviet Union. The failure of
anti-Orientalism was palpable in each of America's imperial wars, hegemonic and imperial,
with the exception of the early genocidal campaign in the Philippines. In Japan, Korea,
and Southeast Asia, American troops collaborated with the native civilian population in
ways that would have been inconceivable to the SS in Poland or the Japanese in Manchuria.
Racism seems to require long and close contact before it can be used as a mobilizing force
for imperial warfare.
Although racism, nationalism, and anti-Communism have always been significant parts of
reactionary ideology in the United States, they have never had the
positive appeal that the current of Messianic, charismatic, and missionistic Christianity
has had. Its usefulness to reaction has gone beyond the mere breadth of its social
appeal. By claiming to be above politics and by disclaiming party partisanship, it has
been easily deployed to suit the hegemonic cause of the moment. By emphasizing the
individualism of Protestant faith, it has been able to produce an anticommunism not of
intellect or of interest, but rather one in which materialism becomes a threat to personal
identity. The profound success of this ideational mechanism is revealed by its persistent
use in times of capitalist crisis, while ostensibly having no economic content at all.
Anti-evolutionism, creationism, and fundamentalist liberalism are long aspects of American
reactionary ideology which have long puzzled external observers. Only when the uniquely
successful personalization of faith by American Protestantism is understood can its
equally tremendous significance for anti-Communism be comprehended. Similarly, the role of
"low" Protestant denomination in perpetuating racism institutionally and
ideologically has been subtle and only revealed in times of direct ethnic confrontation,
as in the struggle of Americans of African descent in the 1950's and 1960's. The Baptist
and Mormon denominations are particularly instructive cases in this regard.
At a time when the economic requirements and consequences of late imperialist production
had tremendous destructive impact on the reproductive structures of American society, the
organs of religious ideology used their permeation of the personal sphere to become major
conduits for reactionary thought. The tremendous onslaught on sexual egalitarianism and
liberty which the churches in America mounted was crucial in limiting the emancipatory
political consequences of emerging gender equivalence in the labor marketplace. Thus, the
economic demands of an increasingly deindustrialized and "unproductive" economy
could be met while the social consequences of the changes and disruptions it entailed
could be contained and deflected. By taking up this burden, religious institutions also
preserved an important part of the legitimating ideology of the bourgeois state, the
preservation of personal liberty. At a time when the need for mobilization for imperial
reinvigoration was becoming increasingly evident, however, such functions were less
significant than a more subtle and general ideological process: the recreation of a
national identity.
A famous bit of Nazi propaganda about America used during World War II was that America
was a nation with no future because it was a nation with no past. As with all good
propaganda, this statement contains grains of truth. However, it did not, nor could it,
address itself to the hegemonic future of America. At a time when hegemony has come full
circle until it resembles a horrible economic addiction, necessary to the metabolic life
of America but destroying it as it is achieved, at a time when an already fragile
nationality composed of hundreds of peoples divided along dimensions of origin, religion,
and region is threatened, and at a time when class conflict is fueled by the precipitous
decline of all classes, privileged, pampered, and cushioned as they may have been,
American imperialism has created prerevolutionary and revolutionary conditions throughout
its periphery. Central America, southern Africa, the Middle East are all aflame. Yet, as
the necessity for the mobilization of the old coalition of rising and falling classes
increases, they are found to be eating quiche and pizza, tacos and eggrolls. They drive
about in Honda.,, and Toyotas, fueled by Venezuelan oil, wearing clothes made in China and
Hungary, listening to radios from Japan broadcast music made by declasse Britons. If the
erosion of nationhood is anywhere evident, it is always most so in the heart of empire. As
long as cosmopolitanism is confined to members of the ruling class who know where their
interests lie--and to their attendant intelligentsia who know where their interests
lie--it is no threat to the life of the empire. When confusion about national identity
permeates the masses of the center however, graduates of Harvard begin to remember the
inability of Rome to field a native army and the result of imperial mercenaries. It is at
such moments that the bourgeois courtship with "native" reaction begins, as it
did in Weimar. In fact, this is a romance with itself, in that it is its own control over
the production and dissemination of ideas which prevent the promulgation of realistic
analyses of the world in a manner compatible with the intellectual development of the
masses which it also determines.
Shining through the obscuring fog of the minutiae of events,
organizations, and personalities which constitute the religious Right in America is an
ominous fact. Today, the most widely distributed and frequently heard definition of the
American experience, historical and contemporary, is that assertion which claims that
America is intrinsically a "Christian" society. Not "democratic," not
"just," not "civilized, "not "happy," not
"progressive," --not anything else but "Christian." This cant is
repeated in the White House and it is spread endlessly (but "neutrally") through
the communications media. What does this "Christianity" mean when it emanates
from Falwell and from the electronic pulpits of "Christian" television networks,
thirty-six wholly owned "Christian" television stations, thirteen hundred
"Christian" radio stations, and thousands of cottage-industry churches? What
does it mean to the forty-five million self-defined fundamentalists and their fifty
million fellow travelers of the airwaves (cf. Crawford, 1980:159161)? Does it mean love
and mercy? Does it mean the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount? 1 Does it mean a specific ritual or style of worship? Does it mean
church attendance? By and large, the answer to all of these questions is "no."
it does mean a hazy self-affiliation with an undefined community of believers whose
conviction is as certain as its object is unclear. It means Protestant Christianity as
Niebuhr or Tillich meant it in precisely the same way that Begin means the prophetic
tradition or Buber when he speaks of Judaism, and as much so as the Polish devotees of
Pilsudski mean the Catholicism of Merton or Roncalli. The "faith" itself has as
much theological content as Aryanism had scientific validity, and in practice, for many of
its adherents, its content ends up about the same: subordination or the individual to the
capitalist state, subordination of the world to imperialist designs, anti-Communism,
anti-humanism, joyful suffering, and wherever possible, the suppression of the personal
liberties which individual human beings have won through class struggle during the long
travail of history. Where the flag of jingoists and the know-nothing nihilists once stood
now stands the cross of Gerald L. K. Smith. Whether it can prevail or not is at this point
in time a matter still in the balance. In the context of Beganism, the revival of the Ku
Klux Klan, and the rehabilitation of the Vietnamese debacle through Dolchstoss
theories and the shedding of maudlin crocodile tears over the plight of the former
imperial soldiers, the question becomes more than an academic one for the people of the
world as well as the citizens of the United States.
Concluding Observations: In his "Towards a Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right:
Introduction," Marx penned some of his most eloquent words. Among them were these:
The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusions about their condition is a demand to give up a condition that requires illusion. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism of the valley of tears whose halo is religion.
The object of this investigation has been to articulate the halo with the
valley of tears and the illusions with the conditions requiring illusion. Toward this end,
it was argued that imperialism must still be understood to be the political-economic
fundament upon which rests the totality of human social relations in the advanced stage of
the capitalist mode of production. Imperialism presents itself as a solution to the
inexorable internal contradictions of capitalist social relations in the generative
societies of the capitalist system. As such, it represents capitalism in its most
predatory mode and as the ultimate expression of nationalism. Ultimately, however, the
social order which capitalist nationalism creates becomes self-negating: it creates a
system which is socially, economically, culturally, and politically international. This,
as Lenin understood, was the dialectic of the modern world. As the fact of nations
declined, the need on the part of the ruling class of capitalist society for nationalism
increased. As the nation ceased to be the largest unit of production, the political
interests of nations came to rest on ever less "rational" grounds. Once
Argentinean beef came to feed European urbanites, or Irish woolens to clothe the gauchos,
the community of interests of the producing classes no longer stopped at the borders drawn
by kings and their wars. Yet, as imperialism passed through its many shake-outs and
imperial mergers, it created, destroyed, maintained, and altered classes of individuals
appropriate to its own processes. At that point in time where the entire capitalist world
is united under a single imperial umbrella, the decline of the system means the decline of
all its parts. Temporary advantages fade in the general tendency toward collapse. Under
such conditions, imperialism (and the class which created it) either perishes quietly, or
it rouses itself to renewed action. The only action which is possible is increased
exploitation on the periphery. In one or more of numerous ways, this results in increased
resistance at the point of exploitation and ultimately, the class wars of humanity spread
and become more desperate. Yet, those class wars would be no contest were they merely one
class against all others. The control over the means of production and dissemination of
ideas which comes with class rule allows for ideological manipulation for the purpose of
forming class alliances of objectively antagonistic classes. In a scientific sense, these
class alliances are irrational.
Based on the erosion of nationality as an economic fact, its continued existence as a
political fact requires an ideology which unites antagonistic classes within the same
society against classes with objectively similar interests elsewhere. In a world of
polyglot cultures, international markets, and highly "rational" means-ends
calculations concerning international investment, the orienting principles for national
chauvinist ideology tend toward the mystical. When and where the mysticisms of
"race" and birthplace become inadequate for the mobilization of reactionary
class coalitions, the essential mystification of human existence, religion, remains the
sole or primary base for reactionary ideology. Although nationalistic religious ideology
tends to subsume its somewhat discredited analogues, they usually are found together. The
durability and vigor of religion directed to reactionary ends may be seen to be derived
from several of its defining characteristics: of all the mystical pseudo-communities it is
the most mystical-it consists of a community of belief in the essentially ineffable and
the numinous, it cleaves social collectivities largely on the basis of ideas subjectively
held and individually proclaimed, and its promises of relief from the "heartless
world" of existence are by their nature unenforceable. Further, religion has
associated with it methods of introducing into humans the structure of belief in the
unverifiable. This mental structure can then be mobilized in the interest of ends other
than the spiritual. Submergence of the individual in mass events of great emotion, the
display of evocative icons, the indoctrination of children, and the claim that that which
is material is epiphenomenal and that which is non-phenomenal is material all lay down
psychological patterns which are easily manipulated when the proper stimuli are provided
in appropriate circumstances. For these and other reasons considered in the body of this
paper, religion emerges to be the dominant form of reactionary ideology in the current
period. Given its actual and potential power, then, the question becomes one of whether it
is sufficiently strong to propagate universally disastrous social relations to the point
where the logic of imperialism ends in omnicide, a mode of "barbarism" the
dimensions of which Rosa Luxemburg would have found unimaginable. This question is, at its
root, a political one. Thus, it is responsive to self-reflective human action and
therefore not amenable to prophecy; it is a problem to be overcome and not an equation to
be solved. The progressive alternative to the rejuvenated irrationalism which is sweeping
the world today is already in motion. Although the old poison of reaction is in a new
bottle, the same antidote exists today as has existed for a century. Most simply, it is
the practical knowledge that human beings create human relations. This is so whether they
are aware of the process of creation or not. Further, humans must be provided with the
means to understand that the relations which exist between humans are conditioned by a
universal species character and not by a universal character devoid of species. The
rendering of these insights into meaningful terms has always been the only legitimate goal
for those humane individuals who have access to the process by which ideas are socially
produced and disseminated. If this challenge is not met, then those who have failed to
face it will simply suffer the same fate as those they have failed.
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Footnotes