SOCIALISM AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
2'53
pares to take into protective custody the entire North and South
American continents. In sixty days the whole pattern of national–
ism has been revealed to be obsolete, and the nations of the world
are rapidly assembling into a few vast continental empires, each
dominated by a single great power.
"BLACK
SOCIALISM"
The Nazis have presented to the ruling classes
of Europe and America their own visages in
a mirror. And they draw back in horror. But
the image is true: this is the only way out for their society. It is
this consciousness which paralyzes the resistance of the capitalist
democracies. A social system cannot fight against its own future.
For all their operatic battlecries, statesmen like Roosevelt and
Churchill and Reynaud recognize in their enemy the characteristics
of the system of class rule they are defending, only carried out to
the terrible ultimate conclusion. The same economic tendencies as
lead to the swallowing of hundreds of little firms by a single great
monopoly have now led to the control of the entire productive
orces of the nation by a single "super-trust," an uneasy amalgam
f bureaucrats, army generals, and finance capitalists. Like its
rototype in industry, this super-trust carries on the national pro–
uction in a much more rationalized, coordinated, planned and
urposeful way than is possible in a free capitalist society.
For
yea~s
Marxists have been quite correctly pointing out
at, economically, capitalism is ripe and rotten ripe for socialism.
e great tragedy of our age is that, for various historical reasons
which the tragic degeneration of the Soviet Union was perhaps
e most important, the working class has been unable to over–
ow capitalism and bring into being the long overdue socialist
iety. Unable to give birth to a natural child, history has
elped the monster, fascism, which combines the centralized state
wer and conscious economic planning of socialism with the most
"deous social and political features of decaying capitalism. It is
sort
of "black socialism," the best answer that the historically
olete bourgeoisie can give to the imperious demand of modem
iety to be
organized.
Fascism can thus organize national production because it has
ught under state control the class conflict which paralyzes the
pitalist democracies today. Here, too, it is a grim caricature of
