-THE DISCUSSION CONTINUED
425
bounds of anarchic private economy. Every one must submit to the gen·
er~l
plan. True. But true also
in
England, and soon in America as well.
The question is:
who
directs the ecorwmy,
and
for what end?
A bureau·
cratic caste bound to the dominant portion of the capitalist class directs
the German economy
towards imperialist war.
Since 1935, under the
direction of General Thomas, all production, all capital accumulation, all
distribution is regulated by the requirements of imperialist war. Compe·
tition, suppressed within, appears more ravenous than ever on the field of
foreign policy. Hitler lays down the law to the German capitalists and to
those of the occupied nations, but the capitalist regime which surrounds
him, which impregnates him, which still survives him, in its turn dictates
to him its unalterable orders. Monopoly of hanks, of production, of
brain and brawn-what is it all used for? For destruction, for the aggra–
vation of the deepest kind of antagonisms.
It
is no more possible for him
to suppress capitalism than it is to escape from competition to the death
with other imperialist powers. Competition is everywhere.
It exists also between the German workers and those of other lands.-–
It is, in fact, on an enormously magnified scale, the problem of the organ·
ized printer.s and the unorganized office workers. The workers of Germany
selfishly wish to live at the expense of Polish, Czech, French workers.
Part of the British workingclass lived quite well off the exploitation of
hundreds of millions of colonial slaves. But what is the upshot of this
forgetfulness not of a
sentiment
of solidarity but of a
mechamsm
of com–
pensation? The continuation of war between the workers, since they have
adopted as their own the sordid interests of their masters. But everything
will be paid for in the end! Because they have forgotten the basic com–
munity of their interests, the workers see themselves condemned either to
rule by force or to he exploited like the so-called 'inferior' races. Fascism
has obviously carried the system to a monstrously refined extreme. But it
has not yet escaped from the phenomenon of compensation, which loads
onto the hacks of the weaker the weight of the advantages temporarily
obtained by the stronger. The 'weaker' are today one hundred million
anti-Nazi Europeans. The problem is not solved. The field of competition
has simply been shifted. There is no 'New Order,' merely a stage of super–
barbarism in the old order. This conclusion imposes itself all the more
imperiously because the hour of a worldwide economic order has struck.
Fascism is not a post-capitalist regime. It is a form of capitalist
degeneration.
If
one deduced from an analysis of a workers' cooperative
or a trade union or a municipal enterprise that such organisms had 'gone
beyond capitalism,' because one does not find
in
their internal economy
any free market, any competition or sale of labor power-then one would
be making the same mistake as to isolate, for analysis, fascist economy
from world economy. Today it is world economy which dominates. Even
in
wartime, through the medium of international trusts, it continues to rule.
One huge area is claimed to have escaped from the world market:
Soviet Russia. Has Stalin built a socialist society? or even a 'post-capi-
