2.
Fascism and Capitalism
-by
Marceau Pivert
LE AMAZING POWER
of the Nazi war machine has led certain writers to
ask whether it is not the fact that Germany has gone beyond the stage of
capitalism that makes it so much stronger than the 'democracies.' This is,
specifically, the theory developed by Dwight Macdonald in the May-June,
1941,
number of
PARTISAN REVIEW.
In the following notes, I should like
to consider whether fascism (like Stalinism) is today a
po.st-capitalist
system of 'bureaucratic collectivism.'
The most striking feature of early capitalism, of course, is competi–
tion. Competition within the ruling class, between groups of salaried
employees, and between the owners and the non-owners. A mighty indus–
trial development accompanies this 'free competition.' A creative frenzy
seems to seize on the entire globe. The workers are stripped of their old
traditions and guild safeguards and flung into the battle.
(It
was the
French Revolution which suppressed the privileges of the guilds by the
Le
Chatelier laws.) The captains of industry set out to discover new
countries, dig canals, build railroads, breed one machine out of another,
excavate continents. Competition is the supreme law, the quest for profit
the sole motive force. All this means simply that the strongest, the best
equipped and armed
are free-to
exploit '.inferior races' and penniless
workers. From the purely moral and philosophic standpoint,
fascism
clearly has not gone beyond this system.
It
has simply carried
it
to a
remarkable pitch of perfection.
.But this early phase of anarchic development speedily creates new
economic ties between competitors. The great banking and industrial
powers .ally themselves into antagonistic groups, first within the frame–
work of the nation, then of the empire, and finally their empires range
themselves for the fight to divide the world by force of arms.
It could not
be otherwise under capitalism: certain nations must preserve
and
if pos–
sible extend their sources of raw materials, their markets, their fields for
investment; the others must try to conquer these, under pain of economic
strangulation.
The 1914-1918 war was fought to settle, provisionally, this
conflict. Just as that war did not cause the collapse of capitalism, so the
present war may be expected to have the same kind of consequences,
aggravated by the prodigious increase in the forces of production.
But the force of capitalist expansion is not only 'extensive,' it is also
'intensive.' The ruling classes not only prepare to fight for markets, but
at
tke same time
they must
organize
mutually in order to produce more
profitably and efficiently. In certain circumstances, they realize it is much
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