Abram Deborin 1936
Author: Abram Deborin
Written: 1936
First published: 1936 in Protiv fashistskogo mrakovesia i demagogii, pp. 47-112
Source: https://rusneb.ru/
Translated by: Anton P.
Fascism, says Dimitrov, is an open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital. This definition emphasizes that in the face of the threat of a proletarian revolution, the bourgeoisie chooses from among its midst the most militant, most reactionary groups to defend the capitalist system and the private property of capital magnates by means of terror. Fascism, like any bourgeois party, is called upon to defend the interests of the bourgeoisie as a class, but it focuses on the interests of the most imperialist, reactionary and counter-revolutionary section of the big financial, industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie.
In the conditions of the outbreak of the deepest economic crisis, comrade Dimitrov said in his report at the 7th Congress of the Comintern, a sharp aggravation of the general crisis of capitalism that revolutionarized the working masses, fascism launched a broad offensive. The ruling bourgeoisie is increasingly looking for salvation in fascism in order to carry out exceptional predatory measures against the working people, prepare a predatory imperialist war, attack the Soviet Union, enslave and divide China, and on the basis of all this prevention of revolution. Imperialist circles are trying to shift the entire burden of the crisis onto the shoulders of the working people. For this they need fascism. They are trying to solve the problem of the markets by enslaving weak peoples, increasing colonial oppression and redivision of the world through war. For this they need fascism. They strive to outstrip the growth of the forces of the revolution by routing the revolutionary movement of workers and peasants and by attacking them militarily. The Soviet Union is the bulwark of the world proletariat. Against her they need fascism. (Dimitrov, Speech at the Seventh Congress of the Comintern)
Fascism appears everywhere as a counter-revolutionary party aiming to suppress the impending revolution. The general crisis of capitalism, deepened by the economic crisis, exacerbating class contradictions to an unprecedented degree, is the reason for the process of accelerated polarization of classes, in which the party of extreme reaction acts as the initiator in the struggle against the party of revolution. At the same time, the intermediate middle parties are washed out, pushed into the background or unified, because in these conditions we are talking about a struggle for life and death. For the bourgeoisie it is a question of saving its own system by the methods of bloody terror and the most reactionary violence. For the working class, it is about the violent overthrow of the power of capital, for there is no other way. Reactionary violence against the working people can only be broken by the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
One of the features of fascism is that, being the party of the big bourgeoisie in terms of its class content, it also uses for its counter-revolutionary purposes the broad strata of the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, where it seeks and finds, under certain conditions, a mass social base. Fascism everywhere demagogically uses to win over the masses their anti-capitalist sentiments, generated by the upheavals of capitalism, the crisis of the capitalist system, which caused an unprecedented impoverishment and ruin of the working masses. The petty-bourgeois strata are at a crossroads. On the one hand, they have already become disillusioned with capitalism, on the other hand, they dream of preserving private property.
As a result of the treacherous policy of social democracy, these conditions create a favorable environment for fascist demagoguery, for whetting the instincts of the small proprietor, for the “anti-capitalist” phraseology of the fascists, for deceiving the masses with false counter-revolutionary theories of a specifically German “socialism”, etc. the small bourgeoisie succumbs to the influence of this deceitful fascist phraseology. Fascist demagogy is successful when the proletariat, having been split by the policy of Social Democracy, has not yet managed to win hegemony over the petty bourgeoisie. Social democracy sowed illusions among the masses with its “theories” of the peaceful growth of capitalism into socialism through bourgeois democracy, theories of “organized capitalism”, etc. These theories of social democracy, propaganda of nationalism, etc. lull the masses and render them incapable of resisting the fascist offensive.
The social demagogy of the fascists draws its “arguments” against Marxism partly from the social democratic theories of organized capitalism, class cooperation, the nationalist theories of Otto Bauer, Karl Renner, Karl Kautsky, Kunow, from the ideas of ethical socialism of Eduard Bernstein, Karl Vorlaender, etc., who accused Marxism of vulgar materialism, overestimation of economics, underestimation of ethics and similar “ideal factors”. The Social Democratic parties everywhere, in all countries, not only did not fight against capitalism, but in every possible way defended its foundations, paving the way for fascism. The communist parties did not manage to win the majority of the working class to their side either in Italy or in Germany before the fascists came to power.
Fascism came to power in Italy, Poland, Germany, Austria, Finland and other countries thanks to the policy of splitting the ranks of the working class by social democracy. Fascism comes to power thanks to the social democratic policy of agreement with the bourgeoisie and struggle against the revolutionary proletariat, a policy that weakens the proletariat and undermines its hegemony over the petty bourgeoisie. However, ...the victory of fascism in Germany, said Comrade Stalin, must be viewed not only as a sign of the weakness of the working class and the result of the betrayal of the working class by Social Democracy, which cleared the way for fascism. It should be viewed at the same time as a sign of the weakness of the bourgeoisie, as a sign that the bourgeoisie is no longer able to rule by the old methods of parliamentarism and bourgeois democracy, which is why it is forced to resort to terrorist methods of government in domestic politics, as a sign that it is no more able to find a way out of the current situation on the basis of a peaceful foreign policy, which is why it is forced to resort to the policy of war. Fascism is an open terrorist dictatorship of finance capital, declaring a civil war on the proletariat under the guise of a false preaching of the nation’s unity and solidarity, under the guise of “abolishing the class struggle.” German fascism, says Comrade Dimitrov, acts as a shock fist for the international counter-revolution, as the main instigator of the imperialist war, as the instigator of a crusade against the Soviet Union, the great fatherland of the working people of the whole world.
Fascism is the worst enemy of the stronghold of the international revolution, the Soviet Union, whose mere existence undermines the foundations of capitalism and threatens the power of the fascists in the first place. But contradictions are inevitable between the fascists of different countries, since they express the conflicting interests of the imperialists in the struggle for the redivision of the world. Fascism is carrying out a bloody terror against the proletariat and working people under the banner of a false sermon about the unity and solidarity of the nation, about the “inclusion” of the proletariat into a single nation. Fascism declared a civil war to the proletariat to the sound of demagogic phrases about the “destruction” of the class struggle. Fascism is striving everywhere to unleash a war, is conducting broad ideological preparations for war. The ideological cover in the hands of the fascists is cannibalistic nationalism and bestial chauvinism. The ideology of nationalism and chauvinism is designed to distract the broad working people from their true interests, from the holy class war with their “national” executioners and exploiters. To conquer new markets, the bourgeoisie wants to throw tens of millions of people against each other for mutual extermination, and the ideology of nationalism serves precisely this goal of the big capitalists.
The ideology of fascism is a cover and justification of the terrorist dictatorship of the most rapacious, imperialist elements of the bourgeoisie by the methods of national and social demagogy. In his historic report at the 7th Congress of the Comintern, Comrade Dimitrov dwelt specifically on the question of the ideological struggle against fascism: One of the weakest aspects of the anti-fascist struggle of our parties, he said, is that they do not react sufficiently and in a timely manner to the demagogy of fascism and continue to disregard the issues of the struggle against fascist ideology. Many comrades did not believe that such a reactionary variety of bourgeois ideology as the ideology of fascism, which in its absurdity often reaches the point of extravagance, was generally capable of gaining mass influence. It was a big mistake. The decay of capitalism, which has gone far, penetrates to the very core of its ideology and culture, and the desperate situation of the broad masses of the people makes certain strata of them susceptible to infection by the ideological scum of this decay.
Fascism is a special form of bourgeois reaction under the guise of national and social demagogy. Without the latter, fascism could never have become a mass party. This circumstance explains the specific form and special character of fascist ideology. Fascism, being a party of extreme reaction, is compelled to envelop the reactionary content, which is the essence of its program and activities, in a seemingly anti-capitalist form in order to win over the masses and be able to use them in the interests of big business. The ideology of fascism is the ideology of big business in the era of the collapse of capitalist production relations and the extreme aggravation of the class contradictions of capitalism and the struggle between the two systems. These conditions put a special stamp on fascist ideology. Socialism is a tremendous force. The world proletariat sees the only way out of capitalist slavery in the proletarian dictatorship, in the building of a socialist society. The Soviet Union is a guiding star for all working people of the world in their struggle for a better future. And fascism strives to use the sympathy of the masses for socialism and hatred of capitalism with the help of anti-capitalist phraseology in order to save and strengthen capitalism. This is precisely the specific feature of fascism, which deliberately deceives the masses and speculates on socialism as a “salable commodity.”
But how could it happen that the broad non-proletarian working masses, exploited by big capital, allowed themselves to be carried away by their worst enemies, the fascists? It is beyond the scope of our article to describe in detail all the conditions that determined the conquest of the broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie by fascism. Let us only emphasize that as a result of the war and defeat of Germany, as a result of inflation and the economic crisis, the broad masses of the middle strata were plunged into appalling poverty and despair; they saw in the Social Democratic Party the party of the working class. But by all its policy, Social Democracy engendered the distrust of the petty-bourgeois masses in the power of the proletariat; it paved the way for the victory of fascism. For the fascists, in order to fight Marxism, it was certainly advantageous not to make a distinction between social democratic politicians and communists, who waged a fierce struggle against the treacherous policies of the social democratic leadership.
Theorists of social democracy have long preached the idea of the unity of the nation. There is a strong national solidarity between the working class and the bourgeoisie, Belgian Social-Democrat Henri de Man wrote. At the Goerlitz Party Congress (1921), German Social Democracy openly opposed the class struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialist revolution, in the name of the unity and integrity of the nation. The Social Democratic Party at that time based its policy on the cooperation of classes, which was the starting point for fascist demagoguery. The leaders of Social Democracy pursued a policy of agreement with the bourgeoisie, that is, a policy of subordinating the interests of the proletariat to the interests of the bourgeoisie.
On August 4, 1914, Social Democracy revealed itself openly as a social-chauvinist party. Ideologically, the policy of social democracy was based on the fact that the fate of the working class is closely linked with the fate of the nation. Fascism “developed” a number of elements of social democratic ideology, using them to deceive the masses. At the Kiel Party Congress (1927), Hilferding presented his theory of organized capitalism, according to which the revival of capitalism, shaken by the consequences of the world war, is necessary to build socialism. The transition to socialism, from the point of view of the social-democratic theorists, takes place within the framework of capitalism. Socialism, wrote Nelting, grows daily and hourly from capitalism. Other representatives of social democracy like Carl Severing long ago proclaimed the principle of brotherly unity and solidarity of all estates.
The Social Democrats, as ideologists of “economic democracy”, put forward the idea of joint management of the economy by workers’ trade unions and unions of entrepreneurs under the supreme control of the state. The idea of “economic democracy” thus paved the way for fascist demagoguery, the fascist ideas of solidarity between the interests of workers and capitalists in order to implement the idea of “the common good”, etc. Disappointed in the Social Democratic Party, the masses of the prosperous petty bourgeoisie hoped to satisfy their needs with sides of the new, national “socialist” party, which promised to all strata of the petty bourgeoisie the satisfaction of their demands, salvation from crisis, impoverishment and ruin.
German Social Democracy, with its inherent management methods, could only hold out for a certain period of time. After the onset of the world economic crisis, the class contradictions in the country intensified, and the Communist Party, which put forward on its banner the idea of the proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the working class, became enormously stronger. In order to prevent the proletarian revolution and to defeat the revolutionary proletarian organizations, the bourgeoisie considered it necessary to abandon bourgeois democracy and go over to an open bloody dictatorship. Under these conditions, the Social Democratic Party, backed by millions of workers who were not at all inclined to the spirit of party leaders and who were ready to fight together with the communist workers against bourgeois reaction in the name of socialism, lost its role as the main support of the bourgeoisie. Power passed into the hands of the fascist party, which, thanks to national and social demagogy, managed to become the most massive party of the German bourgeoisie. It gained power thanks to its bloody terror and especially rampant demagoguery, promising the peasants land and the abolition of interest slavery, promising artisans orders, promising small traders the elimination of competition from department stores, promising workers high wages and the elimination of unemployment. At the same time, the fascists promised finance capital and landowners the defeat of the revolutionary labor movement, the enslavement of the proletariat and the working peasantry. The masses of the working people were deceived by the social demagogy of fascism. It must be said that social demagogy in a new form continues to play a significant role among the fascists to this day. If in their “scientific and respectable” publications Hitler and Rosenberg allow themselves the luxury of appearing as outspoken reactionaries, then in fascist newspapers (Voelkischer Beobachter and others) and magazines social demagogy occupies a “place of honor.” But even in individual publications intended for the masses, “socialist” and anti-capitalist phraseology plays an enormous role.
Take a book recently published with the blessing of Herr Goebbels, German Socialists at Work. Goebbels, in his introduction to this book, writes: What did the previous governments, claiming to represent the working class and fighting for the rights of the poor, have done to put their beautiful phrases into practice? We have proved to the nation and to the whole world that we really strive to create a true national community (Volksgemeinschaft) and that our national socialist movement is not without reason bearing the honorary name of the socialist party.[1] As we know, Mr. Goebbels plays, according to the division of labor between the fascist leaders, the role of the “leftist”, taking care of the interests of the working people. Using the word “socialism” at every step, this demagogue cleverly substitutes for it the opposite concept, namely nationalism. In another article of the book already cited by us, the fascist author unnoticed for himself reveals the secret of the “commitment” of the German fascists to socialism. He writes: The great confidence of the workers so late won over to the side of National Socialism (lie, the workers were not won over by fascism. - A. D.) rests on socialism. Socialism is a living conviction of the masses who have renounced all other values: the nation, the army and the church. Socialism is the last hope left to the masses; they cling to this last hope with all their might. Thus, the fascists frankly admit that since socialism is the last hope of the masses, in order to win them over to their side, it is necessary to hide behind “socialism”. But since in reality the fascists are the worst enemies of the working people and of their last hope, of socialism, the art of demagogues is reduced to the ability to combine the verbal “acceptance” of socialism with a fierce struggle against it. And this can be achieved in the ideological sphere by demagogy and falsification of socialism. It turns out that socialism does not at all represent a definite socio-economic system, but only the moral self-affirmation of the people.
There is no socialist freedom without political freedom, writes the fascist publicist Schwarzmann-Berk. This slogan unites, in the opinion of the fascists, workers and soldiers. “German socialism,” write all fascist demagogues, was born in the trenches. And its meaning is that the unity of the nation, which was born of the war and which, incidentally, was proclaimed by Social Democracy, is the essence of “German socialism.” Thus, fascist “socialism” is inextricably linked with the idea of aggression, with the idea of revenge and a new imperialist war.
The social demagogy of the fascists is extremely vivid in their interpretation of the concept of labor. The fascists demagogically declare labor to be a sacred affair, hoping by this to influence the workers, the laboring peasantry and artisans accordingly. But, declaring labor sacred under capitalism, putting forward this thesis for demagogic purposes, the fascists immediately begin to explain the concept of labor, and then it turns out that the workers are Thyssen, Krupp, and Adolf Hitler. There is no contradiction between the concepts of capital and labor, writes the fascist Berger. We are all German workers of the German people, from the president to the last worker. So, Thyssen and Krupp are just as great “workers” as the workers of their factories. Labor embraces everything, labor is life. And from this point of view, we must imbue the work of a German entrepreneur with responsibility and dignity, he writes. From the point of view of the fascists, Thyssen, Krupp, Benz are great commanders like Napoleon, and Goethe, Schiller and Adolf Hitler are employers. All the troubles of Germany in the past were allegedly the source of Marxism, which, they say, imposed on the German people concepts alien to it. The fascists’ demagogic “explanations” of such concepts as socialism, labor, entrepreneur, workers, capitalism, etc., will lead to the complete triumph of the “German spirit”. For example, it is enough to clarify the concept of labor or worker in such a sense that the Thyssens and Krupps turn out to be the same proletarians as the workers they employ, and any class struggle will end, the fascist demagogues argue.
The meaning of labor is the formation of things, Robert Ley declares, keeping silent about the exploitation of wage labor by capital. People who completely go into their work are said to forget to eat and drink. This is the simple conviction and knowledge of the people. But this is true. The more I immerse myself in my mission, the less I think about food, about matters of the stomach. Of course, you also need to eat, but only insofar as it is necessary to maintain the body ... Our task will be to satisfy hunger, but we will not allow the stomach to become our master. This is the meaning of our work in the Party and on the workers’ front. Thus, the fascist “leader” of the workers’ front declares quite openly that the worker must live from hand to mouth. But the fascists would not be fascists if they did not simultaneously strive to clothe their central task of strangling the workers with the bony hand of hunger in the name of the interests of the Krupps and Thyssens in a demagogic form, in grandiloquent phrases about “German socialism”, which should hide from the workers the true meaning of the fascist aspirations.
During the three years of its dictatorship, fascism did nothing to fulfill its promises to the petty bourgeois masses. The old demagoguery of boundless promises that National “Socialism” made to the masses, was replaced by a new form of demagoguery that avoids painstakingly concrete promises. Demagoguery in its new form most of all flaunts the word socialism in order to stupefy the masses with verbal chatter, deceive them, prevent them from understanding the real meaning of the fascist dictatorship. The fascists, and in particular the “leader of the peasant front” Richard Walter Darre, are developing extensively demagogy about the implementation of “peasant socialism” in Hitlerite Germany. Moreover, at the Reich congress of peasants held in Goslar in mid-November 1935, which was attended by peasant delegates from some foreign states, Darre delivered a speech on the inter-ethnic mission of the peasantry, calling on the peasants to fight communism and Bolshevism. Monsieur Darre talked a lot about the peasant nature, about the importance of the peasantry in general and about the responsibilities that it has. It goes without saying that Monsieur Darre talked a lot about the peace that the peasantry needs. But these were the usual phrases. They had to hide the true meaning of his speech, which showed hatred for the Soviet Union and the communist movement. I am sure, he said, that I will express the opinion of all those present if I say that there is no more serious task than the struggle against Bolshevism. The tactics of the united workers’ front and the anti-fascist popular front, pursued by the Comintern, evoke truly bestial fear among the fascists. This fact proves once again the absolute correctness of the decisions adopted by the VII Congress of the Comintern. The German and Italian fascists openly admit the danger of a united front for them. The Italian fascist newspaper Osservatore Romano in a special article sounded the alarm about the new tactics of the Comintern, relying on the slanderous anti-Soviet speeches at the Nuremberg Congress of German national socialists by the master of lies and demagoguery, Mr. Goebbels.
Exposing fascist social demagogy is one of the most important tasks for us. It is necessary to rip off the mask from the face of fascism and show the masses its reactionary essence, its true nature, goals and aspirations as the worst enemy of the working masses. Showing the reactionary essence of fascism is the main task of our further analysis of the ideology of fascism.
All varieties of German fascism speculate with phrases about the need to merge nationalism with “socialism.” Here we have a deliberately calculated plan of deceiving the working masses, a fraudulent exploitation of the anti-capitalist sentiments of the broad masses in the field of ideology for their further enslavement. Therefore, the entire ideology of fascism is internally false, contradictory, eclectic, because fascism does not dare to tell the truth, it is forced to constantly conduct double “Italian” bookkeeping.
Unable to hold on to its own strength, the bourgeoisie needs mass support. And to deceive the masses, it builds ideological concepts that, at least verbally, apparently, to some extent, reflected their moods and aspirations. The German has not the slightest idea of how, Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, how the people must be deceived in order to win them over to his side. This art of deception is an organic part, we would say, the foundation of all ideological constructions and political programs of fascism. The fact that the bourgeoisie is compelled to juggle the word “socialism”, which is dangerous to it, like clowns dancing on a tightrope, testifies to its weakness and the powerful strength of genuine socialism. The bourgeoisie, in its struggle against socialism, cannot but reckon with the existence of our socialist system, which is for all the workers and working people of the world the social system that they strive to implement in their own country. To influence the masses, the fascists today cannot do without phrases about “socialism.” The quackery and deceit of phrases about “national socialism”, etc., are not difficult to detect. Oswald Spengler, for example, considered it possible to save German capitalism and implement the world hegemony of Germany, provided that the conservative party unites with the proletariat under the leadership of a “socialist” monarch. Spengler understood “socialism” as nothing more than imperialism and the Prussian barracks. Like the Italian leader of nationalism Corradini, he declared the German people a proletariat (poor Krupp. - A. D.). Spengler declared the Western peoples, especially the British, to be the bourgeoisie and called on the German workers to march, led by the German proletarians (the Krupps and Thyssens) against the bourgeois peoples of other countries.
Fascist juggling magicians contrive to reduce “socialism” to wild racial chauvinism and anti-Semitism. After that, they do not have any difficulty in identifying this “socialism” of theirs with imperialism and even with the police. The main “theoretician” of German fascism, Rosenberg, directly, without any further speculation, speaks of the police as a socialist institution.[2] All varieties of fascism, from Catholic to Hitlerite, are forced one way or another in order to deceive the masses to present them with completely false phrases about their “socialism”. This fact also reveals one of the specific features of the struggle of the imperialist bourgeoisie against the proletariat. Fascism comes to power in the conditions of a general crisis of capitalism, from which the workers, all working people, the peasantry, the urban petty bourgeoisie, employees, etc. suffer, first of all, by giving them all kinds of promises of “socialist” transformations. But the real goal of fascism boils down to saving and strengthening the positions of big business. Hence the inner falsity of the ideology of fascism.
German fascism places the propaganda of racism and anti-Semitism at the center of its propaganda of chauvinism. The racial ideology of German fascism treats all people who do not belong to the Aryan Nordic Germanic race as bastards, people of an inferior breed, as Untermenschen. This “ideology” is called upon to substantiate the domination of German imperialism over all the peoples of the earth. After all, German imperialism claims world hegemony. Whoever truly strives with all his heart for the victory of pacifism must by all means strive for the conquest of the world by the Germans, wrote Hitler. And further: In fact, a pacifist-humane idea is good when a superior person preliminarily conquers and subjugates the world to such an extent that he becomes the only master of the earth.[3] Mr. Hitler, according to his phrases, only cares about lofty ideals, about eternal values, about the triumph and prosperity of the great culture. And in the name of this culture and eternal values, he demands the conversion into slavery and the subordination of all the peoples of the earth to German imperialism. Just as a cultured man needs animals, so he also needs slaves. Cultures are born and flourish only where the Aryan, as a man of a higher breed, gets the opportunity to use people of a lower breed as slaves. The only Aryans left on earth are, as you know, the Germans, and then only their core, for all the others have long since become bastards. Even the first apostle of fascism, Spengler, with the help of the most complex “learned” sophistry, tried to prove to the whole world that the British and French, not to mention other peoples, had lost all creative powers, which are designed to save the world from destruction with a guarantee of at least hundreds of years. Thus, racial “theory” should serve as a justification, on the one hand, for the oppression of the working people, and on the other, for the conquest of new colonies by German imperialism.
The German fascists claim that the Germans embody a special breed of supermen, called by God himself to rule over foreign peoples, over the whole world. However, one should never lose sight of the fact that the German workers and toiling masses, on the one hand, and the capitalists, large landowners, bankers, etc., on the other hand, belong, according to the “concept” of fascism, to different races. If the Nordic race refers to the happy tycoons of capital, then the working and laboring masses belong to the so-called Oestlich (Eastern) race, inferior in comparison with the higher, northern race. The fascist philosopher Max Wundt, relying, on the one hand, on racial theorists of fascism like Hans F. K. Guenther, and on the other, on the philosophy of Plato, writes that pure contemplation and clear thinking are inherent in the Nordic race. It is called to be a leader, for it possesses the highest wisdom, is distinguished by heroism, courage and a sense of justice, that is, genuine political virtue; only it alone is capable of assigning to each class its proper place in society.[4] The imperialist war was fought by the Nordic people, while the revolution after the war was carried out by the people of the lower, Eastern race, that is, the workers. The Nordic race and its soul are by their very nature committed to idealism, while the rest of the races, that is, the working and laboring masses, to a materialistic worldview. The German fascists treat the German workers and toiling masses as Red subhumans who must be ruthlessly destroyed when the interests of capital demand it. The ideological justification for this predatory policy towards the working people is the fascist “theory” of the usefulness and inferiority of man. Nature, writes the fascist Meyer, does not tolerate anything defective. Nature strives to preserve strong individuals and their highest productivity. Inadequate and rotten goo has no right to exist in nature.[5]. These aristocratic laws of nature must be implemented in human society. It is necessary to follow these laws, which require ruthless annihilation of everything weak and inferior, because they are not only biological laws, but a moral duty, a categorical imperative. The ideal of the Anglo-French enlightenment and Marxist communism, writes Meyer, are pure humanity and the eternal peace of peoples, the equality of people and races. But this, he says, contradicts all the laws of nature and morality. They are unaware of the existence of a natural law that prescribes the struggle for existence; the meaning of this law is that only the best individuals and only communities of the best, that is, the best peoples, have a right to exist, Nature does not reckon with the groundless ideals of humanists and pacifists. She raises her sword and destroys inferior individuals. In essence, the state should act in exactly the same way, and yet the inferior elements now even claim to be helped by the state. Thus, the working and laboring masses are qualified as inferior people for the very fact that they are doomed to poverty and unemployment, and the bourgeoisie, exploiting and oppressing them, refers by racial “theory” to the best and wisest elements of the nation.
Racial ideology is therefore in the hands of the German fascists the ideology of justifying the exploitation, slavery and oppression of the working masses as “inferior” people. On the other hand, the same racial ideology serves as their tool of mass mobilization for military campaigns, in order to justify the colonial policy, and so forth. The forerunners of modern fascism, Friedrich Nietzsche, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Julius Langbehn, and many others preached the inequality of races and people physically and spiritually. Nietzsche argued that the masses are a crowd, a herd as he says, belonging to a lower race, in contrast to the aristocracy, which is a higher race. Mixing the blood of the masters with the blood of the slaves, the lower classes, leads to a lowering of the type of person and to the generation of democratic and socialist ideas and movements. Racial ideology in the era of industrial capitalism was not popular among the bourgeoisie, since the liberal bourgeoisie then stood on the basis of the idea of formal equality of people, nations and even races inherited from the bourgeois revolution. Of course, this did not in the least prevent the bourgeoisie of the great-power nations from oppressing the peoples of the colonial and semi-colonial countries. In the era of imperialism, and especially at the present stage of the crisis of the capitalist system, the fascist bourgeoisie finds in racial ideology those “ideas” that are more adapted to defend its interests: the idea of inequality of people, inequality of nations and races. Langbehn already defended and substantiated the thesis according to which there is a qualitative difference between people of different ranks.
Modern fascists have borrowed all their wisdom from the reactionary writers of the past. If we turn to the writings of Hitler and Rosenberg, these main pillars of national “socialism”, we will be convinced of the exceptional squalor and poverty of their ideas. Parasitism in the field of ideology is under the muddy reflection of the parasitic character of the imperialist bourgeoisie. Hitler portrays the state as a living organism of the race, whose task is to preserve and develop the inclinations of “abilities” inherent in the race. However, within the limits of the race itself, Hitler hastens to isolate its valuable “core”. This core, in turn, splits into two parts. One part ensures the preservation of the physical life of the race, the other contributes to its spiritual development. The latter constitute the most “noble” part of the people, which at the same time is the most noble part of all mankind. It goes without saying that the most “noble part” of the nation and humanity, according to the views of Hitler and his associates, is the aristocracy of capital.
Racial ideology should serve as a tool for the ideological mobilization of the broad masses for militaristic, imperialist goals, and the same ideology serves to substantiate and justify the rule of the big bourgeoisie, the aristocracy of capital, under the guise of the rule of the best heads. In the first case, the fascists are forced to speak of the entire race (Germanic, of course) as the highest among all others, as a race of masters (Herrenrasse), in the second case, the race of masters is reduced to the aristocracy of the race itself, to an aristocratic minority. The worldview, writes Hitler, which seeks to abandon the democratic idea of the masses to give the land to the best people, that is, to higher people, should logically also follow that aristocratic principle within this people and provide leadership and maximum influence among this people for the best heads ... By this it stands not on the idea of the majority, but on the idea of personality.
Marxism, says Hitler himself, proceeds from the mass, its significance and role, while the mass, he says, acts destructively on culture, economy and politics. Of course, the assertion of the fascists that Marxism denies the role and significance of the individual in general is a gross falsehood. But Marxism really puts the interests of the proletariat and the interests of the working people – the interests of the overwhelming majority of the people in every country – at the center of its world outlook and its practical aspirations. The fascists, on the other hand, defend the interests of an insignificant minority of exploiters, who are elevated to the rank of outstanding heads, talented leaders, organizers and leaders. The idea of inequality of people, which is a deduction from the racial principle preached by the fascists, should, in their opinion, be taken as the basis of the economic, political and cultural life of the people. This is required to deny parliamentarism, the so-called “freedoms” of bourgeois democracy. Liberalism, Rosenberg wrote, recognized freedom: freedom of movement, freedom of trade, parliamentarism, the emancipation of women, equality of people and sexes, etc. It sinned by this against the laws of nature ... The German idea requires ... authority, a type-forming force, restrictions, training, autarchy, protection of racial character, recognition of the eternal polarity of the sexes. Hitler also quite frankly proves that both in economic life and in the state, the “principle of the masses” must be radically eradicated. Everywhere the principle of the aristocratic personality must be implemented, in contrast to the Marxist principle of the mass and the rule of the majority. Both the economy and the state should be built on the model of the Prussian army.
This is actually the true and ultimate goal of German fascism. According to Hitler, the principle that once made the Prussian army a wonderful instrument of the German people should form the basis of the fascist state. This principle says: each leader should have authority in relation to those below him and responsibility to those above him. As for Hitler himself as a leader by the grace of God, he, naturally, is not responsible to anyone, if not to count God and his own conscience, Hitler. The state in Germany became Hitlsr’s fiefdom, and philosophers of law, lawyers, publicists, in a word, a whole army of scribblers earn their bread by justifying the thesis: the state is Hitler. Germany is now simply referred to as “the state of Adolf Hitler.” Of course, Hitler is the sign of the firm of Krupp, Thyssen and other tycoons of capital, which, incidentally, should include Hitler himself, who, as we know, is a large shareholder in a publishing trust that rakes in millions.
The leader is the living embodiment of the nation and the state, he is a national hero, writes for example the “philosopher” Beck: When we were trying to shape our life according to the formulas of Marxist democracy, he continues, we could not come to this idea of a German national state. As for civil and political rights, their “gift” is conditioned by the recognition of fascism, the recognition of the “state of Adolf Hitler”. Anyone who is hostile to the fascists who call themselves the German nation, that is, who professes the ideas of internationalism, who feels connected with other peoples, is deprived of political rights, declares the fascist Rebding, commenting on the relevant point of the program of the National Socialist party. One can hardly find more stupid arguments against Marxism than those of the racialists. So, a certain Sturz proves that if Bolshevism and communism even turned out to be an acceptable economic, state and cultural form for the peoples of Russia, then they are not at all suitable for the Aryan Germans. The racial difference between the two peoples makes it quite probable that what is good for some is far from good for others. Aryan blood does not accept Bolshevism.
With such incantations, fascism wants to save itself from the threat of the proletarian revolution, from communism, which in the form of the German Communist Party is fighting against the fascist dictatorship, creating a united anti-fascist front to overthrow the bloody fascist dictatorship. The fascists slander the Soviet Union even when some of them are forced to admit the successes of the Land of Soviets with a gnash of teeth. However, the history of the Soviet Union, so short in terms of historical proportions, is living evidence that a people freed from exploitation and slavery, under the leadership of the Marxist-Leninist party, is building on the basis of the critical development of all the inheritance inherited from the past, an entirely new culture, a new world. Marxism sees the task of socialism in leading the working people onto the road of independent creation of a new life (Lenin). Before the victorious proletariat, said Lenin at the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets, the land that has now become the property of the whole people has opened up, and it will be able to organize new production and consumption on socialist principles. Previously, the entire human mind, all its genius created only in order to give some all the benefits of technology and culture, and to deprive others of the most necessary things, enlightenment and development. Now all the wonders of technology, all the achievements of culture will become the property of the whole people, and henceforth the human mind and genius will never be turned into means of violence, into means of exploitation. We know this, and is it not worth working in the name of this greatest historical task, not worth giving all your strength? And the working people will accomplish this titanic historical work, for in them lies the dormant great forces of revolution, rebirth and renewal. Under the leadership of the party and the leader of our Soviet people, Comrade Stalin, our great Soviet Union proved to the world that it is practically carrying out the work of liberating the creative abilities and talents inherent in the masses for building a new culture, which has now blossomed in full bloom on Soviet soil. In his excellent speech on Ways of Ukrainian Soviet Literature at the plenum of the board of the Union of Soviet Writers of Ukraine, Comrade Postyshev had every right to say that a new feature of the soul of a Soviet person is a craving for creativity, for creative work and that it was born in front of our eyes, a new, socialist society develops and is more and more filled with strength, health, culture, beauty of life.
The fascists, these true gravediggers of culture, now “argue” not for the impossibility of the Bolsheviks leading the country’s economic life (this card is played less and less, which is extremely important, because this circumstance testifies to our strength and the weakening of the front of our enemies), but from the incompatibility of socialism with “Aryan spirit”, with the racial nature of the Germans. And this, if I may say so, argumentation is designed for complete fools, because it already too transparently covers the interests of capital. As for the inability of Marxism to build a new culture, then this “argument”, which has now become such a popular commodity among the Nazis, is also smashed to smithereens by life. One has only to compare the current fascist “culture” with the true flourishing of Soviet culture, so that the most backward elements are convinced that fascism is the enemy of culture and socialism its greatest defender.
Marxism is declared a Jewish world outlook. Pogrom, Black-Hundred anti-Semitism serves as a weapon of the ideological struggle against Marxism, and against the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Anti-Semitism served as a lightning rod in the hands of the Tsarist secret police in acute periods of the revolutionary struggle. The German fascists resort to this tried and tested means to save capitalism, to divert the attention of the masses from their true oppressors and to divert their hatred of their oppressors into anti-Semitic channels. If there is exploitation, then the Jews are to blame, the fascists insist demagogically, for the Aryans, that is, the German imperialists, have never dealt with this matter. This is alien to their pure blood and their Aryan outlook, according to which the Aryan never cared about personal interests, but always only about the interests of the nation. The anti-Semitism of the fascist formation teaches that capitalism, liberalism, parliamentarism, communism, Marxism, Bolshevism are the products of Jewry, that all these institutions and teachings are alien to true Aryans. This circumstance, however, does not prevent Mr. Hitler from immediately asserting that the Jews are generally incapable of any kind of creativity, that all their ideas are borrowed from other peoples. The Jews lack idealism, an idealistic outlook, which is, they say, the basis of all culture. The Jewish intellect is destructive. The Jew destroys everything, but creates nothing. Jews are monopolists in trade and banking (as if there were no German merchants and bankers at all). The Jews exploit the workers and all the working masses (the Krupps and Thyssens sacrifice everything for the good of the people and exploit no one) since the overthrow of the monarchy. But this is still not enough, the Jewish capitalists, who raised the burghers against feudalism, after their fault created a class of workers, use the latter, organize them, raise them to revolt to strengthen their world domination. Thus, by fighting against its class enemies, the working class actually works for the benefit of Jewish capital.
This delirium of the fascist executioners pursues a single class goal: to divert the attention of the masses by means of anti-Semitic demagogy from the real perpetrators of their suffering. The Jewish capitalists form, together with the German capitalists, including here Messrs. Hitler, Goering, Rosenberg, etc., one warm company. After all, it is a fact that the Jewish banker Mendelssohn was granted the title of honorary Aryan, that a number of Jewish bankers supported and still support the fascist party and the fascist regime. And the Jewish poor, the petty bourgeoisie, or representatives of the free professions, etc., are declared by the fascists to be responsible for all the misfortunes of the working masses. Under the guise of fighting Jewry as a race alien to the Aryan race, in fact, a bestial struggle is being waged against the working class in the name of defending capitalism. Anti-Semitism is, in the hands of German fascism, a means of diverting the masses from the class struggle against capital. The fascist press announces that Jewry and Marxism are one and the same. Fascism is fighting the workers’ movement under the banner of the fight against Jewry. They seek in anti-Semitism a justification for the bestial terror against the working class, a means tested by the Russian Black Hundreds and Tsarism. Depicting Bolshevism as a Jewish doctrine, fascism seeks to direct the petty-bourgeois masses against communism, against the USSR, preparing a war against our great socialist homeland. The struggle against the Jewish Bolshevization of the world, Hitler cries hysterically, requires a clear position in relation to Soviet Russia.
German fascism uses racial ideology not only within Germany. The German fascists are straining every effort to organize the German elements in all countries to create a strong “Aryan” fist everywhere in the struggle against other peoples as superior and inferior. For this purpose, a special organization called Volksbund fur das Deutschtum im Auslande has been created, which has in various countries 500 regional and local groups preaching the ideas of Pan-Germanism, engaged in espionage and working in favor of the idea of world domination of the “superior race”, that is, the German imperialists. The Third Reich, according to the plan of the Nazis, should be a powerful state in the center of Europe. For this purpose, the fascists set as their immediate task the annexation to Germany, in addition to Austria, of Holland with its Malay colonial empire, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, a significant part of Belgium (Flanders, Brabant, etc.), Switzerland, Alsace, Lorraine and French Flanders, parts of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia (Bohemia for example), parts of Denmark, Poland, etc. At the same time, wild propaganda is being conducted against the Soviet Union and communism.
Dorothy Woodman’s work Fascism Prepares War has quite rightly emphasized that Goebbels, as minister of propaganda with the slogan of the struggle against the communist danger, seeks to divert public attention from the genuine pan-Germanist goals of German imperialism. The German fascists are preparing their main blow against the Soviet Union and France. To this end, the peoples of the USSR are declared Mongoloids, the French are mestizos, and the Negroes and all colonial peoples in general are declared not people, but animals that can and should simply be destroyed: this is what is called the alphabet of the Aryan world outlook. The program of the war of the German fascists against the Soviet Union is reduced to nothing less than the conquest of almost the entire European part of the Union. At the congress of the People’s Union of Foreign Germans, held in June 1935 in Konigsberg, the question of the colonization of our Union was discussed. To justify this slogan, the fascists cite the following argument: From time immemorial the Germans ruled over the Oder and Vistula, in the space from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea. East Prussia, where a hasty and intensified military development is being carried out, should serve as a military base, a springboard for an attack – with the assistance of Poland, of course – on the Soviet Union.
Modern fascist Germany is feverishly preparing for war. Fascism is war, it is militarism, it is a bloody dictatorship within the country and the desire to exercise military hegemony over the whole world. In the war the fascist bourgeoisie sees for itself a way out of the crisis that Germany is now experiencing most acutely. To prepare and conduct it, fascism mobilizes forces, carries out unparalleled robbery of the working people. German industry is engaged in the manufacture of military equipment: airplanes, fighter planes, tanks, warships, all kinds of poisonous gases, in a word, all imaginable weapons of extermination of people. The superior race, shamelessly bragging to the whole world that it alone is the bearer of honor and conscience, is preparing a war in which biology and chemistry must play a huge role. The famous fascist military writer Professor Banse writes in his book Wehrwissenschaft: Biological warfare is a natural weapon for unarmed and disarmed peoples. We cannot blame them for the fact that they will once fight against gross violence by such means and destroy the state that oppresses them with the help of purely scientific methods. For this reason alone, the League of Nations has banned the use of biological control agents. But when it comes to the existence of the state and the people, then this people are allowed all means to overcome and defeat an excellent adversary.[6] What are the goals pursued by biological warfare? To this question, the same Banse (Banse is not the only writer who preaches biological and chemical warfare, in Germany, there is already a whole literature on this issue) gives the following answer: Water contamination (in the enemy, of course) with typhoid bacilli, fighting with the help of those infected with plague and cholera rats, which are sent by whole armies to an enemy country, etc. One might perhaps think that we are talking here about purely theoretical assumptions. But a number of research institutes, led by the Robert Koch Institute are busy theoretically and practically preparing biological warfare, which has as its task the complete extermination of the enemy’s civilian population. Therefore, it is natural that those countries that are not interested in war and for whom German fascism poses a threat see no other way out to curb the beast but the conclusion of pacts of mutual assistance.
Is it necessary to add to all that has been said that not only labor camps for workers (Arbeitsdienstlager), but also sports organizations, schools, universities, political educational institutions, etc., are nothing more than schools of military education. In his bookMein Kampf Hitler sharply criticized the organization of education and upbringing, demanding the maximum reduction of general education subjects and the expansion of military knowledge at the expense of them. All citizens of the country, from children to old people, should receive a soldier’s upbringing and education. The citizens of fascist Germany are now called the political soldiers of Adolf Hitler. The Prussian-soldier education system is considered the highest creation of the German spirit. German fascism believes that militancy is the main feature of the Germanic race. The German-Catholic philosopher Max Scheler has already argued that there is a fundamental difference between German militarism and the militarism of other peoples. Germany, he wrote, is indeed a militaristic state. But Prussian militarism is the expression of a people who places honor over utility, the power of the whole over the interests of individual groups and classes, struggle and work over the pleasantness of life, happiness and tranquility. In a word, German militarism is, he implies, a product of racial nature, it is militarism out of deep conviction, while French militarism, for example, is rough militarism, utilitarian militarism that puts utility above honor, etc. race, constituting, as it were, a part of its being. These views also characterize modern German fascism, for which war is the highest reality and the highest value. Not only the official representatives of the so-called national “socialist” party, but also many German scientists, philosophers and priests of both religions in every possible way praise the war as the highest revelation of the deity. Military science (Wehrwissenschaft) is declared national philosophy and ethics in Germany. War is a glandular bath of purification, Banze declares.
But let us hear how the representatives of the clergy, the ministers of the Christian church, glorify the war. The program of activities of German Christians, published in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, says that they will fight against all modern false teachings of Bolshevism and non-Christian pacifism. In their sermons, the priests portray war as the most sacred and great revelation through which God sends us light. The Sermon on the Mount, as interpreted by the fascist priests, is nothing more than an order for the army. The whole new testament is full in their interpretation of battle slogans and “heroic” motives. Christ is a warrior and a hero. Each line of the new covenant is portrayed as a call to fight enemies. Thus, the church does not lag behind the people of “science” in preaching war, being an integral part of the mobilization plan of the fascist bourgeoisie. It would not be an exaggeration to say that all of Germany is now an armed camp. German fascism is ready at the right moment to plunge the world into the most terrible, most destructive and brutal war that the world has ever seen, a war in which the fascists promise to exterminate civilians, including children, women and the elderly. This is the program of the fascists. Such is their, if one may say so, Aryan world outlook.
But the fascists are fundamentally wrong in their calculations. The war will surely unleash a revolution and call into question the very existence of capitalism in a number of countries, as was the case during the first imperialist war. As early as January 1934, Comrade Stalin subjected to analysis all sorts of plans for organizing a war that were maturing in the circles of bourgeois politicians. To the address of the German fascists, he said the following: Still others think that the war should be organized by the superior race, say, the German race, against the inferior race, first of all, against the Slavs, that only such a war can give a way out, since the higher race is called upon to impregnate the lower one and rule over it. Let us assume that this strange theory, which is as far from science as heaven is from earth, let us assume that this strange theory has been translated into practice. What can come of this? It is known that ancient Rome looked at the ancestors of today’s Germans and French in the same way as the representatives of the superior race look today at the Slavic tribes. It is known that ancient Rome treated them as a lower race, as barbarians destined to be in eternal submission to the higher race of great Rome, moreover, it can be said, ancient Rome had some basis for this, which is impossible to say about the representatives of the current superior race. (Thunderous applause.) And what came of this? It turned out that the non-Romans, that is, all barbarians, united against a common enemy and overthrew Rome with a thunderbolt. The question is: where is the guarantee that the claims of the representatives of the current superior race will not lead to the same disastrous results? Where is the guarantee that the fascist politicians in Berlin will be more fortunate than the old and tried conquerors in Rome? Wouldn’t it be more correct to assume the opposite?
The national demagogy of fascism exploits the heroic past of the people and the national feelings of the broad working masses in order to oppress the nation, enslave it. But nationalism, as one of the speakers rightly said at the Paris Congress for the Defense of Culture from Fascism, is the enemy of the truly national. The VII Congress of the Communist International paid great attention to both the national question and the question of the protection of culture. Bearing in mind, says the resolution on Comrade Dimitrov’s report, that the main, most dangerous form of fascist ideology is chauvinism, it is necessary to reveal to the masses that the fascist bourgeoisie, under the pretext of protecting national interests, is pursuing its selfish class policy of oppression and exploitation of its own people, as well as the robbery and enslavement of other peoples. It is necessary to show that the working class, fighting against all kinds of bondage and national oppression, is the only true fighter for national freedom and the independence of the people ... Being implacable and principled opponents of bourgeois nationalism in all its varieties, the communists are by no means supporters of national nihilism, a disdain for the fate of their own people. Only communists are the legitimate heirs of all the best, revolutionary, heroic that exists in the history of every people and every nation.
The suppression of the proletariat is carried out by fascism under the flag of its inclusion in the unified nation and in the so-called corporate-estate state. Ideologically, the Hitlerites trump that the state is not an end in itself, as in Hegel, but only a means, an instrument for the preservation of the nation or the core of the race. National Socialism, writes Hitler, sees in the state in principle only a means to an end and understands this goal as the preservation of the racial existence of people. Hence, in no case does it believe in the equality of races, but recognizes, along with their difference, their highest or lowest value and therefore feels obliged, according to the eternal will governing the universe, to contribute to the victory of the best, the strongest and the subordination of the worst and the weakest. We readily believe that the state is not an end in itself for the fascists, but an instrument of the terrorist dictatorship of the class, of which they are a party. All talk about idealism, racism and nationalism is just phraseology that covers up the economic and political interests of the big bourgeoisie.
As a panacea for all the evils of the class struggle, the fascists, in addition to direct terror, murder and other measures of violence against the working masses, put forward the idea of a strong, authoritarian, “total” state based on the estate principle. A whole literature has been created by the fascists on the question of estates, which are to “replace” classes. It is enough to read the books of the fascists Spann, Heinrich, Hitler and others to get an idea of the methods of enslaving the working class that the fascists invented to overcome the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. In an effort to disarm the working class, the Nazis put forward the thesis of the need to restore the unity of the nation on the basis of a professional, estate system. The fascist Schultz, foaming at his mouth, proves the harm of the idea of class struggle, which weakens and destroys the unity and integrity of the nation and workshops, mechanical collectives – classes – and that it thus gave rise to a “restless mass”, which, moreover, uses its “freedom” unwisely. Freedom, writes Weippert, for example, is unthinkable without authority. Rank always means boundary and dependence. Self-restraint is characteristic of the hierarchical concept of freedom, while freedom in the Marxist understanding means arbitrariness and unbridledness.[7] In a hierarchical system, the fascists say, politics is not everyone’s business citizens, but only a special layer or class. Without a sharp distinction between the leaders and the led, between the ruling and the ruled, the estate state cannot be realized. But, on the other hand, without the estate system, it is impossible to stop the process of self-destruction that Western European society is going through.[8] In order to save capitalism in this way, it is necessary to take the working class in an iron corset, reduce it to a state of complete lack of rights and put it in slavish submission to the upper class, the capitalists. The fascists are following this path, and in their trumped-up language it means the destruction of classes and capitalism.
But before turning to exposing this charlatan idea of abolishing classes without abolishing bourgeois private property, let us familiarize ourselves at least briefly with the argumentation of the fascists. The National Socialist trade unions, writes Hitler, are not the organ of the class struggle, but the organ of representation of the professions. The National Socialist state does not know any classes, but only – politically – citizens with equal rights and, accordingly, also with equal responsibilities; and along with citizens, the National Socialist state recognizes subjects who are completely deprived of rights in the state-political relation. The workers are, of course, disenfranchised in a fascist state. But what is an estate as opposed to a class? To get an answer to this question, let us turn to Scheler, who is quite frank about this. Max Scheler, in a special work entitled Christian Love and the Modern World, wrote the following on this issue: The class spirit is the spirit of Mammon. The idea of the estate puts the content of labor in the first place, while in the class the desire for profit acts as a motive for activity. For these reasons, class envy and hatred flourish in class society, which explains the mutual class struggle. The class is characterized by the concept of general (class) interest, while the estate has its constitutive principles honor and conscience. The fascists have associated the concept of a hierarchical order with the concept of the estate system. The principle of higher and lower ranks should lie not only in the axis of the relationship of individuals within the estates. The masses, not subordinate to the fascist estates and corporations in rank, are incompatible with the higher estate system and with the requirements of the fascist state. The estate is a member of the state as a whole or, as other ideologues of fascism put it, the organism that it serves. The place of the first estate in the state should be occupied by the army, the bureaucracy and the nobility, says Sombart, while the official representatives of fascism say: the class of soldiers.
The denial by the ideologists of fascism of the principle of development is an expression of the position of the bourgeoisie as a class doomed by history to perish. Fascism strives by all means to delay the course of the historical process. The estate system as a stationary social order, opposed to the dynamism of the era of rising capitalism, should serve as an instrument of stagnation and immobility, an obstacle to the further development of society. The estate or corporate system, in the phraseology of the fascists, leads to the “elimination” of the class opposites of modern bourgeois society. The estate system, according to the plans of the fascists, has its own consolidation in certain legal norms and actual relations of property, class inequality, caste system and enslavement of the working class in the form of an organic estate for the class (or estate) of the capitalists. This estate system essentially excludes the ideology of progress, equality and labor. In this regard, it is also necessary to emphasize that fascism is engaged in the dissemination of a false and slanderous fable that the people, in essence, are so ideal that they do not strive for any rights, but dream day and night about fulfilling their duty to their superiors, etc. This slave ideology is imposed on the working masses by their exploiters and oppressors, who, naturally, enjoy only rights. The fascists constantly argue for the idea of duty, decreeing to the working masses that the only meaning of their existence is to express devotion and obedience to the idea of the whole.
The fascist state, built on a professional-estate basis, as well as on the lack of rights of the individual, represents a special type of unlimited absolutism. Werner Sombart writes on this issue as follows: German socialism requires a strong state; Om demands it because it puts in opposition to liberalism the good of the whole is higher than the good of individuals. The state must have sufficient strength to carry out and carry out the tasks of the nation, contrary to all the private interests of individuals. Monopoly capitalism, naturally, requires concentration and centralization of political power to protect the interests of the whole nation, which means the interests of the big bourgeoisie, they must sacrifice the good of individuals, freedom, liberalism, democracy, parliamentarism, etc. The natural form of authoritarian state power, writes Sombart, is absolute monarchy. In the democratic era, however, this form is a military dictatorship, or a one-party system of the fascist model: The supreme will of the state should not necessarily be embodied in one person ... Knowledge of the true goals is inherent in a small number of the best, the council of leaders. And the true principle of selection for the formation of this link of leaders and for finding a true elite under such conditions constitutes the central problem of domination ... The exemplary prototype of any authoritarian constitution is the Catholic Church with its college of cardinals at its head. In order to substantiate their domination, the fascists revive the principle of authority, which has as its task the strengthening of the power of the state (that is, the class that stands at the head of the state) in order to achieve the goals pursued at this time by monopoly capital. The subordination of all civil society, all culture, school, literature, economy, religion to imperialist goals constitutes the class meaning of the idea of a total state, the idea of etatism. The meaning of fascist phraseology about the so-called German and Prussian socialism also really boils down to granting the fascist state, that is, the big bourgeoisie, special rights to suppress the proletariat and provide the big bourgeoisie with the possibility of unlimited exploitation of the masses.
The protection of large property of capital magnates in the current conditions presupposes the possibility of plundering the country and the state treasury under the guise of protecting the interests of the nation and the people’s “community”. The demagogy of the fascists with regard to property rights lies in the fact that, on the one hand, property is declared sacred and inviolable, but, on the other hand, a struggle is declared against the Roman individual right, it is opposed by the German social law, according to which the right of property is sanctified to “social” motives and associated with certain obligations of the owner in relation to society. As we know, German fascists call the German form of ownership fief property; Roman property rights derive from the unrestricted right of the individual to property belonging to him, while German social property restricts the rights of individuals in favor of the “nation.” Othmar Spann writes on this issue that from the point of view of German law property is formally private, in reality there is only common property. Sombart also joins Spann’s point of view. However, such demagoguery is dangerous, and therefore other representatives of fascism give the opposite formulation, asserting that the fascist state is formally the owner of all goods in the hands of private individuals, but in essence the right to own and dispose of property belongs to private individuals, owners. The essence of the matter does not change from this. The capitalists remain the owners of capital, while the proletarians are left with only phrases about property. The fascist Reimer, commenting on the program of the National Socialist Party, proves that law in general was created by a Nordic man, that is, by the Germans, to whom it was born due to the peculiarities of their blood. All relations of domination among the Germans are of an ethical nature and are directly related to the idea of duty. This applies in particular to property rights. But no matter how the fascists interpret the right to private property, one thing is beyond doubt: that under the guise of recognizing the supreme right of property for the state, we are talking about strengthening the private property of capital magnates.
The fascist dictatorship subjugates the state to monopoly capital on an unheard-of scale; the reasoning of the ideologues of fascism about law is reduced to the justification of this subordination. But fascism covers up these goals with various idealistic phrases and demagoguery. There should be an alliance of mutual trust between workers and entrepreneurs, writes the fascist philosopher Schwarz; both sides should be imbued with the consciousness of reciprocity and joint responsibility for the fate of the national economic whole. The workers know that they are obliged to follow and obey in everything the entrepreneur as their leader.[9] Until now, this has not been the case because there was no true state that still needs to be created. By socialism the fascists mean a set of responsibilities of workers in relation to the “nation”, to the capitalists, readiness for self-sacrifice and service of all citizens to the state of finance capital. Authoritarian “socialism” and the authoritarian state are based on the same principle: power belongs to the whole, the individual serves it. He obeys orders, is distinguished by unquestioning obedience, is deprived of all rights and burdened with some duties. In an effort to ideologically prepare the masses for a new war, to mobilize them in a spirit of devotion, obedience to the interests of the state capitalists, the fascists declare socialism a special virtue, the virtue of comradeship, which is especially clearly manifested in war. German socialism, the fascists say, was born or revived in the first imperialist war. It is accordingly characterized as gray front socialism. The preaching of barracks-Prussian psuedo-socialism becomes the more widespread, the greater the internal difficulties of the fascist dictatorship. Fascist demagogy about socialism aims to keep the masses disillusioned with fascism under its influence. Ley, Goebbels, Hitler cry out all the more about socialism the more the food crisis in the country aggravates.
Adhering to the question of understanding the essence of the state to Hitler, Carl Schmitt, and historically to reactionary Romantics like Adam Mueller, Novalis and others, Sombart insists that the state is an ideal union originating from the transcendental world. From an empirical, scientific and rational point of view, the state cannot be explained. The state as an ideal union is something irrational in its origin and essence. It does not arise at all, but exists eternally. The tasks of the state are reduced to the maintenance and preservation of its own existence in its unity, in the struggle with other states, the development of those abilities and virtues that constitute the essence of the political man: heroism, patriotism and the spirit of community. The state differs from all other social formations in that there is no place for any rights and claims of an individual or a group of people in relation to the whole. In the state, in this ideal union, the behavior of people is characterized by sacrifice, the constant readiness of the individual to sacrifice himself entirely to the whole. This idea of sacrifice should serve in the hands of the fascists as a new demagogic tool in the enslavement of the working people, who are deprived of any right to make certain demands on state power. The disenfranchised mass should bear only one sacrifice in the name! inviolability of the interests of the capitalists. But the empirical source of the idea of sacrifice is too weak a guarantee and protection of the bourgeoisie from the demands of the proletariat. If the right to strike is prohibited, then this prohibition must be justified by the will of God. Therefore, the fascists argue that the idea of sacrifice presupposes the existence of an idea that transcends the earthly world. In other words, not only the state, but the ideas of sacrifice are transcendental, divine in origin and in essence. Sombart, however, discovered the truly Germanic cause of all current disasters in man’s longing for reunification with God. To make clear to the reader the answer to the question of who ultimately constitutes the state, we consider it necessary to remind that in the concepts of the fascists the state itself is interpreted theoretically as an estate. The state, writes for example Heinrich, a follower of Spann, is an independent estate; it is based on a certain stratum of people, forming the estate of state bearers. The question arises as to whether do not the state and the broad masses belong in any way to the estate? The author answers this question in the spirit of Hitler and Spann: directly and passively, of course, they somehow relate to the state, but in no case do they belong and cannot belong to that stratum of people who make up the state proper. This layer of people is the layer of leaders, or the new “nobility”. Thus, the aristocracy of capital is identified with the state itself. The masses, the people, are excluded from the state. Their duty is unquestioning obedience to the leaders, that is, to the aristocracy of capital, which concentrates in its hands not only all material values, but also all state power. This is the nature of the German statehood of fascism.
How many crocodile tears were shed by the bourgeoisie and its lackeys over the fact that the Soviet regime in our Union “suppresses and destroys” the individual. Leibholz, referring to the authority of the fascist Schramm, repeats again this fable about the destruction of the individual in the Soviet Union. It is characteristic that the fate of the individual in the Soviet Union is mourned by the very counter-revolutionaries, fascists and reactionaries of all stripes, who theoretically substantiate the thesis of the complete and absolute lack of rights of the individual in the face of the fascist state and leaders in all spheres of life. However, the fascists often inadvertently slip out, condemning the Soviet system for the fact that it is not far from liberalism and that it protects the individual, that for Marxism there is nothing higher than the welfare of the individual. Sombart as an old expert and critic of Marxism in his last work, where he substantiates the principles of truly German “socialism”, again as a crushing argument against Marxism points out that Marxism proceeds from the thesis of the all-round development of the individual in a socialist society. For Mr. Sombart this ideal of proletarian socialism is so displeasing to his heart that he treats it as a bourgeois ideal. We already know, he writes, those basic values, the increase of which proletarian socialism regards as progress. These values are life in contentment, wealth, knowledge, technology, freedom, equality, mass. So, the “crime” of proletarian socialism is that it strives to improve the material well-being of the individual and to create conditions for the all-round development of all abilities and inclinations of the individual, for the development of knowledge, technology, freedom, etc. Is this really not the end of the world? Mr. Sombart (and all fascist writers, including Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels and others) sees a terrible blasphemy in the desire of Marxism to make all people happy, or, as he cynically puts it, to make the masses full. It cannot be denied that the fascists also care about individuals, but these are the personalities of the leaders of industry, the magnates of capital, while Marxism and Bolshevism put the interests of the working masses at the center of their aspirations and concerns. But even the mere mention of the masses leads the fascists into indignation, arousing in them a truly bestial anger. The personality of the worker, the living person, plays a really central role in our country. The slogan put forward by Comrade Stalin, cadres decide everything, requires that our leaders show the most caring attitude towards our workers when they need support, encouraged them when they show their first successes, pushed them forward, etc. We must finally understand that of all the valuable capital available in the world, the most valuable and decisive are people, cadres ... Such a formulation is completely alien to the bourgeoisie, and especially to the modern one. Man is the cheapest commodity in a society in which tens of millions of people find themselves thrown into the street and doomed to starvation. In our socialist country, however, it is natural that all the efforts of the party and government are aimed at satisfying all the material and spiritual needs of the masses, that at the center of all our aspirations is the task of creating conditions under which all people would be not only well-fed, cultured, but also happy ... Contrary to the current policy of the bourgeoisie, aimed at eliminating the remnants of its miserable democracy, our country, on the contrary, is following the opposite path, towards the expansion and strengthening of Soviet socialist democracy.
The White Guards and the reactionary leaders of Social Democracy opposed the Soviet regime under the banner of defending democracy. Lenin and Stalin, exposing them, proved to the masses that the dictatorship of the proletariat rests in our country on the broad basis of Soviet democracy, that our system is a hundred times more democratic than any of the most democratic bourgeois countries. And this is natural, since the bearer of the Soviet system is the working masses of the workers and peasants. Soviet power is indeed quite justly and openly depriving the political rights of the exploiters, counter-revolutionaries, all those who are interested in the restoration of the bourgeois-landlord regime. The dictatorship of the proletariat destroyed the exploiting classes and groups in our country; there are still some embittered, but quantitatively extremely insignificant elements hostile to us. After the peasantry, with its colossal bulk, entered thanks to the brilliant leadership of Comrade Stalin on the socialist path, after socialism had triumphed in our country finally and irrevocably, the Soviet government, on the initiative of Comrade Stalin, immediately raised the issue of expanding democracy. The socialist society of the Soviet country is going over to the implementation of universal, equal, direct and secret voting. The development of the Soviet Union and the bourgeois countries is thus proceeding along directly opposite directions. Our country is developing along an ascending line in all respects. The bourgeois countries are moving downward. The latter are forced, as a result of the ever-shrinking level of their power, to follow the path of liquidation or extreme restriction of the rights of parliamentarism, democracy, etc. Our country, on the contrary, is following the path of the flourishing and development of Soviet democracy, which is fundamentally different from the false, limited bourgeois democracy.
If the state in fascist countries is an instrument of a narrow stratum of capital tycoons directed against the rest of the population as politically deprived of rights, then the Soviet state attracts all working adult citizens of the country to participate in the government of the state. The era of free competition more or less corresponded politically to bourgeois democracy and parliamentarism. In the era of Imperialism, bourgeois democracy is increasingly turning into a fig leaf covering the dictatorship of a handful of capital magnates. After the war of 1914-1918, during the first round of revolutions, the working people in a number of countries, through the revolutionary struggle under the leadership of the Communists, again won some democratic rights. During the period of the general crisis of capitalism in a number of countries, these democratic rights, the remnants of bourgeois democracy, were destroyed and replaced by the terrorist dictatorship of finance capital, the bloody regime of fascism.
The ideas of popular sovereignty, which were previously put forward by bourgeois democracy, are rejected openly by the fascizing bourgeoisie. Divine revelation is declared to be the source of the supreme power, which substantiates the authority of the fascist state. The second distinguishing feature that characterizes the process of degeneration of bourgeois democracy when it is replaced by the open dictatorship of the financial oligarchy is that instead of freedom and individual rights, a servile hierarchy and the subordination of all working people to fascist dictatorships, the “leaders” of the people, fulfilling the will of the tycoons of finance capital, are openly proclaimed. All that has been said is naturally associated with a turn from rationalism to irrationalism, to religious faith, and then to the idea of a hierarchical, pyramidal structure of society and the state. The bourgeoisie in many countries is unable to rule by the old methods, the methods of bourgeois democracy. It is quite natural that the bourgeoisie and its most militant politicians and ideologists – the fascists – treat the masses with hatred and contempt, striving to turn them into powerless slaves.
But here once again the whole enormous international revolutionary role of the Soviet Union is revealed, in which the rule of the working masses is realized, in which the great proletarian democracy flourished on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
The entire bourgeois philosophy of the era of imperialism is permeated through and through with extremely reactionary tendencies. Its main task was and is reduced to undermining the foundations of scientific knowledge, to the theoretical defeat of the positive sciences, to proving and comprehensive substantiation of the thesis about the unknowability of the world, to all-round discrediting of the human mind, to proclaiming the exceptional significance of mystical experiences, internal mystical contemplation, intuition. They are looking for mysterious mystical forces experienced by the human soul in nature and in human society! All science was reduced by militant reaction to a set of fictions, symbols that have nothing in common with true reality and in no way reflect the real world.
This turn of bourgeois philosophy, and after it science, towards fictionalism, symbolism, mythologism and mysticism is an expression of the fact that the interests of the bourgeoisie came into conflict with the development of genuine science and philosophical thought. This contradiction, in turn, is an expression of a deeper contradiction corroding decaying capitalism, the contradiction between the level of development of productive forces and capitalist production relations, which have become intolerable fetters of their development. This contradiction finds its clearest expression in the class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. The general crisis of capitalism is characterized, on the one hand, by a bureaucratic reaction along the entire line, but, on the other hand, at the proletarian pole, by the development and concentration of the forces of the communist party, which is making its whole socialist, proletarian revolution. These forces are rallying under the banner of Marxism-Leninism in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions. And since the inexorable course of history and the logic of the class struggle lead inevitably to the collapse of capitalism and to the triumph of socialism, it is natural that the imperialist bourgeoisie is forced to renounce all truly scientific knowledge and throw itself into the arms of pure activism, fictionalism and mythologism. The proletariat becomes the only heir to all the great achievements of the past in all areas of culture and the only class that highly appreciates science and philosophy in their only correct, dialectical and materialist understanding, the only class capable of generally taking over the leadership of society and further cultural creativity, which has already been practically proven by the Soviet Union.
The spearhead of the struggle on the part of the ideologists of the bourgeoisie, and especially of fascism, is directed against Marxism-Leninism, against materialism. But classical idealism is recognized by fascism in this struggle as a blunt weapon. The old bourgeois idealism is too progressive-liberal and abstract in the eyes of the ideologists of imperialism and ineffective in the fight against Marxism. The most reactionary type of idealism and mysticism is being put forward to combat Marxism-Leninism at the present stage. The modern bourgeoisie needs mythology due to its current, especially critical and catastrophic situation.
The forerunner of fascism, Friedrich Nietzsche, has already argued that without fictions, that is, without myths, without illusions, humanity and science cannot do. The opposition between science and wisdom, he says, is resolved by the fact that the fictional world, that is, the world as fiction, is consciously recognized and justified in the necessary myth. Nietzsche proclaimed the need for the revival of mythical thinking as a prerequisite for life and science. Similarly, says Nietzsche elsewhere, just as children need games and fairy tales, adults also need myths and illusions. Myth, mythical fictions, have disappeared due to science and abstract thinking, says Nietzsche. And so, the task is to revive mythical thinking, for a necessary prerequisite for life and science is illusion as the highest form of the assertion of the will. The question is, what is an illusion? An illusion, Nietzsche correctly explains, is a delusion, a lie. But this is a lie that we must take it for granted, says Nietzsche, for it is useful to us, that is, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, since it affirms the will to live weakened due to the loss of real soil. The will to illusion has its basis in the will to live and in the will to power. Nietzsche quite frankly says, for example, about religion, that it is an illusion, a myth, but religious fictions help to maintain the obedience of the flock (as Nietzsche calls the people). Until now, all kinds of fictions were operated unconsciously, but from now on the question is posed differently, in the sense of consciously operating with fictions. It must be said that almost all reactionary currents of bourgeois philosophy and epistemology have developed in this direction in recent years.
On the basis of the disintegration of bourgeois philosophy, the defeat of the foundations of scientific knowledge, modern fascist mythology arose, equally flourishing both in fascist Italy and in Germany. Georges Sorel, influenced by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, already in his time developed the theory of myth. For him, the strike, the revolution are myths. Mussolini was brought up in the school of the syndicalist Sorel and at the same time on the works of Nietzsche and Pareto, to whom he listened in Lausanne. Mussolini borrowed the theory of myth from them. What is a myth? Sorel understands by myth a completely irrational idea that cannot be logically proven on the basis of rational arguments. It is, by its very nature, an object of faith. A myth should not and cannot be an expression of any objective truth: it is not the truth of the myth that is important, but the actions it generates. Its role and significance are determined by the strength of its effect on the masses. It must serve as an instrument for mastering the masses. There is nothing rational in myth, it is an object of experience, an object of feeling, a well-known symbol necessary for arousing the masses to action and constant activity.
By means of myth, the fascists consider it possible to set the masses in motion, to entice them to “heroic deeds” and to realize their goals. Fascism can no longer ideologically substantiate the need for the omnipotence of capital, wage slavery and the oppression of workers by referring to reason, to the logic of rational scientific knowledge. The bourgeoisie is forced to appeal to the faith and incite chauvinistic instincts among the masses, to refer to the intuition of the leaders, to the mystical properties of the race, etc. German fascism proceeds primarily from the myth of blood, in contrast to Italian fascism, which puts the myth of the nation at the forefront. Now, writes Rosenberg, a new faith is awakening: the myth of blood, the belief that together with blood we also protect the divine essence of man in general. It is necessary at all costs to entangle, stun the masses, not let them come to their senses, to act on their imagination and instincts in order to prepare from them an obedient weapon for imperialist goals. Therefore, Rosenberg, describing the ideal of humanity that the German brought to earth with his teaching on the value of character and the idea of honor, for which the Germans fought throughout history on all battlefields, hastens to assure the reader that if this the idea is the idea of honor, then Europe and her blood will perish forever, and chaos will come. The new myth, the myth of the blood, alone gives the Germans the strength to destroy the domination of the inferior race. Hitler’s fascist movement is hailed as a movement that awakened the spiritual strength of the Nordic Germanic race. The abilities and inner energy of the soul of this race are limitless and inexhaustible. The soul, says the fascist philosopher Ettig, is an emanation of the absolute, a divine spark that is identical with God. The soul creates a body for itself. It regulates all vegetative functions, our blood circulation, our heartbeat, all intellectual processes, etc. Compared with the higher mental powers, logical thinking, our rational cognition, plays only a subordinate role.[10] The fascists reveal an undisguised fear of reason, fearing that if the broad masses, carried away by their demagogy, cease to believe in fascist myths that serve as an instrument of deception, then fascism will perish. Even Nietzsche was well aware of how dangerous it is for the ruling classes when the masses begin to think. He even wrote specifically about the dangers of logic. The workers were endowed with logic and they began to riot, Nietzsche wrote. Meanwhile, it is beneficial for the bourgeoisie that the workers do not think, but believe in the eternity of capitalism, in the necessity of slavery. Where there is respect for authority, they do not reason, but obey orders unquestioningly. The fascists, following in the footsteps of their teacher and putting into practice that anti-intellectualism that was developed not by Nietzsche alone, but by a whole galaxy of bourgeois philosophers of the imperialist era, headed by Bergson, demand from the masses only obedience, submission, voluntary recognition of slavery, etc. because science, intellectualism, logic went bankrupt long ago. The soul, with its inner, but spontaneous feelings took their place. The racial soul of the German, of course, has specific features, characterizing the “higher” breed of people. Along with the myth of blood in fascist ideology, the myth of the soul occupies an equally honorable place, in the center of the myth of the soul is the idea of honor; this idea reveals the essence of all this mythology as a militaristic ideology. The reactionary essence of the mythical doctrine of the soul is clearly manifested in the reasoning of the fascist Ettig, which we have already mentioned: The overdevelopment of the human brain, writes Ettig, an immense overestimation of intellectual abilities, thinking, logic, knowledge, experimental observation, rational cognition led to the fact that the soul with its lofty abilities was pushed into the background. Intellectualism destroys, he declares, all national and cosmic ties. A man of thought does not perceive the directives of the universe, that is, of God. Intellectualism, in a word, is madness, it leads inevitably to death. Intellectuality is also declared to be a Semitic and Marxist invention, with the aim of destroying the racial soul of the Germans. Intellectualism destroys the religious perception of the world, which is a product of the soul. What we honor as the highest human virtues, he writes, heroism, self-sacrifice for the national cemgo, pure inspiration, devotion, obedience to the highest guiding will is the essence of the manifestation of the soul. Whoever denies the magical abilities of the human soul will never be able to comprehend the national soul of the Germans. The human soul has supernatural powers. It can separate from the body and in its etheric shell (as an astral body for example) to rush around the world and act. It can create phantoms that manifest themselves as independent beings (this is called materialization or ideoplastics); it can set bodies in motion without touching them. The magic abilities of the soul allow it to appropriate for itself every conceivable knowledge, every conceivable skill. And the deeper they penetrate into the science of the soul, the more they come to the conviction that its possibilities are really endless. In any case, according to this “learned” shaman, the “science” of the soul, that is, magic, occultism, telekinesis and other rubbish, is one of the strongest weapons in the fight against materialism and atheistic propaganda.
Thus, the process of the decay of capitalism, especially in the fascist states, has advanced so far that the bourgeoisie, represented by its ideologists, is forced to renounce science and the brain, which has developed excessively; logic and knowledge, science are now fraught with great dangers for the existence of capitalism. The bourgeoisie, in its struggle with the proletariat, grasps at the wildest superstition, at the belief in miracles. Weakness, wrote Marx, was always saved by faith in miracles. German fascism, being by its very essence militaristic and striving to unleash a great war, puts forward as, so to speak, the main essences, or attributes, the German racial soul, forming a national fortress, which is the source of true will and higher reason. The greatness of the fatherland, the nation – national pride, as Hitler puts it, – should form the basis of the thinking and activities of the German people. Rosenberg writes: The idea of honor, national honor, is for us the beginning and end of all our thinking and all our activities ... It is incompatible with any equivalent center of power, It does not tolerate Christian love, or Freemasonry, or Roman philosophy next to it. The law of honor, according to Rosenberg’s myths, is the fate of the Germanic soul. In the blood of the German race God himself laid as an inevitable fate the necessity and obligation of the Germans to fight for national honor and freedom, which always turn out to be outraged. German imperialism dreams of world domination, the subordination of the entire earth and all peoples to its power. In order to justify his revanchist and militant-imperialist aspirations, he puts forward such chauvinistic and patriotic ideas for the treatment of the petty bourgeoisie, philistinism, such feudal rattles as the mystical laws of honor and revenge, which must act with the necessity of inevitable fate.
This is how German fascism is preparing a new world slaughter. There is definitely not a single field and not a single concept that would not be adapted to the demands of military propaganda. All the so-called world outlook of fascism is nothing more than a bloody ideology of war, war with one’s own people under the guise of national unity and war for colonies under the guise of the ideas of race, nation, freedom and destiny. We have already spoken above about the reactionary class essence of the fascist myths about race and nation. The ideologists of fascism themselves admit that for them the point is not in the scientific concept of race and nation, but in the myth of nation and race. They set themselves the task of creating a myth of a nation, a religion of blood. We do not find a more or less precise distinction between the concept of race and the concept of nation, as if these are two identical concepts. But we learn that Paul de Lagarde was the first to reveal the true essence of the nation. What is this essence? Nations do not arise as a result of historical events, they are divine institutions, the creations of God. Nations are the thoughts of God. Each nation must have its own religion. Fascism created the religion of blood, homicide, war in the name of protecting the interests of capital. Professor Banse explains to us that a dying warrior is easier to part with life, if he knows that his blood is shed in the name of his national god. National religion is the religion (or mythology) of Nazism and chauvinism; it is a weapon in the struggle against the revolutionary movement of the proletariat, against the Marxist theory of the class struggle of the workers against the bourgeoisie. These myths portray the nation as a divine institution, a primary integrity, and everyone who fights against capitalism, against the regime of exploitation, opposes God and destroys the divine vessel. Impudence and ignorance, national demagoguery and mystical delirium are in the hands of German fascism the means of deliberately deceiving the working masses. Remarkable is the logic of the false ideology of fascism! On the one hand, the fascists speak of a nation as an organism, a single body and a single soul; on the other hand, they not only speak, but in reality exercise the domination of the aristocracy of capital, enforce the aristocratic law of blood, according to which the masses should be reduced to the level of powerless slaves. The ideologues of fascism are directing especially fierce attacks against proletarian internationalism, which stands in the way of preparing for war. Humanism and internationalism, the fascists teach, mean betrayal of science and the idea of justice, national freedom. In reality, however, we are talking about the workers’ “betrayal” of their domestic capitalists, the exploiters.
The fascist ideologist Hermann Schwarz mocks the freedom for which the masses are fighting, saying that the freedom the crowd is talking about is a paradise for the masses; it goes without saying that this idea of freedom contradicts the German idea of freedom. First, the German soul differs from, say, the French in that it is a clot of fluid energy. In addition, it is distinguished by a heroic character. Further, he claims that the highest commandment of religion is selfless service to the nation and fatherland. This bigot, like other fascists, composes all kinds of fables about Marxism and communism. The donkey ears of a sycophant of the bourgeoisie stick out from every line of his divine devilry. The idea of Marxism that workers and entrepreneurs confront each other like enemies must be considered insanity, he says. In fact, they form a single whole, being an expression of the dismembered life of a nation. Marxists do not understand that the matter is not at all in economic, gross, material interests, but in the spiritual essence, in the idea, according to which the people, the nation constitutes a union of dui, or an animated union. Now everything is going brilliantly. One has only to remember the workers that they are in a spiritual union with their oppressors, and they will renounce all material needs, from all their aspirations and ideals.
Where capitalism reigns, the rich will always exploit and oppress the poor. The rich manage banks, businesses, department stores, steamships, and railways. The capitalist state is an instrument of the haves to suppress the have-nots, to preserve the privileges of the rich and protect their property. In the period of Weimar democracy, they tried to shield this truth from the workers by means of parliamentary deception. In the Third Reich, they want them to be blinded by lies about national unity, the unity of the rich and the poor. But what kind of unity can the working people have with Krupp, Thyssen, Duisburg? What kind of national unity can exist between the working people and those exploiters who, having taken possession of the means of production and power in order to increase and secure their profits, doom their compatriots – the German workers and small business owners – to starvation and slow death. Such national unity is a deception of the people.
We must now begin to clarify the most general epistemological propositions underlying the ideology of fascism. The first thing that catches the eye when analyzing the ideology of fascism and the ideology of the imperialist bourgeoisie in general is, as already indicated above, a hostile attitude towards science and human intellect. This circumstance is explained by the fact that genuine scientific knowledge, which in its essence cannot but be materialistic, refuses to serve the interests of the bourgeoisie. Just as the productive forces created by the bourgeoisie rise up against the existing relations of production, so the development of scientific knowledge has come into conflict with the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. The fear of the bourgeoisie for the future, which belongs to the proletariat as a class called by history to play the role of the gravedigger of capitalism, dictates to it the need to renounce any idea of development, from the recognition of any objective laws in nature and especially in society. The proletariat stands for the scientific knowledge of reality, the bourgeoisie is against it, for the revolutionary development of reality, since we are talking primarily about human society, is directed against the bourgeoisie, and leads to the denial of bourgeois social relations. The proletariat in all its struggle is guided by the scientific knowledge of reality, which in its hands becomes an instrument for changing reality. The bourgeoisie at the present stage of decaying and dying capitalism is forced to take the path of denying science, thinking and reason, proclaiming their bankruptcy. Since science reveals the bankruptcy of capitalism, the bourgeoisie declares the bankruptcy of science. Hence the turn of bourgeois thought towards irrationalism and intuitionism is understandable.
To characterize the current state of minds of the fascizing bourgeoisie, let us cite some quotations from various works of fascist ideologists. Hans Hofer proves the necessity of turning to neo-Romanticism (or to irrationalism), because the source of all the disasters of the world war, revolution, inflation, the Weimar Republic and democracy, the communist danger, etc., experienced and experienced by Germany, is ... enlightenment! The Enlightenment, he writes, was directed against the religious, Christian, theological, authoritarian, socialist, estate spirit of the Middle Ages. It was essentially secularism and liberalism. As secularism, the Enlightenment recognized only this worldly life. As liberalism, it strove above all to free itself from guardianship of the church, Christianity, and then from all the medieval bonds of the family, class, workshop, people, state.[11] As a result, it turned out that the personality and its mind – humanism – took a central position in the rational worldview. Man became the source of truth, but since people are unequal, thus the truth, based, so to speak, on the equality of people, disappeared. The state turned out to exist by virtue of the agreement of individual people with each other. It became dependent on individuals thanks to the electoral system (liberal democracy). Every single person began to feel like a citizen of the world. The mind of a person triumphed, who believed in his strength so much that he considers it possible to change the world according to his ideas and even penetrate the secrets of being through knowledge of the world. The final phase of all this development principle since the beginning of the Great French Revolution is the emergence and spread of Bolshevism. Bolshevism implements the liberal program of rationalism consistently up to the terrible and bitter end: until the complete liberation of man from God, the break with morality, with the family, with native soil, from all bonds and all authorities.
The fascists proclaim all modern mathematical-mechanistic and materialistic natural science, modern technology to be the products of destructive rationalism and godless enlightenment, which science itself engendered. Neo-Romanticism is now called upon to overthrow reason from the throne it occupies and in its place to plant a feeling that recognizes the mystery and unknowability of being. Neo-Romanticism, continues the same Hofer, seeks to lay the foundation of all spiritual life, including science, into a new metaphysical, irrational principle. This new irrational principle is the principle of morphology, according to which every science, art, politics, state, economy constitutes a living organism controlled and animated by a mysterious idea. Hofer writes, this is the great feat of Adolf Hitler. He carried the ideas of neo-Romanticism to the people and thus turned neo-Romanticism into a popular movement. At the same time, he created a powerful political organization for it. All this he opposed to destructive communism.
We have cited these thoughts of Hofer in order to show that the need for the bourgeoisie to abandon science, the idea of progress, development, scientific knowledge of the world, bourgeois enlightenment, not to mention democracy, is dictated by its bestial fear of Bolshevism, communism, of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat. Hofer’s attempt to present the matter as if fascism is fighting the Bolsheviks, since they are allegedly destroying culture, is an attempt with unsuitable means, for the cultured face of fascism is already sufficiently familiar to the whole world. All varieties of fascism are equally rebellious against rationalism, opposing. to it irrationalism, in which the fascists see salvation from the revolutionary proletariat. We must therefore reveal the class meaning and significance of fascist irrationalism. It is perfectly understandable that it is in the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie at the stage of its downward movement under the conditions of decaying capitalism to portray things in such a way that the world is unknowable by its very essence, that history in particular is a kingdom of irrational forces that defy any cognition and any particular foresight. With this assertion, fascism flatters itself with the hope of refuting the laws of the development and death of capitalism established by Marxism-Leninism. There can be no talk of the inevitable death of capitalism, since it is based on a mystical idea that is inaccessible to us. Reason as an instrument of knowledge has gone bankrupt in the eyes of the bourgeoisie, for reason speaks of the bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie.
Irrationalism is inextricably linked with religious faith, and fascist irrationalism is also distinguished by a specific, terrorist, counter-revolutionary activism and voluntarism. The class meaning of fascist irrationalism is reduced to the desire to throw a veil impenetrable for reason over reality, which should hide the essence of events taking place in the objective world. For a class that has lost its footing, irrationalism presents a wide scope for subjectivity, for faith, for illusions, without which the bourgeoisie cannot deceive the masses and keep hopes of staying in power, as Nietzsche puts it. In all its struggle against the working class, it is compelled to exert all its will and activity. This is also where the apology for immediate, direct action, the idea of active, volitional intervention in the course of life, originates. The fascist apology for the heroic principle is called upon to substantiate the terrorist dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie, which is striving to save its domination by means of open violence against the masses and the organization of war.
The ideology of fascism is hostile to science, it is imbued with counter-revolutionary pragmatism, which gives the bourgeoisie the opportunity to justify changing its false slogans and policies depending on the needs of the day. It does not recognize any principles except one: all means are good to suppress the proletariat. The most essential and the only real thing that exists in the theory and worldview of fascism is the defense of the exploitation regime and the bloody struggle against the proletariat. All theories are good if they serve this basic task. The thinking of the fascists must be subordinated entirely to this task. Scientific thinking conceals in itself dangers of two kinds. First, it teaches workers to understand too much. Even Nietzsche was indignant at the fact that the workers were taught to think, since this circumstance is fraught with dangers for the existing system. The fascists follow the same path. Secondly, irrationalism, being, as we can see, a tool to obscure the consciousness of the masses and distract them from the struggle for their class interests, should serve for the bourgeoisie itself as a means of spiritual salvation from the impending danger. This is, so to speak, the politics of the ostrich. So, logic is dangerous from all points of view, but above all it is dangerous when it becomes the property of the masses. Logical, reasonable, scientific thinking, reflecting reality, constituting a powerful weapon in the hands of the rising class, the proletariat, poses a huge danger to the historically already doomed class, the bourgeoisie. And therefore, the latter is forced, in the face of the fascists, to turn to irrational and mystical thinking, to use fictions and illusions in order to generalize the masses. And the dying class itself also needs faith and hope, a special kind of fanatical delirium. This is the objective position of the modern bourgeoisie.
The leader knows, writes Karl Mannheim, that all political and historical views (of the fascists - A. D.) are only myths. He is actually free from them, but he values them, and this is the second side of the question, because they cause enthusiasm, which sets in motion the irrational remnants of a person – feelings – and lead to political action. Thus, we see here a close connection between myths as fictions and irrationalism as a special spiritual force with the help of which the transition from the mythical theory to terrorist political practice is made. When capitalism is already at a loss, at the brink of the grave, the ideology of the bourgeoisie must inevitably differ and is distinguished by extreme skepticism in relation to scientific knowledge (in the form of a denial of logic, rationalism and the assertion of irrationalism, intuitionism, the role of instincts). The deliberate deception of the masses becomes a complex elaborated system of mythology, fictionalism, symbolism and spiritualism. Today the task in the field of philosophy is reduced for the ideologists of the bourgeoisie to proving the bankruptcy of science. Moreover, they set themselves the direct goal of refuting the possibility of scientific knowledge. This tendency is very clearly expressed, for example, in Ludwig Klages, who says that the proofs of metaphysics are reduced mainly to the refutation of science.[12]
The bourgeoisie is hostile to scientific progress. The fate of the development of science is now inseparably linked with the fate of the proletarian revolution, for only the proletariat is fully interested in the progress of science. And even such enemies of Marxism as Mannheim are forced to admit the exclusive belief of Marxism in science and the skeptical, negative attitude towards it of fascism, which, as already mentioned, relies only on the power of instincts, affects, demagogy and believes only in the power of terror. Returning directly to the issue of irrationalism, it is necessary to point out that it is very closely associated with the concept of the mystery of being among the fascists. The secrets of the world, as the fascists say, do not want to and cannot be disclosed. To remove the veil from the world secret means to commit blasphemy. Therefore, nowadays for the ideologists of fascism, the matter is not reduced to the solution of world mysteries, but to the fundamental recognition of the unknowability of the world in general, not only in the sense of the impossibility of our penetration into nature, being, but also in the sense of the criminality of this audacity of knowledge. We do not want to remove the veil from the world’s secrets, reads another slogan of the fascist, if one may say so, philosophy. And we do not want because the knowledge of the secrets of the world is associated with great dangers for the existence of the bourgeoisie. These secrets of life are the mystery of the origins of capitalist ownership and profits, bourgeois dictatorship, the State, and so on. All this secret, and which should not be touched, and yet the science of Marxism covers and shows them in true light. Materialism, Marx and Haeckel, writes one of the “learned” ideologues of fascism, are the natural finalizers of the path opened by Kant, the path to natural science, technology and civilization ... But the philosophy of our time should strive not for a rapid forward movement, but stoic modesty and to the comprehension of the ancient wisdom of mankind, expressed in a silent admiration for the irrationality of life and the filling of meaning.
Irrationalism serves as a means of diverting the attention of the masses from their real class interests towards the mysterious entities behind which the interests of capital are hidden. Therefore, the masses are required to confess their faith and admiration for these mysterious entities, they are forbidden to cognize them. Irrationalism requires the rejection of reason, from its desire to penetrate through scientific knowledge into the essence of the bourgeois system. Refusal of reason and thinking turns a person into a slavishly obedient servant of capital. The servant should not reason, but believe and obey the higher mysterious forces, which include capitalist property, state power, etc. The ideology of the modern bourgeoisie is imbued with deep pessimism. Having been forced to renounce the idea of development or progress even in the old bourgeois understanding, the ideologists of the bourgeoisie are now engaged in clarifying the problem of the decline and destruction of all kinds of forms and formations, coming to the conclusion about the incomprehensibility and irrational nature of all life, about the impossibility of comprehending reality through the human mind. Fascist actualism and heraclitism are the expression of a deeply pessimistic view of the world in the idea of fate, to which supposedly everything that exists is subordinated. The idea of fate is irrational in its essence and again is a means to hide real relationships, especially in human society, destroying the rationalistic nature of the causal explanation of phenomena. The view of this mystical concept is reduced to unquestioning, submission to fate incomprehensible in its goals. The working class and all working people, by virtue of this thoughtful philosophy, must wear the yoke of slavery, resignedly submit to the mysterious fate, the will of God and not make any attempts to a causal explanation of reality, for this would mean a desire to remove the veil from the face of God, or, to put it another way, something like that. striving inevitably leads to the knowledge of the real conditions of the proletariat of its existence and to an uprising against the capitalists. Deceiving the workers and all working people in general, the fascists declare the nation an alliance bound by fate, which, with the rights of inexorable fate, orders, for example, the Germans to march on the Soviet Union. And there is nothing to do here rationalistically to seek meaning and any explanations, since fate is irrational, which, however, does not prevent the fascists from knowing firmly its inexorable demands, which always amazingly coincide with the requirements of German capitalism. Mr. Rosenberg speaks of a specially Germanic concept of fate. What is the political meaning that the fascists put into this concept? The Germans, you see, see the will of fate in the fulfillment of the laws of honor and in the implementation of the highest German values in general, such as: honor, freedom, courage and arrogance. It is not difficult to understand that all the fascist chatter about the idea of fate serves two purposes: on the one hand, as we have already shown, it is an instrument for enslaving the working people inside the country, and on the other hand, it should serve as a means of justifying imperialist wars. Now, after Spengler, Rosenberg claims, it is considered established that causality and fate are two different ideas. The disagreement between the father of fascism Spengler and his ungrateful followers is that in the former, fate takes on the character of an irreversible fate, and Herr Rosenberg sees the truly Faustian character of the German soul in the slogan I want. Racial and spiritual forces rule the world, and therefore the idea of fate gets its true expression in a purely Germanic voluntarism.
Rosenberg has every reason to hate Marxism, which discovered the laws of social development and thereby passed the death sentence on capitalism. That is why the Rosenbergs are so raging against the Marxist inevitable economic law, the death of the capitalist system. The fascists hope that they will be able to slip through, bypass the inevitable, if they exert all their willpower to fight the inevitable course of things, with the objective laws of reality. Hence the denial of the mechanistic laws of causality and the assertion of the naked I want (I want to live, I want colonies, the German bourgeoisie yells through the lips of the fascists); hence the original understanding of the idea of fate, in which fatalism is combined with the idealistic priestly doctrine of free will. Since the natural course of development of the class struggle leads to the death of the bourgeoisie, they leave everything to the will of God and prepare for the struggle for national honor, for the imperialist massacre.
Above we talked about the reactionary class essence of the fascist ideology of the corporate-estate state. Let us see how logic and epistemology are used to substantiate these ideas. Replacing the concept of classes with the concept of estates is interpreted by the fascists as overcoming the quantitatively mechanistic world outlook and asserting a qualitatively idealistic view of society, and then of nature. Each estate, or rank, is an independent quality, irreducible to another rank, being at the same time an expression of the divine idea. The fascists, and with them many representatives of bourgeois philosophy in general, are now waging a fierce struggle for their fanatical qualitative and organic worldview against materialism, fraudulently slipping, instead of dialectical, into mechanical materialism in order to ascribe to dialectical materialism all the real and imaginary sins of mechanical and metaphysical materialism. From the point of view of fascism, an organism is not only a nation and a state, but also a landscape and a continent, endowed, according to Klages, for example, with individual souls. The concepts of organism and integrity, in turn, should serve as instruments for enslaving the masses. The idea of hierarchy as applied to the social order needs a metaphysical and mystical substantiation for its illumination. The fascists seek to prove that the hierarchical structure of society is based, so to speak, in the hierarchical structure of the cosmos, created by God on the basis of the dominance of the higher and the subordination of the lower. In a word, the hierarchical structure is elevated into an ontological principle. Weippert connects the idea of hierarchy with the idea of emanation. The process of emanation of a deity is a process of a stepwise, ranked implementation of order in space. After the completion of the process of emanation, the cosmos acquires a character, a strict order of certain qualities harmoniously connected together. The process of emanation is the process of descending the steps. The lower has existence due to the self-alienation of the higher. The principle of hierarchy, says Weippert frankly, and then Sombart, means the principle of inequality. And so the principle of inequality, according to the fascists, is rooted in the nature of the cosmos and is an expression of the will of the deity, who determined once and for all that the lower, that is, the lower classes of society, exist due to the existence of the higher ones, that is, by their mercy.
Enlightenment, liberalism, socialism, democracy, writes the same Weippert, are the great mental movements of our era. The same principle that now dominates in science, namely ... the principle of quality quantification, also dominates in public life. Nowadays, a sense of distance and a consciousness of quality have awakened, and with them a passionate need for a class-hierarchical structure. The sense of distance and consciousness of quality that have awakened among the bourgeoisie are aimed at establishing a lasting order that excludes revolution and any possibility of disturbance. Consciousness of quality stems from the class attitude of the bourgeoisie, which boils down to dividing people into white and black bones. Exploiters and oppressors are higher quality creations than workers. There must be a certain distance between them (this is the meaning of the sense of distance), separating those who are on the social ladder at the top from those who occupy the lowest steps. The principle of inequality thus receives its reinforcement and additional substantiation in the sense of distance and consciousness of quality, that is, the equivalence of people. This is the ideal pursued by Nietzsche, who is the recognized spiritual father of fascism. Any elevation of the type of man, according to Nietzsche, is the work of an aristocratic society that believes in a long ladder of ranks and in the diversity of people and which needs slavery. In a good and healthy aristocracy, says Nietzsche further, it is essential that it does not feel like a function, all the same, of royal power or the state, but their meaning and supreme justification, that it therefore accepts the sacrifice of a huge number of people with a clear conscience. who should be suppressed and degraded for its sake to the level of people incomplete, to the extent of slaves and tools. Its main belief should consist precisely in the fact that society has the right to exist not for society, but only as a foundation and a platform that can serve as a foothold for a certain kind of chosen creatures to fulfill their highest task and in general for a higher being: it can be compared with those aspiring to the sun, the plants climbing in Java, they are called Sipo Matador, which embrace the trunk of an oak tree with their branches until they finally rise high above it, and then, leaning on it, dissolve their top in the open and parade their happiness. The fascists strive to realize Nietzsche’s ideal to create such an aristocratic society in which the magnates of capital would play the role of the plant Sipo Matador, and the workers and all working people would be suppressed and degraded to the level of slaves, to the level of tools. This task must be performed primarily by the hierarchical structure of society. Slaves cannot dream of a happy life. Their lot is exploitation, hunger, cold, suffering, etc. From Nietzsche we know that exploitation is the main organic function, that the will to live is the will to power, and life itself, its essence, is reduced to exploitation. Therefore, it is absurd to dream of a society devoid of exploitation.
In the conditions of the general crisis of capitalism, the presence of millions of unemployed armies that have turned from reserve to permanent, the bourgeoisie and its ideologists can only spread the philosophy of asceticism. Henri Bergson, this most prominent fascist philosopher of France, who had a tremendous influence on the reactionary circles of Germany, and through Georges Sorel on Mussolini in Italy, now demands a turn to asceticism, arguing that potatoes are more nutritious than meat. Spengler in Germany claims that the ascetic way of life is the basis of all true culture. The fascists follow the same path, theoretically substantiating and practically implementing the principles of asceticism or self-sacrifice in relation to the working people, in the language of Mr. Hitler. The working people and only they, every worker, every peasant, inventor, etc., as Herr Hitler obligingly proclaims, must always be ready for sacrifices in the name of the interests of the capitalists. In the language of the fascists, this is called true idealism, which excludes any gross egoism; this is called fulfillment and duty, this is self-sacrifice as the highest virtue of man. All these virtues are finally a specific feature of the Germanic race. Herr Spann proves the necessity and fruitfulness of suffering. With his characteristic cynicism, he writes: One of the greatest vices of our era is that people try to avoid suffering, that they have no concepts of the cleansing power of suffering. This circumstance is particularly an obstacle for a correct judgment of all social problems, in particular it is an obstacle to the resolution of the social question. If the poor, he says, are treated with respect for the suffering, they can easily be taken up in prison, and the pleasure and wealth is not would be so much appreciated. Without appreciating the greatness and fruitfulness of suffering, it is impossible to find a way out of the political and economic problems of our days, it is impossible to resolve the social question.[13] Suffering convinces a person of the transitory nature of everything, except that which has its basis in the eternal. A whole host of fascist agents, from Spengler to the “venerable” Bergson, not to mention the official representatives of fascism, preach an ascetic way of life to the masses. They claim that asceticism is the basis of any culture, that if the working people do not starve and freeze, the culture will perish, that crises are generated by the thirst of the masses for pleasure, etc. Henri Bergson preaches to the masses the simplification, the rejection of meat food, sexual abstinence, which will lead, they say, to the elimination of crises. But the masses, Noltenius exclaims in despair, do not want to know anything about asceticism. Yes, they do not want to know anything about asceticism and will fight with all their energy for the abolition of the wage slavery regime throughout the world and for the implementation of socialism. It will not be a sin if the victorious proletariat puts the preachers of asceticism on bread and water.
Fascist sophists base all their “logical” constructions on the concept of integrity. The organically holistic worldview is opposed by them to the atomistic-mechanistic, in reality materialistic. In this special field, Professor Spann’s idea of an organism and wholeness, on which the fascist idea of community (Gemeinschaft) rests, has proved to be very fruitful as a weapon of blatant deception of the masses. The idea of integrity among fascists and fascist philosophers is the central “logical” category around which all their constructions revolve, around which all other concepts and categories are wound, such as nation, state, economy, the principle of hierarchy, etc. What does the concept of integrity mean for the fascists? Applied, say, to an economy or a nation? To this the fascists give the following answer: the economy (or nation) is an organic integrity, a specific quality that has a certain spiritual, but hidden mysterious meaning, which we cannot comprehend with rational knowledge, which we irrationally, so to speak, anticipate. With this, quite deliberately, an impenetrable veil is thrown over reality, covering the true, actual relations of the various classes of the capitalist economic system. These real relations of various classes to the instruments and means of production, property relations, the system of exploitation, etc., in a word, everything that makes up the content of the economy is declared a secret. And the entire ideology of fascism is a kind of system of prohibitions (taboos). It is forbidden ... to really touch everything that is subject to protection by the bourgeoisie: property, class relations, the origin of power, etc.), prohibits rational research and study, because integrity is irrational in its very essence, constituting a secret where knowledge is tantamount to insulting a deity. Any integrity is declared to be fundamentally unknowable, not subject to the laws of causality, but to some special mystical laws of fate and mysterious meaning. Integrity – whether it be an organism, a nation, or a state – is distinguished by absolute unity, excluding any relatively independent meaning of parts. For example, a nation is treated as an organism (and therefore unity), in which individuals or entire social classes play the role of organs, individual members, existing only for the sake of the whole and therefore completely dissolving in it. Both individuals and social classes, according to this philosophy of integrity, must see the meaning of their existence in the existence of the whole and eternally bring themselves into life for the sake of the well-being of this whole, which is actually revealed, naturally, as a class organization (the notorious fascist Gemeinschaft, community), in which the dominance belongs to the bourgeoisie.
Thus, all the chatter about the qualitative nature of integrity, about its indestructibility, unity, organicity, etc., has as its goal to instill in the masses the idea of absolute solidarity of interests of all members, or organs, of the whole, that is, of bourgeois society. In fact, this means the slavish subordination of the working people to the interests of the ruling class. The working people must be imbued with the conviction that their existence has no independent meaning and significance, but only a derivative meaning, since they serve the whole, that is, bourgeois society. So, the fascists have all the concepts and categories of their ideology adapted to fulfill one single task - to protect the interests of capital. Concrete conclusions from the idea of integrity are reduced by the fascists to the following thesis; the relationship between entrepreneurs and workers follows from their mutual belonging to a single supreme, divine integrity and their mutual responsibility for the prosperity of the nation, state and national economy. Any integrity or community has an ideal eternal meaning, therefore, it cannot be considered as a means to achieve material goals. The German nation, as a specific and unique integrity, has its vocation in revealing its inner spiritual meaning and ideal unity, in contrast from others nations, for example the French and the British, who, according to the fascist philosophers of Germany, are mired in the mud of selfishness, materialism and economism. Naturally, the German God, as Schwarz explains, requires every German to serve the nation, the fatherland, the state, for the German nation, as a divine integrity, is the abode of God. And every true German, accordingly, must be a fascist. If a nation and a race are organic entities, organisms with a soul, then the whole matter of cognition comes down, from the point of view of the fascists, to various forms of reflection of this racial or national soul in science, philosophy, art, politics, etc. scientific objective truth, which they contemptuously treat as abstract. They stand on the basis of organic truth, this truth is innate to the race. Organic truth, of course, is not proved by logic, as Rosenberg says, but is confessed and affirmed by the national spirit. Therefore, for the Germans there are only German science, philosophy, art, socialism, which have nothing in common with the abstract Jewish-Marxist science and philosophy. Because of this, the theory of relativity is already unacceptable, as the fascist physicist Lenard says. The decisive criterion of organic truth is how much it is capable of increasing the inner values of the race, increasing its strength and power. In a word, organic truth is, in turn, a means of promoting the success of the struggle of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat and other peoples.
Fascism, being a product of decaying and dying capital, gave birth to the most rotten, the most vile ideology. Fascism brings death and destruction with it. Fascism attacks first of all the advanced revolutionary workers and the advanced intelligentsia, striving for their physical destruction. Fascism is a mortal enemy of the working class and all working people. It is the mortal enemy of the true progress of science, art, literature and all culture. Fascism rightly sees in Bolshevism its main enemy, the bearer of all the great revolutionary and progressive trends of our time, both in economics and politics, as well as in science, philosophy, art and literature. Deriving historically Bolshevism and Marxism-Leninism from the great revolutionary movements of the past, proving that it is a continuation of the ideas of the Enlightenment era, the era of the French Revolution of the late 18th century. etc., the fascists are thinking to discredit Bolshevism. In fact, this only exposes the reactionary essence of fascism, which seeks to destroy all the great achievements of mankind and to revive medieval barbarism and obscurantism. Bolshevism is proud to be the true and only legitimate heir to all the great achievements of mankind. The proletariat is the only class that is called upon to renew the world, to rid mankind of the fascist filth and to mobilize around itself, as a hegemon, all working people to defeat fascism. Fascism is currently the greatest danger and threat to all working mankind and all of its culture.
The Seventh World Congress of the Communist International therefore drew up a general plan for an offensive against fascism. The unity of action of the proletariat on a national and international scale, said Comrade Dimitrov in his report, is a powerful weapon that makes the working class capable not only of a successful defense, but also of a successful counter-offensive against fascism, against the class enemy. By bitter experience, the broadest masses of the working people are convinced of the righteousness of the Communists. They realize more clearly that a united front of workers, relying on the sympathy of all working people, can successfully resist the onslaught of fascism or overthrow it where it is already in power. The Social Democracy bears historical responsibility for the split of the proletariat, for the fragmentation and, consequently, weakening of its forces, for the defeat of the proletariat in a number of countries, for the policy of Social Democracy split the proletariat and paved the way for fascism.
In the beginning of the turn of the broad masses of workers from reformism to revolutionary struggle, the achievements of our socialist system played a decisive role. The workers and working people of the whole world have become convinced, again not from books, but from the practice of our socialist construction, that socialism is not an abstract theory, but already a living reality of our great country, which not only does not know unemployment, but where the poverty of the people has been eliminated where every person is a full-fledged citizen, where the workers are the owners of all wealth. The victory of socialism in the USSR, Comrade Manuilsky said in his report at the 7th Congress of the Communist International, has created conditions for such an increase in the material well-being of the masses and their cultural level, which no capitalist country in the world has ever seen. Only now can we put before ourselves in all its magnitude in the center of all our thoughts and deeds, concern for a person. Man is not the dung of history, as fascism proclaims, the human mass is not an object for the whip of a fascist corporal who imagined himself to be a Nietzschean superman, he is not a slave who builds the Egyptian pyramids, he is not an appendage to the capitalist machine to create a free life for a bunch of parasites, he is not an object of exploitation by the slave owner, feudal lord, capitalist. Man is the creator of socialism, the creator of a new social system. For the first time in history, man has been put in his place. He is the blacksmith of his own destiny and his history, he is the master of the socialist machine. Socialism is for him, he himself is the great goal of socialism.
The workers and laboring people of the whole world, seeing these colossal gains of our socialist country, on the one hand, and the regime of lawlessness, exploitation, slavery, poverty, prevailing in the capitalist countries, on the other, are beginning to understand more and more that the only path leading them to liberation is the path followed by the Russian workers and laboring people, the path along which they were led by the great creators of socialism, Lenin and Stalin, this is the path of the revolutionary class struggle. The immediate task of the working class and all working people is to overthrow fascism in those countries where it is in power and block its path to power where it is preparing to seize it. Without for a moment weakening the struggle for our ultimate goal, for Soviet power, for socialism, for genuine democracy of the working people, the proletariat, under the leadership of its Communist Party, will strive to use every transitional stage that will quickly bring the masses to the dictatorship of the proletariat and which makes it possible to create more favorable conditions for the struggle for Soviet power, for the struggle for socialism.
The anti-fascist popular front, the main pivot of which is the united workers’ front, which ensures the hegemony of the proletariat at all stages of the struggle, is at the moment the main link that makes it possible to pull out the entire chain. The working class, taking the path to mobilize the allies for the general offensive against fascism, must mobilize and deceived and oppressed by fascism, the petty-bourgeois strata of the population, the peasantry, the petty urban bourgeoisie, intellectuals, oppressed minorities, etc. The Anti-Fascist Popular Front aims for the protection of the immediate economic and the political interests of the people, that is, the overwhelming majority of the population, for the protection and in the struggle to preserve and expand the democratic rights of workers. In a hard and long struggle, the working people have won for themselves those crumbs of political rights that bourgeois democracy grants them, and they will not yield them without a fight. The disagreements between communists and social democrats on the issue of bourgeois democracy and the dictatorship of the proletariat boiled down to the fact that Social Democracy saw in bourgeois democracy the state form in which the transition to socialism is supposedly taking place. Today, in the practice of the USSR, it has been proved even to all the blind that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the only political instrument of the socialist revolution and that it is on the basis of the dictatorship of the proletariat that a genuine socialism, that is, a new, higher form of democracy, is growing.
Bourgeois democracy, which was considered a bulwark of freedom and socialism by Social Democracy, is in fact only a form of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. But everyone understands that where fascism dominates or where it is close to seizing power, the proletariat is obliged to defend and fight for the preservation and expansion of the democratic rights of the people, as the unlimited dictatorship of the most brutal elements of the bourgeoisie much worsens the conditions for the existence, development and struggle of the proletariat in comparison with bourgeois democracy. The Communists will therefore support the creation of a united anti-fascist front government. Since such a government will really fight against the enemies of the people, will give freedom of action to the working class and the Communist Party, we, the Communists, will support it in every possible way and, as soldiers of the revolution, will fight in the first line of fire. But we openly say to the masses: this government cannot bring final salvation. It is incapable of overthrowing the class rule of the exploiters, and therefore cannot completely eliminate the danger of fascist counter-revolution either. Therefore, it is necessary to prepare for the socialist revolution! Only Soviet power will bring salvation. The Anti-Fascist Popular Front will need to hasten the victory of the working class. It is quite understandable that in order to carry out the anti-fascist popular front and in order to destroy the fascist filth, it is necessary first of all to wrest the petty-bourgeois middle strata of the population from under the demagogic influence of fascism, pulling them over to the side of the popular front.
If we bring to the attention of the masses who follow fascism, Mr. Hitler’s “accusations” of the Bolsheviks that they put the interests of the masses, the interests of the majority of the people, at the center of all their aspirations, as opposed to the fascists, it cannot but have a huge impact on the masses. Or take the fascist preaching of asceticism, that is, the elevation to a principle, to a worldview, to a theory of renunciation of life, of the beggarly, hungry existence of the masses, so that gentlemen capitalists could enjoy all the joys of life at the expense of the fooled slaves of capital. This preaching of asceticism cannot but arouse the indignation of the suffering masses. The nation is made up of the toiling masses, not a handful of parasites sucking the blood of the people. And therefore the working masses are the creators and bearers of the culture of the given people. Everything great that was created by this people is the property of the working masses, who alone are the heirs of the great past of the people. Engels, back in the 1880s, proclaimed that the only heir to classical German philosophy is the German working class. Now, using the example of the Soviet Union, the whole world sees that the proletariat, coming to power, not only preserves its cultural heritage, not only assimilates it, but raises the entire culture to its highest flowering.
Only a proletarian revolution, says Comrade Dimitrov in his report, can prevent the decline of culture, raise it to the highest flowering as a genuinely popular culture - national in form and socialist in content, which, before our very eyes, under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, is being carried out in the Union of Soviet socialist republics. In countries where barbaric fascism reigns supreme or where it threatens to seize power, the revolutionary proletariat engages in a mortal struggle with it for the salvation of culture, for the salvation of science, literature, art from fascist executioners who burn great works of human thought at the stake and replace science with false myths about blood and race. We communists are fighting for the liberation of science, literature, art, and all culture in general from the shackles of decaying capitalism. Our goal is the proletarian revolution, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the abolition of classes and the building of a socialist society, on the basis of which a new, socialist culture flourishes, as we see in the example of the Soviet Union. However, in our struggle against the ideology of fascism, we also have allies in all honest scientists, artists, writers, who cannot help but see that bloody barbaric fascism brings with it the death of culture, that it strangles every free thought and that it destroys all the conquests of human genius. Under the pressure of irrefutable facts of life and science, individual prominent scientists and even entire groups of them in various countries – in France, England, America, Japan, not to mention Germany – are beginning to take a serious interest in Marxism. Among scientists there are many who in their field unconsciously take materialistic positions. This, incidentally, was shown by the XV World Congress of Physiologists. Comrade Molotov emphasized this side of things very clearly in his speech at the reception of the delegates of the International Congress of Physiologists: Modern, basically materialistic, physiology, penetrating ever more deeply into the essence of the life processes of the human body, into the life processes of animals and plants, does, together with the development of other sciences, a great liberating work for the mental cleavage of man, freeing him from all this mold of mysticism of religious vestiges. The emancipatory work of genuine science has long ago come into conflict with the class interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie. This internal contradiction is illustrated with particular clarity by fascism and its ideology. Comrade Molotov, in his speech, expressed another very important idea, which we consider necessary to cite here. Having emphasized that in the Soviet Union we have concluded a close alliance of labor and science, he at the same time pointed out that the working masses, freed from the domination of the rich parasites, see their bright future in the growth of the culture of peoples of all nationalities, in the flourishing of Soviet and world science.
The Soviet Union is not only a bulwark of peace, not only a bulwark of socialism, but also a bulwark of culture. It is vitally interested in the flourishing of Soviet and world science. Therefore, the masters of culture of the whole world, representatives of genuine science and artistic creativity are drawn to the Soviet Union, express their sympathy for it more and more, starting to understand more and more that the salvation of culture and science is possible in their homeland only on the path of a close union of science and labor, a single front of scientists, artists, writers with the proletariat. The International Congress for the Defense of Culture, held in Paris in June 1935, was a huge historical event in this respect. It showed that thinkers and artists, seeing all the barbarism that fascism brings with it, strive to link their fate with the proletariat and communism, that the eyes of all true masters of culture are turned to the great Soviet Union, which is the only stronghold of the world that has established a true brotherhood of peoples, which created the conditions for the all-round flourishing of the personality on the basis of its harmonious fusion with the collective, on the basis of genuine socialist humanism.
Despite all the efforts of the fascists to preserve their mass social base by deceiving the masses, the masses are becoming more and more convinced of the true nature of fascism. The meanness and falsity of the social demagogy of fascism is being revealed more and more, says the resolution of the VII Congress of the Comintern. Fascism not only did not bring the masses the promised improvement in their material situation, but further increased the profits of the capitalists by lowering the living standards of the working masses, intensified their exploitation by a handful of financial magnates, and carried out their further robbery in favor of capital. The disappointment of the petty-bourgeois strata of the city and the working peasantry, deceived by the fascists, is growing. The mass base of fascism is decaying and narrowing. The Congress, however, warns against dangerous illusions of the automatic collapse of the fascist dictatorship and reminds that it is the proletarian revolution which constitutes the only force capable of decisively overthrowing fascism.
For all working people there is one way out - going over to the side of the revolutionary proletariat to fight fascism. On the day when the fascist reptile is crushed, all working mankind will sigh freely and joyfully, for the victory over fascism will open up a new perspective for it: the perspective of our great Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is shining brightly on the path of the world proletariat. Under the leadership of the Communist International and its great leader, Comrade Stalin, communism will triumph throughout the world.
1.Deutsche Sozialisten am Werk. Ein sozlalistisches Bekenntnis deutscher Maenner, 1935, pp. 13-14
2.Rosenberg, Der Mythus des XX Jahrhunderts, 1934, pp. 533-537
3. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1933, p. 315
4.Max Wundt, Deutsche Weltanschauung, p. 162
5.H. Meyer, Der deutsche Mensch, Buch I, p. 117
6.Banse, Wehrwissenschaft, 1933, pp. 136-137
7.Weippert, Das Prinzip der Ierarchie, p. 156
8.Werner Sombart, Deutscher Sozialismus, p. 319
9.Hermann Schwarz, Nationalsozialistische Weltanschauung. 1933, p. 89
10.Franz Ettig, Der Nationalsozialismus und die Wiederentdeckung der Seele, 1933, p. 6
11.Hans Hofer, Die Weltanschauung der Neuzeit
12.Ludwig Klages, Vom Wesen des Bewustseins, p. 84
13.Othmar Spann, Gesellschaftsphilosophie, p. 155