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FASCISM
1. From Napoleon to Nashville
2. Project Democracy: The Fascist Corporate State, April 1987.
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NAPOLEON BONAPARTE - BRITISH ASSET
This address was part of the "Napoleon to Nashville" panel of the ICLC
Conference held in northern Virginia over the Labor Day weekend of 1996. It
was published in New Federalist, September 23, 1996
Napoleon's family background is that his father and mother were part of
a Corsican liberation movement which was an asset of British
intelligence and the British Admiralty.
The leader of this Corsican liberation front controlled by London was
Pasquale Paoli, a celebrated figure of the British-controlled
Enlightenment. Napoleon's father, Carlo Buonaparte, was the secretary
and right-hand man of Pasquale Paoli. For about twenty years after the
close of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, Corsica was that
the island remained a nominal possession of Genoa, but there were
French garrisons in all the coastal cities. The mountainous interior of
the island was controlled by Pasquale Paoli and his pro-British
liberation front. Carlo Buonaparte was so devoted to Paoli that in 1767
he brought his entire family, including wife Letizia, to live in
Paoli's mountain stronghold and capital of Corte. Letizia Buonaparte,
Napoleon's mother, was the prettiest woman present when Paoli received
an envoy of the Bey of Tunis.
By the middle of of the seventeen hundreds, Horace Walpole, the brother
of the British prime minister, was paying close attention to Corsica.
Paoli was presented to Europe as the greatest statesman and
constitutionalist of the age. Frederick the Great of Prussia lionized
Paoli and his "little handful of brave men" who were fighting for
liberty. Voltaire joined in this chrous of praise. Voltaire and
Rousseau like Corsica because they saw the shepherds in its mountains
as semi-civilized. Brigandage and robbery were widespread. Murders and
vendettas accounted for 800 homicides per year. The Corscians were
closer to the state of nature and therefore better, thought Rousseau.
The leading publicity man for Pasquale Paoli was James Boswell, the
most famous biographer in the English language and, to put it mildly, a
British agent. Boswell visited at the time that the Buonaparte family
was living in Paoli's mountain stronghold; little Napoleon had not yet
been born. Boswell's Account of Corsica was published with the help of
David Hume in 1768, and it caused a sensation. It was in the same year
that French Foreign Minister Choiseul ordered French forces to wipe out
Paoli. Napoleon Buonaparte was born the same year. Paoli fled to London
where he lived comfortably among the oligarchs for the next twenty
years; he went back for the revolution.
Corsica was thus a laboratory for social experiments by the main
operatives of the Anglo-Venetian Enlightenment. Rousseau revealed
something important when he wrote in his Social Contract of 1762 that
he had "a presentiment that this little island will one day astonish
Europe." Napoleon's father worked for a British agent. And in Corsica,
family is everything.
Napoleon's family were members of the petty nobility - the level of a
British squireen. On Napoleon's father's side, the Buonaparte family
claimed to descend from Genoese mercenaries who came to Corsica soon
after 1490 or 1492. Note that by this time Genoa was a junior partner
of Venice. On Napoleon's mother's side, the Ramolino claimed to be
descended also from a Venetian, the Count of Coll'Alto. The Buonaparte
and Ramolino families had intermarried with other families of the
Corsican nobility, including the family variously called Paravisino,
Paravisini, Paravicino, Paraviccini, Pallavicino, or Pallvicini. There
were also Pietrasanta, Bozzi, and Ornano. The Pozzo di Borgo lived on
the top floor of Napoleon's house; father Carlo once sued the Pozzo di
Borgo for emptying a chamber pot on him. Later Pozzo di Borgo, as a
Russia czarist minister, would help rule Paris after Napoleon's fall.
The Buonaparte family strategy was the seizure of political power in an
independent Corsica that had kicked out the French while working in
alliance with the British. To this Napoleon added the results of his
own studies. He was fascinated by Plutarch. Indeed, old Paoli once told
Napoleon that he, Napoleon, was not a modern man, but a rebirth from
the age of Plutarch. Napoleon's model of the good society was the
dictatorship of Sparta. Napoleon believed that man had no rights.
Napoleon's intense dislike of the French was increased by his
experience at school in France, at Brienne, where he made his famous
pledge to cause the French all the harm he possibly could. When the
French Revolution broke out, Napoleon first sought to use his rank of
lieutenant of artillery to take over Corsica. He tried to take over by
getting himself elected commander of the new Corsican national guard.
He came in second. During this time he wrote to his superior officers
in Paris and talked of France as "your nation." Since he could not take
power by the ballot box, on Easter Sunday 1792 Napoleon tried a
military coup, leading Corsican forces against a fort flying the French
flag. He failed. His third attempt was to use the Jacobin Clubs of
Corsica, which were controlled by his brothers, to get Paoli -- who was
back in power -- arrested for high treason. Napoleon, now under a
French flag, failed for a second time to take the citadel, and failed a
third time to take power. His whole family had to flee to France to
escape Paoli's vendetta.
Napoleon made headway by his willingness to use his cannons against the
mob. Napoleon exalted the revolution and raved "Marat and Robespierre,
those are my saints." (DS14) When Robespierre and the other terrorists
fell, Napoleon shifted to Barras. Soon Napoleon got a command in Italy,
and began to win victories against the inept Austrians with the armies
Carnot had created.
The post-1795 Directory was a weak and hated government. There was a
lower house called the Five Hundred and an Upper House called the
Ancients, and an executive of 5 Directors. One Director was Carnot.
Another Director was Napoleon's protector, the stockjobber Barras. The
Directory regime was a storm cellar for very unpopular regicides and
terrorists who knew that if the King came back, they would be executed.
The discredited Directory, fearing royalist restoration, needed the
gripping exploits of a victorious general. Of these there was soon only
one: Bonaparte. The regicides wanted war, and Bonaparte could be relied
on to deliver.
With the treaty of Campo-Formio in October, 1797, Austria dropped out
of the war and England stood alone against France. The First Coalition
was over, and the British predicament resembled that of May, 1940: a
cross-Channel invasion was on the agenda. The British were very
vulnerable. Pitt had financed the First Coalition against France with
loans, and prices began to inflate. In February 1797 the Bank of
England defaulted on gold payments to private citizens. Crops were bad,
and bread was scarce and expensive. At this time Britain became
permanently dependent on imported food. Famine threatened, and there
were mutinies in the Royal Navy.
There was also a rebellion brewing in Ireland under the leadership of
the United Irish Society and Theobald Wolf Tone. The French had
actually gotten 15,000 men to Ireland's Bantry Bay in 1796, but had not
landed because of bad weather. At the end of 1797 and the beginning of
1798 the Irish met with Bonaparte and Talleyrand, appealing for the
help of a French Army. A French landing would have led to a general
uprising and the ouster of the British. Pitt recognized there was no
military way to stop such a landing.
At the same time, the Directory named Napoleon the commander of the
Army of England massing in the channel ports for a cross-channel
invasion. The crucial period is the end of 1797 and the first months of
1798. Napoleon reported that he was having trouble finding enough ships
to transport the invasion force.
At this point Talleyrand came forward with his idea of dropping the
cross-channel invasion, and invading Egypt instead. At this time there
were no British in Egypt, and no Suez canal. Talleyrand claimed the
idea was to take Egypt as a way of getting to India. Napoleon supported
Talleyrand's Egyptian plan, and reported that the cross-channel
invasion was impossible. Despite important opposition in the Directory,
the decision was made in early March, 1798 to send a fleet and an army
not to England or Ireland, but to Egypt. Two months later, in May, tens
of thousands of Irish patriots, Catholics and Protestants, rose against
the hated British. The Irish were slaughtered; they never had enough
guns, and no sufficient French forces ever landed, although a small
French force did show how pathetic the British land forces were before
it was surrounded.
In Egypt, Nelson destroyed the French fleet at the battle of the Nile,
and Napoleon abandoned his army there, where it surrendered in 1801.
One fleet and one army lost, and nothing gained. But much more was
lost: Turkey and Russia joined together against the intruder Napoleon,
and the French defeats encouraged Russia and Austria to join with the
British to form the Second Coalition.
The Egyptian fiasco had led to a strategic disaster. It had saved the
British from possible destruction. But it helped Napoleon's career:
after he had shown that he had no intention of fighting the British, he
was groomed by Talleyrand for his seizure of power in November, 1799 --
the coup of Brumaire. Napoleon later brought Talleyrand into his
government. Talleyrand was a renegade Catholic bishop, mad for money
and power.
He was pro-British in the way that every oligarch as, and more.
Talleyrand began working against Napoleon as an agent of the Czar of
Russia by 1808. Talleyrand lasted far longer than Napoleon. He was
still in power in 1831, when he created modern Belgium for the British.
To reassure the old Jacobins, Napoleon brought in Joseph Fouche'. At
one point in the revolution, the Terror had demanded the wiping out of
the city of Lyon in the same way that Hitler ordered the destruction of
Warsaw in World War II. Fouche had directed the massacres. Fouche
stayed in power until 1820.
Napoleon also got support in coup from the veteran revolutionary Abbe
Sieyes, a regicide and the theoretician of the Third estate. Napoleon
was named First Consul for 10 years. Soon he held a referendum to get
himself named First Consul for life. Then, in 1804, he won a plebiscite
saying that "the government of the republic is confided to an Emperor."
At his coronation, Napoleon forced the Pope to attend, but he crowned
himself with a pagan crown of golden laurel. He had one hand on his
sword-hilt to show that his regime was based on military force.
After this Napoleon went off the deep end of his megalomania. At Tilsit
In February, 1807 he attempted to divide Europe with Czar Alexander of
Russia. In the same year he committed the folly of invading Spain and
Portugal. Around this same time Napoleon launched his Continental
System, which forbad the importation of British goods into any
French-controlled or French-allied part of Europe. The British
responded with blockade. And without railroads, it was impossible to
run the European economy by land transportation alone. Despite de facto
help from Thomas Jefferson's embargo policy, the Continental System
backfired. Every time Napoleon conquered a European country, the
British seized its colonies. Napoleon defeated Russia, Austria and
Prussia, all sometime enemies of the British, while the British
conquered the world outsuide of Europe. But Napoleon got to marry a
Hapsburg archduchess.
Napoleon ousted Pope Pius VII as head of the papal states. Pius VII
then excommunicated Napoleon. Napoleon then jailed the pope in Savona,
northern Italy. For a time Napoleon toyed with the idea of forcing the
papacy to relocate to the imperial capital, Paris.
Napoleon built up a totalitarian police state based on conscription -
the draft. He always needed soldiers. His anti- feudal, anti-union and
anti-guild policies reduced populations to an atomized mass which could
not resist. Serfs cannot be drafted. Napoleon freed serfs so they could
be.
Napoleon created a new imperial nobility. Talleyrand was made the
Prince of Benevento. Fouche, the Hebertist of the Terror, was now
solemnly addressed as the Duke of Otranto. Napoleon placed his parvenu
relatives on the thrones of Europe. His sister Pauline married Prince
Borghese; she was a nymphomaniac. His sister Elisa became Grand Duchess
of Tuscany; she patronized Paganini and made money through mass
production of marble busts of Napoleon. Paranoid and syphilitic brother
Louis was made King of Holland; Louis drifted off to a spa and the
kingdom was liquidated in 1810. Napoleon III was Louis's son. Gen.
Murat married Napoleon's sister Caroline, and they were made monarchs
of Naples. Murat fought well in battle but by 1813 he had betrayed
Napoleon to Metternich; he was angry he had not been made King of
Poland. General Bernadotte married Napoleon's old girlfriend Desiree
Clary. To console the jilted Deesiree, Napoleon made Bernadotte King of
Sweden. His failure to bring Swedish troops into Napoleon's 1812
invasion of Russia helped to doom that campaign. Josephine's son Eugene
became Viceroy of northern Italy. Jerome Bonaparte became King of
Westphalia, in Germany. Jerome was a hedonist; his nickname was Fifi.
Jerome commanded one wing of the Russian invasion; his bungling was
another key factor in Napoleon's disaster. Westphalia collapsed in
1813. Elder brother Joseph was made King of Naples, and later King of
Spain, where his incompetent meddling guaranteed that the Duke of
Wellington and the guerrilla would defeat the French. In 1814 Joseph
sealed Napoleon's doom by surrendering Paris. Napoleon called him a
"coglione" and a "pig." Mother Letizia never learned French; she went
around saying "Longo mai" in her Corsican dialect. Longo mai meant,
let's hope it lasts. In case it didn't Napoleon builty up a stach of
500 million gold francs under the Tuileries.
Napoleon coined the term United States of Europe. When Fouche had
warned Napoleon not to attack Russia while the Spanish campaign was
going poorly. Napoleon replied: "I need 800,000 troops and I have them.
I can drag all Europe after me and in these days I regard Europe as a
rotten old whore who has to do my pleasure when I possess such an
army...There must be one legal code, one court of appeals and one
currency for all Europe. The European nations must be melted into a
single nation and Paris must become capital of the world. Can I help it
if so much power is sweeping me on to a world dictatorship ?" (DM129)
Adolphe Thiers wrote in his History of the Consulate and the Empire of
"the cry rising up from every family in Paris as in the remotest
provinces" was "'He wants to sacrifice all our children to his mad
ambition.'" In 1813 Metternich told Napoleon that his soldiers were
children. Napoleon raged that he "grew up on battlefields and
didn't mind if he lost a million men." Napoleon viewed the French as a
vehicle for his ambition, much as the Austrian Hitler viewed the
Germans.
Napoleon was a one-world imperialist and anti-nationalist whose
disagreement with the British was only a matter of WHERE the capital of
the world empire would be -- London or Paris, a mere detail. As his
marshals told him, the distance from Madrid to Moscow turned out to be
too far.
Napoleon sought to build a world empire based on the Reign of Terror.
This aspect is captured in Abel Gance's 1927 silent film on the early
career of Napoleon, in the scene in which Napoleon visits the deserted
hall of the French National Convention which had been the seat of the
reign of Terror a few years before. The ghosts of the now-dead
Terrorists, Danton, Robespierre, Marat, St. Juste, appear and demand
that Napoleon pledge his loyalty to their heritage of inhuman madness.
Napoleon's lines as you will read them in the film are a direct quote,
but the concluding part is missing. Napoleon's conclusion is as
follows:
"The first impetus has been given; and after the fall and the
disappearance of my system, it seems to me that the only way in
which an equilibrium can be achieved in Europe is through a league
of nations."
So spoke Napoleon almost one century before Woodrow Wilson, Versailles,
and the League of Nations.
End
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PROJECT DEMOCRACY'S PROGRAM:
THE FASCIST CORPORATE STATE
The following article by Tarpley appeared as Chapter V of the EIR
Special Report entitled Project Democracy: The "Parallel Government
Behind the Iran-Contra Affair," issued in April 1987.
Even in an epoch full of big lies like the late 20th century, it is
ironic that the financiers of the Trilateral Commission should have
chosen the name "Project Democracy" to denote their organized efforts
to install a fascist, totalitarian regime in the United States and a
fascist New Order around the world. It is ironic that so many of the
operatives engaged, in the name of "democracy" in this insidious,
creeping coup d'état against the United States Constitution should be
firstand second- generation followers of the Soviet Russian universal
fascist, Nikolai Bukharin. It is ironic that Israel, the country in the
modern world singled out more than any other by Project Democracy as a
model of the triumph of democratic values, should turn out to be a
corporate state with marked similarities to Mussolini's Italy.
Though ironic, all these propositions are indeed true. Project
Democracy is fascist, designed to culminate in the imposition of
fascist institutions on the United States, institutions that combine
the distilled essence of the Nazi Behemoth and the Bolshevik Leviathan.
Project Democracy is high treason, a conspiracy for the overthrow of
the Constitution. An organization whose stock in trade is the
destabilization and the putsch in so many countries around the world
can hardly be expected to halt its operations as it returns to the U.S.
border. For Project Democracy, it can happen here, it will happen here.
The greatest obstacle to understanding the monstrous purpose that lurks
behind Project Democracy's bland and edifying label is the continued
ignorance on the part of the American public of the real nature of
20th-century totalitarian regimes. Despite the fact that Stalin
deliberately helped bring Hitler and the Nazis to power, despite the
Nazi-Communist alliance of 1939-41 under the Hitler- Stalin Pact,
despite Mussolini's close ties to Moscow, despite the deep affinity
between Nazi-fascists and communists demonstrated repeatedly in many
countries by mass exchanges of membership between political
organizations of the two persuasions, the average American still sees
communism and Nazism-fascism as polar opposites. The expression
"fascist" exists only as a strongly derogatory but very vague epithet,
empty of any precise political content.
In reality, Bolshevism and fascism, Bukharin and D'Annunzio, are
products of the Capri School, Siamese twins conceived in the Isle of
Capri's Grotto of Matromania by Venetian and Benedictine cultural-
political gamemasters. This can be shown by briefly examining Nazi-
communist ideology and economics. But in addition to ideology and
economics, there exist specifically Nazi-communist, totalitarian
institutional forms which can be objectively identified. A review of
the institutions of the corporate state as exemplified by D'Annunzio,
Mussolini, and Bukharin is an excellent preparation for recognizing the
corporate state in present-day Israel, and for discerning the outlines
of the ongoing Trilateral-Project Democracy fascist transformation of
the United States.
Nazi-communism is 20th-century totalitarianism. Although some writers
attempt to trace the origins of totalitarianism to models of the
Protestant Reformation or the French Jacobins, the search for the roots
of totalitarian regimes takes us totally outside of the confines of
Western, Augustinian civilization, outside of the world of Latin
Christendom. The model from which Western totalitarianism derives is to
be found in the separate, Byzantine-Orthodox civilization of Eastern
Europe. Byzantine-Orthodox civilization has been not just autocratic
and militaristic, but specifically totalitarian also, since no later
than the reign of the Emperor Diocletian in the second century A.D.
Although Hannah Arendt and her school never recognized it, Soviet
communism is only the form of totalitarian rule associated with the
Bolshevik dynasties of the Russian Empire.
"Totalitarianism" is much more than just a dictatorship or
authoritarian state. The totalitarian state seeks to dictate the
behavior of its inmates down to the most minute detail, and creates for
this purpose institutions that will allow that total surveillance and
total control. In Byzantine-Orthodox civilization and in the Western
totalitarianism copied from it, all departments of human endeavor,
including economics, religion, sports, marriage, and even thinking are
conceived of as departments of the state. Appropriate institutions are
required to mediate totalitarian control in each of these areas.
The starting point of Western civilization, as for example in the
writings of St. Augustine, is the God-like, creative individual, the
most precious resource of the society as a whole. Western civilization
seeks the highest development of the individual and the highest
development of the state as complementary objectives. The United States
Constitution is the finest instrument yet devised for pursuing these
inseparable goals. Western civilization in our era knows the state as
the constitutional republic, wherein the rights of the individual are
guaranteed. Within that framework the organizations of society, the
political parties, business enterprises and companies, trade unions,
churches, associations, societies, universities, local governments, and
families enjoy their independent existence. That is what a democratic
republic means.
In totalitarianism, by contrast, both the individual and society
disappear into the maw of the all-consuming Moloch, the state.
A Definition of Nazi-communism
Starting from these premises, it is possible to furnish a rough
definition of modern fascism or Nazi-communism, the regime toward which
Project Democracy is working. That definition contains the following
elements:
1) Totalitarian fascism is a system which seeks to mutilate,
mortify, and crush the Augustinian conception of the individual.
As in the writings of Mussolini's ideologue, Giovanni Gentile, or
in the ravings of Michael Ledeen, the aspirations of the
individual are rigidly subordinated to the exigencies of the
regime.
2) The fascist regime is a government controlled in practice by a
single party--a one-party state.
3) Fascist ideology, whatever its specific predicates, repudiates
human reason and exalts irrationalism and irrationalist violence,
often in the form of wanton military aggression and imperialism. A
fascist mass movement is the most aggressive form of militant
irrationalism. From Mussolini's Romanita through Hitler's
Herrenvolk to the Great Russian master race conception of "Moscow
the Third Rome," fascist ideology is based on notions of racial
superiority and race hatred, extreme chauvinism, and blood and
soil mysticism. Fascism is neo-pagan and ferociously hostile to
Augustinian Christianity, as can be shown from Mussolini's early
career and from Hitler's private conversations. This same
neo-paganism is perfectly expressed in the predilection of Russian
totalitarianism for the Russian Orthodox Church. In the Western
world, fascism can be correctly called the politics of cultural
despair.
4) Fascist economics is the murderous austerity associated with
the names of Hitler's finance minister, Hjalmar Schacht, and
Mussolini's finance minister, Count Giovanni Volpi di Misurata.
The final logic of fascist economics is the concentration camp,
the labor camp, the Gulag. Fascist irrationalism cannot tolerate
scientific rationality on a broad scale, and is therefore
correlated with hostility to technological innovation, and
permanent peasant backwardness in agriculture.
5) The institutions through which totalitarian control of economic
life is mediated merit special attention. In Eastern
totalitarianism, this is accomplished by making each branch of the
state-owned industries subject to the Council of Ministers and the
state planning authority, and thus to the party. At the same time,
the trade unions are the passive "transmission belt," in Lenin's
phrase, for party control. In totalitarian regimes in the Western
world, masses of labor have often been simply dragooned through
institutions such as Dr. Ley's Nazi Labor Front. But the
characteristic institutions of fascism in the West are those of
the so-called corporate state. In the fascist regime of Italy,
Vichy France, and many others, it was the corporations which were
to bring together ownership and employees, management and labor
under the direct control of the one-party state for the purpose of
extending totalitarian domination into the nooks and crannies of
everyday economic life while at the same time fragmenting
potentially rebellious workers along the lines of branches of
industry.
The corporatist principle
This corporatist principle in fascism is so neglected and misunderstood
that it merits our special attention, especially because the form of
fascist totalitarianism which Project Democracy aims at is of a
corporatist variety. The word corporation here has nothing to do with
its usual English meaning of a joint-stock company. "Corporation" here
means, approximately, a guild. For present purposes it is enough to
recall that corporatism emerged as an irrational, solidarist opposition
to capitalism and the United States Constitution during the period of
the reactionary Holy Alliance after the end of the Napoleonic wars.
Corporatism asserted that the way to overcome the tensions between
labor and capital was not through the broad national community of
interest prescribed by Alexander Hamilton's American System of dirigist
political economy, but rather through the artificial creation of
medieval guild organizations, based on the pretense that capitalists
were masters, and workers were journeymen and apprentices, all
functioning together in "organic" unity.
Thus, Mussolini advertised his fascist regime as the stato corporativo
or corporate state, proclaiming that Oil fascismo sara corporativo o
non sara (fascism is corporative or it is nothing). In German, the
equivalent for stato corporativo is Standestaat, wherein Stand has the
meaning of social position in the sense of aristocracy, clergy, and
bourgeoisie, the three "estates" of pre-revolutionary France. Hitler's
National Socialist German Workers Party was corporatist from the very
beginning: point 25 of the "unalterable" program of the Nazis as
adopted on Feb. 25, 1920 included the "creation of corporative and
professional chambers" (Odie Bildung von Stande--und Berufskammern zur
Durchfuhrung der vom Reiche erlassenen Rahmengesetze in den einzelnen
Bundesstaaten.) [Note- 1] For a certain period after Hitler's seizure
of power in 1933, his regime referred to itself prominently as a
Standestaat, or corporate state. When Marshal P;aaetain and Pierre
Laval created their Nazi puppet-state in Vichy, P;aaetain announced
that one of the principal goals of his "national regeneration movement"
was the creation of an ordre corporatif. Other fascist regimes,
especially the many that were directly modeled on the Italian one, also
stressed corporatism, so that corporatism emerges as the charactersitic
institutional structure of fascism.
Theories of the corporate state can be traced back to Germans like
Pesch and Kettler, or to the "guild socialism" of the Englishman
William Morris. An early attempt to actually create a corporate state
came in 1919, with the filibustering expedition to Fiume of Gabriele
D'Annunzio, the protofascist of our epoch.
D'Annunzio as seen by Ledeen
The corporate state D'Annunzio attempted to create during his Fiume
adventure is of double relevance to an analysis of the fascism of
Project Democracy. On the one hand, D'Annunzio's 16- month tenure as
dictator in Fiume was the model and dress rehearsal for Mussolini's
March on Rome. On the other hand, D'Annunzio's activities in Fiume have
been the subject of a lengthy treatise by the most overt and blatantly
fascist ideologue of Project Democracy, Michael Ledeen.
Ledeen's discussion of D'Annunzio in Fiume is to be found in his book,
The First Duce. Ledeen celebrates the poetaster D'Annunzio as the
founder not only of fascism, but of 20th-century politics in general,
through his creation of a Nazi-communist mass movement of
irrationalism:
Virtually the entire ritual of Fascism came from the "Free State
of Fiume: the balcony address, the Roman salute, the cries of
"aia, aia, alala," the dramatic dialogues with the crowd, the use
of religious symbols in a new secular setting, the eulogies of the
"martyrs" of the cause and the employment of their "relics" in
political ceremonies. Moreover, quite aside from the poet's
contribution to the form and style of fascist politics,
Mussolini's movement first started to attract great strength when
the future dictator supported D'Annunzio's occupation of Fiume.
(p. viii)
D'Annunzio's political style--the politics of mass manipulation, the
politics of myth and symbol--have become the norm in the modern world.
All too often we have lost sight of the point of departure of our
political behavior, believing that by now ours is the normal political
universe and that the manipulation of the masses is essential in the
political process.
D'Annunzian Fiume seems to have marked a sort of watershed in this
process, and that is perhaps the explanation for the fascinating
symbiosis between themes of the "Right" and the "Left" in the rhetoric
of the comandante. It is of the utmost importance for us to remind
ourselves that D'Annunzio's political appeal ranged from extreme Left
to extreme Right, from leaders of the Russian Revolution to
arch-reactionaries. (p. 202)
Ledeen is especially fascinated by D'Annunzio's ability to re- create
an "organic" unity out of the disparate elements of modern society: "At
the core of D'Annunzian politics was the insight that many conflicting
interests could be overcome and transcended in a new kind of movement."
(p. ix) For Ledeen, the key institutional feature of the D'Annunzian
fascist order is the corporate state.
The city of Fiume at the southern base of the Istrian peninsula was in
1919 a former territory of the newly defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire
under dispute between Italy and the new nation of Yugoslavia, where the
town is located today under the name of Rieka. Italy, having
participated in the victorious cause of the Allies, desired to annex
Fiume as it had the other Austro-Hungarian port of Trieste, but the
weak Nitti ministry hesitated to do so because of the opposition of
France. France at that time was determined to emerge as the protector
of the new states created in the Balkans by the Peace of Paris, and
therefore supported the Yugoslav claim to Fiume, which the Yugoslavs
saw as a key port. In order to force the hand of Nitti, D'Annunzio,
starting from Venice, gathered a force of arditi, veterans of the elite
shock troops of the Italian army, and seized Fiume in September 1919,
demanding that Italy annex it. D'Annuzio's regime, which he sometimes
called a Regency, organized acts of terrorism and piracy. In November
1920, with the Treaty of Rapallo, Fiume was made a free city.
D'Annunzio refused to accept this solution and Italian troops dispersed
his "legions" some time later.
The Fiume expedition was a classic example of Venetian cultural-
political warfare, designed as a pilot project for fascist movements
and coups in the aftermath of the hecatomb of the First World War. The
centerpiece of the operation was the so-called Charter of Carnaro
(Carta del Carnaro), the corporatist guild constitution for Fiume as an
independent state written by D'Annunzio in collaboration with the
anarcho-syndicalist agitator Alceste de Ambris.
The Carta del Carnaro was reminiscent of certain features of the
Venetian Republic. Legislative power was vested in a bicameral
legislature. One house was called the Consiglio degli Ottimi, or
Council of the Best, and was elected on the basis of universal direct
suffrage with one councilor per every thousand inhabitants. The Ottimi
were to handle legislation regarding civil and criminal justice,
police, the armed forces, education, intellectual life, and were also
to govern the relations between the central government and subdivisions
or states called communes.
The corporate chamber of the Fiume parliament was to be the Consiglio
dei Provvisori, a kind of economic council. The Consiglio dei
Provvisori was composed of representatives of nine guilds or
corporations whose creation was also provided for in the document.
These included the industrial and agricultural workers, the seafarers,
and the employers, with 10 representatives each; the industrial and
agricultural technicians, private bureaucrats and administrators,
teachers and students, lawyers and doctors, civil servants, and
cooperative workers, with five representatives from each group, for a
grand total of 60. The Consiglio dei Provvisori was responsible for all
laws regarding business and commerce. The Consiglio dei Provvisori also
decided all matters touching labor, public services, transportation and
the merchant marine, tariffs and trade, public works, and medical and
legal practice.
The Ottimi served for a term of three years, and the Provvisori for two
years. A third legislative body was prescribed, formed through the
joint session of the Ottimi and Provvisori: This was called the Arengo
del Carnaro, and was to deal with treaties with foreign states, the
budget, university affairs, and amendments to the constitution.
The Provvisori were chosen by nine corporations. Membership in one of
these corporations was obligatory for all citizens, and was posited in
the Carta del Carnaro as an indispensable precondition for citizenship.
The article on corporations states that "only the assiduous producers
of the common wealth and the assiduous producers of the common strength
are complete citizens of the Regency, and with it constitute a single
working substance, a single ascendant fullness." (Ledeen, p. 166)
D'Annunzio's corporations are horizontal, similar to the estates, and
are not organized according to vertical branches or cycles of economic
activity, as Mussolini's corporations were to be.
The Carta del Carnaro provides for a 10th corporation, which seems to
have been reserved for geniuses, prophets, and assorted supermen.
D'Annunzio's conception of the corporation is almost tribal, as the
text of the constitution shows. He stipulated that each corporation was
to "invent its insignia, its emblems, its music, its chants, its
prayers; institute its ceremonies and rites; participate, as
magnificently as it can, in the common joys, the anniversary festivals,
and the maritime and terrestrial games; venerate its dead, honor its
leaders, and celebrate its heroes." (Ledeen, p. 168)
The executive power was normally vested in seven rectors or ministers
(including foreign affairs, treasury, education, police and justice,
defense, public economy, and labor). For periods of emergency, it was
provided that the Arengo could appoint a dictator or comandante for a
specified term, as was the custom in the Roman Republic. There was also
a judiciary, with communal courts (Buoni uomini, or good men), a labor
court (giudici del lavoro), civil courts (giudici togati, of judges in
toga), a criminal court (giudici del maleficio), and a supreme court
called the Corte della Ragione, or court of reason.
For Ledeen, D'Annunzio assumes the status of Nazi-communist prophet of
the mass irrationalism of the 20th century. For Ledeen, the Carta del
Carnaro sums up the "essence of European radical socialism." From the
point of view of Ledeen's universal fascism, D'Annunzio is located in
the same tradition as the classics of Marxism and historical
materialism, since his writings "conjure up the Karl Marx of the
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. The young Marx, like
many other heirs of Hegelianism, had been engaged in the search for a
way to end human "alienation," and D'Annunzio saw the structure created
by the Carta as a means of organizing a society in which human
creativity would blossom in a way rarely seen in the story of mankind.
It is by no means accidental that he employed the language of the
Comunes in his new constitution, for he wished to recreate in the
regency of Fiume the ferment of activity that had produced the
Renaissance. He hoped that this constitution would produce a new,
unalienated man." (Ledeen, pp. 168- 9)
In reality, D'Annunzio was a degenerate monster, a coprophile, pervert,
and psychopath--qualities that may have helped to determine Ledeen's
compulsive affinity for this hideous figure. The Venetian operative
D'Annunzio, the "John the Baptist" of fascism in this century, must
bear a great share of the responsibility for opening the door to the
Nazi-communist chamber of horrors in the epoch during and after the
First World War. Ledeen's commitment to the creation of a universal
fascist yoke has found its appropriate organizational expression in
Project Democracy.
Mussolini's corporate state
After the March on Rome in 1922, and especially after the consolidation
of a full-blown dictatorship through the coup d';aaetat of l925, the
Kingdom of Italy saw the creation of the fascist corporate state. The
promise of creating corporations figured prominently in Mussolini's
demagogy from the beginning of his campaign for the seizure of power,
but the creation of the corporations and the transformation of the
parliament in order to include them was a long and drawn-out process
that was completed only in the late thirties at the eve of the outbreak
of the Second World War.
One of the reasons it took so long to found the corporations was the
lack of agreement about what these artificial creations might in fact
be, since they had to be invented ex novo. Mussolini in the end settled
on the idea that each corporation was to represent, not a stratum of
society, but rather a branch of industry. The essence of the fascist
corporations was that they were a support and appendage of the personal
rule of Il Duce, and thus of the one-party fascist state. As one
historian has observed:
"The fundamental truth, however, is that the Fascist State claims
the right to regulate economic as well as other aspects of life,
and has aimed at accomplishing the former through the Corporate
organization. The Dictatorship is the necessary rack and screw of
the Corporate system; all the rest is subordinate machinery."
[Note 2]
Mussolini rejected both the Marxist idea of class conflict as well as
what he called economic liberalism. The corporate system was designed,
in his view, to overcome the class struggle of the one and the
exaggerated economic individualism of the other. All of this was
supposed to mobilize and focus national energies in the service of the
superior interest of the state as the overarching collectivity. In one
speech, Il Duce summed up the three elements of revolutionary
corporatism as a single party, a totalitarian state, and "the highest
ideal tension." In fact, Mussolini danced to the tune of Venetian
financiers like Volpi di Misurata, Cini, and others.
Mussolini situated the need for corporations in the context of the
dissolution of the world capitalist system--an interesting parallel to
the corporatist fascism of Project Democracy and the Trilateral
Commission, which are explicitly proposed as necessities for a
post-industrial era of scarce and diminishing resources. In 1933,
Mussolini announced that the world depression (or the "American
crisis," as he also called it) had become a total crisis of the world
capitalist system. He went on to distinguish three periods in the
history of capitalism: "the dynamic, the static, and the declining."
According to Mussolini, the dynamic era of capitalism extended from the
introduction of the widespread use of the steam engine to the opening
of the Suez Canal in 1870; this period he saw as the time of unfettered
free enterprise. After 1870, came a static phase, with the growth of
trusts, the end of free competition, and smaller profit margins. The
third or decadent phase is described by Mussolini as a kind of state
capitalism.
The outcome is the necessity for corporatism:
Today we are burying economic liberalism, and the Corporation
plays that part in the economic field, which the Grand Council and
the Militia ;obthe squadristi;cb do in the political.
Corporativism means a disciplined, and therefore a controlled
economy, since there can be no discipline which is not controlled.
Corporativism overcomes Socialism as well as it does liberalism:
it creates a new synthesis.
(Finer, pp. 501- 502)
The juridicial basis for the fascist corporations is established in the
Charter of Labor of 1927, whose sixth article states:
The corporations constitute the unitary organization of production
and represent completely its interests. In view of this complete
representation, the interests of production being national
interests, the corporations are recognized by law as organs of the
State. [Note-3]
The regime created fascist labor unions for workers, which had the
monopoly of representation of labor in the negotiation of the national
labor contract for each category or branch of economic activity. The
Confindustria was created as the sole syndicate of the employers. No
labor contract was considered valid until it had been approved by the
Ministry for Corporations.
In 1934, Mussolini finally issued a decree-law creating 22 corporations
for the principal sectors of the Italian economy. Each corporation was
given a council, which was composed of equal numbers of representatives
of the fascist labor union and the fascist employers' organization for
that sector, plus representatives of the National Fascist Party, the
Ministry of Corporations, and consulting technocrats. The president of
each corporation was generally a top official of the government or of
the Fascist Party. The leading task of each corporation was the
reconciliation of disputes between labor and management.
Each corporation represented a "productive cycle" rather than an
occupational category. A first group of corporations included
agricultural, industrial, and commercial elements. These were the
corporations for:
1) cereals;
2) garden products, flowers, and fruits; 3) vineyards and
wine;
4) oils;
5) beets and sugar;
6) animal industries and fishing;
7) wood; and
8) textile products.
A second group of eight corporations included only commercial and
industrial elements. These were:
1) metallurgy and mechanics;
2) chemical industries;
3) clothing and accessories;
4) paper and the press;
5) building construction;
6) water, gas, and electricity;
7) extractive industries; and
8) glass and ceramics.
A third group of corporations made up the service sector:
1) insurance and credit;
2) professions and arts;
3) sea and air transportation;
4) internal communications;
5) show business; and
6) tourism and hotels.
In the early stages of the regime, corporate representatives were
brought together at the national level in a National Council of
Corporations, and a National Assembly of Corporations, which were later
superseded by a Central Corporate Committee. All of these contained
additional party and government representatives in addition to the
corporate delegates. In addition, Councils of Corporate Economy were
set up in each province as a kind of fascist chamber of commerce, with
all the corporations of the province plus local governments being
represented.
In 1938, after having proclaimed that he considered the Chamber of
Deputies, which until that time had been the lower house of the Italian
Parliament, as belonging to the alien residue of liberalism, Mussolini
replaced that Chamber with the Chamber of the Fasces and Corporations
(Camera dei Fasci e delle Corporazioni). This was composed of a number
of delegates appointed by each of the corporations, plus other
delegates appointed by the National Fascist Party.
Mussolini summed up these institutional transformations with the
following words:
"We have constituted a Corporative and Fascist State, the State of
national society, a State which concentrates, controls,
harmonizes, and tempers the interests of all social classes, which
are thereby protected in equal measure. Whereas, during the years
of demo-liberal regime, labor looked with diffidence upon the
State, and was, in fact, outside the State and against the State,
and considered the State an enemy of every day and every hour,
there is not one working Italian today who does not seek a place
in his Corporation or syndical federation, who does not wish to be
a living atom of that great, immense living organization which is
the national Corporate State of Fascism."
(Field, p. 16)
After the cataclysm of the Mussolini regime, former members of the
fascist hierarchy who considered themselves in the syndicalist-
corporate tradition, such as Giuseppe Bottai, accused Mussolini of
having been instinctively inclined to preserve his personal
dictatorship, rather than transform that dictatorship into a true
corporatist system. From beginning to end, the corporations were in
fact the merest paraphernalia of Il Duce's one-party state. Although he
actually functioned as a malleable puppet of Volpi di Misurata and the
Venetian financiers, in the eyes of the world Mussolini stood atop the
fascist edifice as Duce of Fascism and Head of Government, and the
secretary of the National Fascist Party served at his pleasure. An
important organ of this totalitarian dictatorship was the Grand Council
of Fascism (Gran Consiglio del Fascismo), primarily an expression of
the fascist party, but in its makeup a mixed organ composed of top
officials of the National Fascist Party, government ministers, the
Presidents of the Senate and the Chamber, the commander of the
squadristi, and others. As long as the Chamber of Deputies lasted, it
was the Grand Council which made up the single nationwide list of
Fascist candidates which the voters were called upon to accept or
reject as a single unitary slate. The Grand Council was also
responsible for submitting to the King the names of persons who might
be selected as Head of Government. It was this Grand Council which, in
July 1943, decided to oust Mussolini.
As will be shown later, the National Endowment for Democracy is not
only corporatist, but its board of directors is intended to function as
a kind of informal Grand Council of Fascism in the totalitarian
one-party state that Project Democracy seeks to create in the United
States.
After seizing power, Mussolini institutionalized and domesticated his
storm troopers, the squadristi, under the name of the Voluntary
National Security Militia, which was an organ of the Fascist Party. To
combat political resistance to his regime, Mussolini then set up
Special Tribunals whose judges were all high officers of the squadristi
militia. Perhaps Ledeen or other Project Democracy theorists can take
this as a starting point for the reform of the U.S. federal judiciary.
Mussolini claimed to justify his regime through the need for efficiency
and getting things done effectively. The Second World War revealed the
overwhelming logistical and military weakness of the fascist corporate
state. Despite the failure of corporatism in its declared aims of
generating economic and military power, corporatist forms have
exercised an almost hypnotic fascination over certain financier cliques
in times of grave economic crisis. One such financier was Bernard
Baruch, whose wholly controlled operative, Gen. Hugh Johnson, was the
leader of the National Recovery Administration during the first
administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt. The organizations that were
supposed to be created in each sector of production around the NRA code
for that sector were a very transparent copy of the fascist
corporations. Many of the brain-trusters in the first New Deal were
declared admirers of Mussolini, and even went so far as to prepare a
summary report on the fascist corporate state for President Roosevelt.
As we will see, the Trilateral Commission is committed to a
neo-corporate order for the United States.
At this point in the argument, certain readers may become impatient
with an argument that seems to them to be incongruous. Can it be that
the business-suited bankers of the Trilateral Commission, the
shirt-sleeve bureaucrats of the AFL-CIO, or even such figures as Oliver
North share decisive elements of their ideology with a black- shirted,
jack-booted, strutting fascist like Mussolini, with fez, dagger, and
club, with jaw jutting over the balcony of Palazzo Venezia? Are not the
present-day figures of Project Democracy too bland to qualify as
fascists? Are they not just American pragmatists with views that may
happen to differ from our own?
It may come as a surprise to many that Mussolini himself was a
professed follower of American pragmatism. Among the thinkers who had
made the greatest contribution to his own intellectual formation, Il
Duce numbered first of all William James, the classic exponent of
American pragmatism, whom he knew especially through the Italian writer
Papini. Then came Machiavelli (certainly not a pragmatist and clearly
not understood by Il Duce), followed by Nietzsche, who must be
considered as representing a slightly different school of pragmatism.
Then came the French anarcho- syndicalist, Georges Sorel, the theorist
of purgative violence and also a declared pragmatist.
All pragmatists are not necessarily fascists, but in the 20th century
many have been, and there is no doubt that all fascists are
pragmatists. In a crisis of civilization like the one of the 1980s, the
fascists constitute the fastest-growing component of the pragmatic
school. This makes it possible for individuals like Oliver North and
Carl Gershman to embrace fascism as a simple practical expedient.
In one of his speeches, Mussolini remarked: "The second foundation
stone of Fascismo is represented by anti-demagogism and pragmatism."
William Yandell Elliott of Harvard University remarks in his study of
post-World War I political irrationalism, entitled The Pragmatic Revolt
in Politics: "For pragmatism, a myth is true so long as it works.
Mussolini offers himself as the new Caesar.... If he can capture the
imagination of Italians and inflame them with his dream, he feels that
he can govern with consent." (p. 341) Elliott, it should be recalled,
was one of the principal teachers of Henry Kissinger.
William James had posited this "working test of truth," which was also
reflected in Mussolini's celebrated contempt for programs. When asked
for a program, he replied: "Our program is simple: We wish to govern
Italy. They ask us for programs, but there are already too many of
them." For Mussolini, program was a part of liberalism's "government by
talk," which he was determined to extirpate. In 1932, Mussolini wrote:
La mia dottrina era stata la dottrina dell'azione. Il fascismo nacque
da un bisogno d'azione e fu azione. (My doctrine had been the doctrine
of action. Fascism was born of the need for action, and was action.)
Oliver North would presumably agree.
Bukharin's universal fascism
In his pamphlet on "The Foreign Policy of America," the later chairman
of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl Gershman, describes the
origins of AFL-CIO foreign policy activism in the international
department of David Dubinsky's International Ladies Garment Workers
Union (ILGWU) during the 1930s. He notes that Dubinsky was surrounded
by a
"large group of dedicated antitotalitarians, some of them refugees
from European fascism, others veterans of the political battles
against communism on the American left. Of this latter group, the
outstanding figure was Jay Lovestone, an immensely informed,
resourceful, and controversial individual who had gained
first-hand knowledge of communist strategy since he himself had
served as general secretary of the American Communist Party until
ousted in 1929 on Stalin's orders. Lovestone is among the most
interesting figures of American political life in this century. A
classic example of the communist-turned-devout- anticommunist, his
influence has been far-reaching. For almost four decades until his
retirement in 1974, he served as the chief executor of American
labor's foreign policy, the author of countless AFL and AFL-CIO
statements and resolutions, and a man exceedingly well-connected
with key government officials and trade unionists in America and
abroad. It is often assumed by those who underestimate Meany's
influence that Lovestone has been personally responsible for
American labor's foreign policy over the years. Still, the fact
that this is a common misunderstanding is a measure of the role
Lovestone has played and the mark he has left. "
Gershman then describes how two of Lovestone's close associates, Irving
Brown and Serafino Romualdi, were the key operatives for the AFL-CIO in
Europe and in Latin America, respectively. (pp. 8-9)
Lovestone was removed from his post as leader of the American
Communists by Stalin because Lovestone was an ally and asset of
Stalin's factional adversary in the Soviet Bolshevik Party, Nikolai
Bukharin. Bukharin had been one of the principal half-dozen leaders
among the Bolsheviks, and in the early twenties he had been the central
figure of the left-wing Communists. Later in the 1920s, he joined with
Stalin to dominate the party, and then passed into Right Opposition.
Bukharin was the theoretician who argued that Soviet socialism could
"creep at a snail's pace." He was purged and later executed by Stalin.
A very significant part of the network that has been organized into
Project Democracy is made up of social-democratic right-wingers and
syndicalists whose ideology and, in some cases, whose careers can be
traced back to Bukharin. This lineage is especially significant because
of the tendency of the Gorbachov leadership of the Soviet Union to
rehabilitate Bukharin as the archetype of policies to be implemented
today in order to accelerate the all-out mobilization of the Soviet
economy for war.
So, the question arises, who was Bukharin?
Bukharin was a universal fascist, irrationalist, and agent of the
East-West financiers' cabal known as the Trust. If allowance is made
for the fact that he was operating within the a priori totalitarian
universe of Soviet Russia, his world outlook and policies will be seen
as remarkably similar to those of a Mussolini, a Strasser, or a Roehm.
In the days of his Moscow youth, Bukharin was friendly with Ilya
Ehrenburg, who later spewed out the murderous ideology of the Great
Russian master race in the pages of Pravda during the Second World War.
He was a student of Bogdanov, the irrationalist "empiriomonist" who had
emerged from the Venetian- Benedictine school on the island of Capri.
Bukharin was an avid reader of European and American sociology,
including Max Weber and Thorsten Veblen. Bukharin traveled extensively
in Europe and visited the United States, but his favorite base outside
of Russia was Lausanne, Switzerland.
The young Bukharin was a leftish anarchosyndicalist, like so many of
his fascist brethren in Germany, Italy, and other countries. The first
point on his program was the need to smash the "contemporary
imperialist robber state, an iron organization which envelops the
living body of society in its tenacious, grasping paws. It is a new
Leviathan, before which the fantasy of Thomas Hobbes seems child's
play." [Note-4]
Compare this to the young Mussolini's attacks on the "Moloch state."
Bukharin, just like Mussolini, argued that the enemy of the revolution
was "state capitalism." He felt that the prospects for revolution
against such an order would depend in all likelihood on the advent of a
general war. Thus, Bukharin's early program for the workers' movement
was centered on the need "to emphasize strongly its hostility in
principle to state power" and to "destroy the state organization of the
bourgeoisie," to "explode it from within." (Cohen, p. 34)
Bukharin's credentials as a universal fascist include his early
contention that nationalism could never be a progressive force. During
the First World War, Bukharin joined with his fellow Trust operative
Karl Radek to attack Lenin's Imperialism because of its positive view
of nationalism in the colonial world. Bukharin and Radek rejected the
slogan of national self-determination as un- Marxist.
During the civil war that followed the Bolshevik coup of October 1917,
Bukharin was the spokesman for a Left-Communist faction that he
referred to as "We, the young, the left." (Cohen, p. 64) During the
period of Lenin's War Communism policy, Bukharin created the Supreme
Economic Council, an instrument designed to promote totalitarian state
control of all economic activity. War communism was a policy of
dragooning labor, wholesale nationalization of industry, requisitioning
of agricultural and industrial products, and confiscations and labor
camps for those who did not go along. Bukharin, who was considered one
of the few trained economists among the Bolshevik leaders, was
responsible to Lenin for "socialist policies in the areas of finance
and economics." (Cohen, p. 62) Bukharin became the leading theoretician
of the coercive aspects of the war communism policy. During this same
period, Bukharin strongly opposed the peace treaty with Germany signed
at Brest-Litovsk, and preached a revolutionary "holy war" against the
European bourgeoisie. (Cohen, p. 63) For Bukharin, the process of world
revolution would necessarily be an apocalyptic one: "Sometimes I am
afraid the struggle will be so bitter and so long drawn out that the
whole of European culture may be trampled underfoot." (Cohen, p. 99)
Stephen Cohen, a leading American academic admirer of Bukharin,
describes the War Communism years of 1918-21 and the "statization" of
economic life as follows:
"The state grasped every economic lever within reach, and a vast,
cumbersome bureaucracy mushroomed into being. Cooperatives, trade
unions, and the network of local economic soviets were transformed
into bureaucratic appendages of the state apparatus. The Supreme
Economc Council, now responsible for virtually all industrial
production, created sub-agency upon sub- agency." (p. 79)
In the midst of this statization and militarization was Bukharin,
proclaiming that "the republic is an armed camp" and that "one must
rule with iron when one cannot rule with law." Bukharin during these
years was very specific that totalitarian control must be extended into
economics by the Soviet state, in a kind of national corporatism:
"If the proletariat's state power is the lever of economic
revolution, then it is clear that "economics" and politics must
merge into a single whole. Such a merging exists under the
dictatorship of finance capital ... in the form of state
capitalism. But the dictatorship of the proletariat reverses all
the relations of the old world--in other words, the political
ditatorship of the working class must inevitably be its economic
dictatorship." (Cohen, p. 86)
During the civil war, the Bolshevik Party engaged in a debate about the
proper role of trade unions. A group around Trotsky proposed the
militarization of the workers into labor armies in an appeal to the
most extreme totalitarian control. This was initially supported by
Lenin, who later moderated his own stand somewhat under his slogan of
making the unions into "schools of communism" as well as "transmission
belts" for the imperatives of the party. The trade union leaders
themselves, like Tomskii, later a close factional ally of Bukharin,
argued in favor of union control and management of industry. For a
time, Bukharin supported the program for the militarization of labor,
but then assumed a middle position between Lenin and Trotsky. He was in
favor of the statization of labor unions, but in a milder way than
Trotsky. Some of Bukharin's statements in this controversy are most
illuminating:
"We have proclaimed a new sacred slogan--workers' democracy, which
consists in the fact that all questions are discussed not in
narrow collegiums, not in small meetings, not in some sort of
corporation of one's own, but that all questions are carried to
wide meetings." (Cohen, p. 103)
Bukharin thought that the unions could be instruments of the "technical
administrative apparatus" and schools of communism at the same time. He
argued for a syndicalist-corporatist conception of the Soviet state:
"If the general progressive line of development is the line of
fusing the trade unions ;obwith the state;cb, then from the other
side this same process is a process of "unionizing" the state. Its
logical and historical end will not be the absorption of the
unions by the proletarian state, but the disappearance of both
categories, state and union, and the creation of a third--the
communistically organized society." (Cohen, p. 104)
Bukharin later became the principal spokesman for and defender of the
so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which was introduced on orders
from Lenin in 1921, as the civil war was ending, and which was pursued
as the official policy of the Soviet state until the initiation of
forced collectivization and of breakneck industrialization under Stalin
in 1928-29. During the mid-1920s, the NEP was administered jointly by
Stalin and Bukharin acting as the duumviri of the Kremlin. Today, the
Soviet Cultural Fund and the Gorbachov regime are attempting to depict
their reforms as a return to the NEP, which they claim to have been the
most advanced result of Lenin's political thought. In the process, the
rehabilitation of Bukharin is on the agenda.
The debates about the NEP and the proper industrialization strategy for
the Soviet state exhibit another aspect of Bukharin's fascism, his
economic views. Bukharin was an economist in the tradition of Thomas
Malthus, who had argued that "a church with a capacious maw is best"
when it came to providing sustained demand for the artifacts of
capitalist production. In Bukharin's view, it was the peasants,
including the wealthier ones, called kulaks, whose consumerist maw
would stimulate the growth of the Soviet industrial economy.
"Accumulation in socialist industry cannot occur for long without
accumulation in the peasant economy," Bukharin argued. "The greater the
buying powers of the peasantry, the faster our industry develops."
"Kopeck accumulation in the peasant economy is the basis for ruble
accumulation in socialist industry." (Cohen, p. 175) Although the
thesis is patently absurd, it is not so different from the nostrums
that were advocated as a solution to the Great Depression some years
later by another fascist economist, John Maynard Keynes, also a
follower of Malthus.
Bukharin expressed many of his arguments in polemics against the
demands of Trotsky and Preobrazhenskii for a policy of primitive
accumulation against the peasants, to be accomplished by setting the
prices of industrial goods at very high levels and the prices of farm
commodities at very low levels. Bukharin rejected this, maintaining
that accumulation against the peasants would undermine the alliance or
smychka between urban workers and peasants. Bukharin demanded instead a
"union of workers and peasants." "The revolution of 1905 was a failure
because there was not a smychka between the urban movement and the
agrarian-peasant movement." (Cohen, p. 166).
Bukharin was something of a Maoist ante literam, since he saw the
developed cities as being surrounded by a vast countryside. He argued
that "the proletariat ... constitutes an insignificant minority" while
the peasants of the Orient and and in other agrarian zones, "are the
huge majority on our planet." The peasant in his view "will become--is
becoming--the great liberating force of our time." (Cohen, pp. 168-69)
For these peasant liberators, Bukharin had a simple message: Get rich!
(We must say to the whole peasantry, to all its strata, enrich
yourselves, accumulate, develop your economy.) (Cohen, p. 177)
Bukharin's approach to organizing the peasants was a typically
solidarist-corporatist one: His "wager on the cooperatives" as the
appropriate form of peasant economy. In this, Bukharin was tapping the
tradition of Aksakov, Kiriyevsky, and the other slavophiles of the
19th-century Russian Empire, who had been fascinated by the mir, the
primitive communalist Russian peasant village. For Bukharin the
mir-like peasant cooperative was the royal road to socialism: "The
basic network of our cooperative peasant organization will consist of
cooperative cells not of a kulak but of a 'laboring' type, cells
growing into the system of our general state organs and thus becoming
links in a single chain of socialist economy." (Cohen, p. 198)
Bukharin's economic method was to proceed from consumption and
circulation back to production, while his opponents were arguing for
the creation of new branches of industry through a deliberate political
decision to accumulate against the peasantry and invest. Bukharin's
program moved "from circulation (money, prices, trade) to production."
(Cohen, p.177) All economic activity, according to Bukharin, must
always "end with the production of means of consumption ... which enter
into the process of personal consumption." (Cohen, p. 174) He laid
special stress on the question of consumption, arguing that the
satisfaction of the material needs of the masses "was the real lever of
development, that it generates the most rapid tempos of economic
growth." "Our economy exists for the consumer, not the consumer for the
economy. (Cohen, p. 173) At the same time, he incessantly stressed the
need to stoke up the process of circulation by "unleashing commodity
turnover," which he thought would automatically and without any further
state intervention lead to socialist economic expansion: "We will come
to socialism here through the process of circulation, and not directly
though the process of production; we will come there through the
cooperatives." (Cohen, p. 196)
Bukharin's idea was most emphatically that buying and selling would by
themselves lead to industrialization: "First, if commodity turnover
grows, this means that more is produced, more is bought and sold, more
is accumulated: this means that our socialist accumulation is
accelerated, i.e., the development of our industry." (Cohen, p. 179) It
is not surprising that Bukharin's factional adversaries ridiculed him
as the Soviet Manchester school of political economy. The essence of
his argument is that even under a communist dictatorship, Adam Smith's
invisible hand is still at work. As Bukharin's repeated references to
the mysterious role of the market in guaranteeing development make
clear, he was a cultist of the "magic of the marketplace.
Out of this irrationalist, eclectic mix of Malthusianism, fascism,
physiocratic doctrine, and Bolshevism, there emerged an approximation
of the zero-growth, post-industrial ideology of the type later
associated with the Club of Rome:
"Capitalist industrialization--this is the parasitism of the city
in relation to the countryside, the parasitism of a metropolis in
relation to colonies, the hypertrophic, bloated development of
industry, serving the ruling classes, along with the extreme
comparative backwardness of agricultural economics, especially
peasant agricultural economics." (Cohen, p. 170)
If Project Democracy is not destroyed, the world will shortly be
dominated by a clique of fascist Bukharinite irrationalists in Moscow,
whose hegemony shall have been validated by a New Yalta accord with
their counterparts, the Bukharinite corporatists of the United States.
Israel as a corporate state
One of the hallmarks of Project Democracy's demagogic public face is
its glorification of the State of Israel as an exemplary democratic
nation. The present head of the National Endowment for Democracy, Carl
Gershman, writing with Irving Howe in the introduction to a collection
of essays entitled Israel, the Arabs, and the Middle East, asserts:
"The survival of Israel is a major priority for everyone who cares
about democracy; it should be a special obligation for people on the
democratic left to speak out--passionately yet not uncritically--in
behalf of the social innovations and achievements of Israeli
society...." (p. 1) The same neo-Bukharinite Gershman, in his The
Foreign Policy of American Labor, goes on to say: "American labor's
relationship with Israel and its labor movement, the Histadrut,
deserves separate treatment. This relationship has been of such an
intimate nature for so long that one labor journalist, writing in the
wake of the Yom Kippur War in 1973, observed that 'no comparable
relationship has ever flowered between U.S. unions and any other nation
at any time. Gershman adds: "American labor leaders generally express
their support of Israel in terms of labor solidarity and democratic
ideals. The Histadrut is universally admired within the American labor
movement and Israel is viewed as a model society." (pp. 63-64)
A model society? If so, then Project Democracy has chosen for a model a
country whose founding fathers included a substantial number of
professed admirers of Mussolini, a country which has no constitution,
whose party structure is highly authoritarian, where 90% of the land
cannot be bought because it is owned by a consortium of international
financiers, and where a very large fraction of the working people find
that the boss they work for and the union that is supposed to defend
their interests are identical.
The corporatist character of Israel is rooted in the Histadrut, the
labor federation that was founded in Palestine in 1920 during the
British mandate. If viewed as a trade union, the Histadrut counts
upward of 1.5 million members, equivalent to 80% of the workforce, more
than one-half of the entire adult population, and three-quarters of the
total voting population. The Histadrut therefore exerts the dominant
influence on questions of collective bargaining in Israel, and
negotiates the contracts for the employees of the government and the
state sector with the finance minister. The Histadrut has always been
controlled by the leadership of the Labour Party.
The Labour Party's control of the Histadrut is facilitated by a
hierarchical system of voting, which is also typical of the Israeli
political parties. The characteristic feature here is that each level
of representation elects the next highest level, and so forth. Whatever
can be said of this system, democratic it is not.
In 1981, more than 825,000 Histadrut members elected 1,501
delegates to the 14th Histadrut convention. The Histadrut council,
elected by the convention, had 501 members; the executive
committee, elected by the council, had 195 members. The executive
committee meets regularly and is parallel to a Histadrut
parliament. From it emerges the central committee (42 members),
which can be likened to the Histadrut government. [note-5]
All of the key positions of power are in the hands of the Labour Party.
But in addition to being a trade union, the Histadrut is also the
capitalist for more than one-third of the entire Israeli economy. In
its role as entrepreneur, the Histadrut is in fact the largest single
employer in the entire country. The only difference is that when
Histadrut is acting as employer, it calls itself Hevrat Ovdim, which is
constituted as a holding company. In the words of Noah Malkosh of the
Histadrut: "In the case of the economic enterprises owned directly by
the collective membership of Histadrut, Hevrat Ovdim is incorporated as
the Histadrut holding company, and in this way is able to control their
policies." "The Convention and Council of Histadrut are the highest
policy-making authorities of Hevrat Ovdim. On the completion of general
Histadrut business those organs sit specifically as organs of Hevrat
Ovdim. In the same way the executive committee of Histadrut is
constituted as the executive of Hevrat Ovdim, and sits in this capacity
when matters relating to the labor sector of the economy arise for
decision." (Malkosh, pp. 62-63)
The Hevrat Ovdim economic enterprises include Sollel Boneh, which
carries out 20% of the building activities in the country and employs
more than 17,000 workers. Then there is Koor, with 100 industrial
firms, 100 commercial firms, and 50 financial firms including pension
funds. Koor is Israel's largest heavy industrial firm and largest
exporter, and is listed among Fortune magazine's list of the 500
largest companies in the world. Other Hevrat Ovdim companies include
Bank Hapoalim, Shikun Ovdim, Hasneh, and others. Histadrut also owns
companies providing service to the cooperative economy, including
Hamashbir Hamerkazi, the central wholesale society of the consumers'
cooperative movement, which runs a chain of department stores.
Histadrut controls Tnuva, the central marketing agency of the
agricultural settlements, which is linked to a chain of supermarkets.
The Histadrut runs the country's largest sick fund, the Kupat Holim,
with 3 million persons insured and 29,000 employees, plus pension plans
and social welfare funds. One-third of the country's hospital beds are
in Histadrut hospitals. Histadrut owns the newspapers Davar and the
Jerusalem Post.
Finally, the Histadrut controls the cooperative economy, including the
kibbutzim and moshavim with 21,000 workers, and Egged and Dan, which
move 80% of the passengers inside the country. As Arian sums it up,
"The economic power of the Histadrut is a major factor in the Israeli
economy. When it and the government are controlled by the same group,
the potential political and economic power is awesome--and that was the
case between 1948 and 1977." (p. 30)
If the resulting structure is compared with the features of the Italian
fascist corporate state summarized above, a striking similarity
obtains. For a very large part of the Israeli economy, labor and
capital are indeed joined in organic unity, through the same executive
committee alternating its existence as Histadrut the trade union with
that of Hevrat Ovdim the mammoth group of companies. For those who work
for Hevrat Ovdim, and they are the majority of all Israelis who work,
the boss and the shop steward are ultimately the same titanic entity.
For those who work in the state- owned third of the economy, the
picture hardly changes. Their employer is the government, which has
generally meant a government dominated by the Labour Party or at least
including it, and their trade union representation is the Histadrut,
ultimately under the control of the same Labour Party. Even in the
third of the Israeli economy that is privately owned, wages tend
closely to follow the standards that obtain in the Histadrut sector.
If, in addition, we consider that the worker whose boss and union are
the Histadrut also depends on that same power center for his medical
insurance and his pension, the totalitarian force that confronts each
such individual in the society is plainly manifest--and indeed
"awesome.
Apologists for the Histadrut are of course uncomfortably aware of the
problems posed by "Labour Zionist ideology." Malkosh writes:
"The fact that Histadrut, a labor and trade union organization, is
also the largest employer of labor in the country, is often found
to be a considerable stumbling block to the understanding of the
movement by labor leaders and sympathizers from other
countries....
The question is often posed: how can the worker in the Histadrut-
owned enterprises be assured of adequate trade union protection,
when his employer is also his trade union?
The answer given is as follows:
In the case of a dispute within a Histadrut plant, what is
involved is a temporary failure of the federal machinery of
Histadrut, rather than a genuine conflict of interest. The ruling
of the executive committee is binding, whether it favors the
mangerial interpretation or the trade union interpretation or, as
is more likely, produces a practical compromise fully acceptable
to both. Both sides have their spokesmen in the Histadrut
executive, and in that forum, they find themselves governed by the
most authoritative interpretation of the body of legislation
approved by the whole membership of Histadrut.
(Malkosh, pp. 79-80)
Malkosh goes on to say that what is really important about Histadrut is
its characteristic ideology: "A correct picture of normal labour
relations within Hevrat Ovdim must deal with the philosophic foundation
of the labor sector. Economic objectives apart, the foremost purpose of
Histadrut's economic operations is to develop a form of industrial
democracy." "Histadrut envisages the development of a democratic
structure within its economic enterprises, comparable to the democratic
spirit pervading all other branches of its activity." This structure
has now been created, so that each Histadrut member now votes not only
for the national convention, for the city or regional workers' council,
the trade union council for each craft or profession, but also for the
workers' committee in the place of employment.
It should be stressed again that Israeli parties are all based on
so-called "indirect representation." The members of the Labor Party in
1979 elected a national convention of 3,000 delegates, which chose a
center of 880 members, which in turn elected a leadership bureau of 61
members, which then selected an even smaller executive body. One
student of Israeli political affairs finds that the country's governing
process is an excellent illustration of what he calls the "iron law of
oligarchy." (Arian, p. 118) His conclusion is that "Israeli political
life, as exemplified by its parties, its organizations, the Knesset,
and the government is highly oligarchical and hierarchical.
Israel has no written constitution. The Knesset was convened in 1949 as
the constituent assembly to produce a constitution, but no progress was
made on this point. The place of the constitution is to be filled by
the accretion of a series of precedents, in imitation of the British
model. As a result, there is no Bill of Rights, and the relations among
the various branches of government are determined by mere statutory
law. Israeli statutory law shows substantial influence from the law of
the Ottoman and British empires.
Israel's landlord is yet another very powerful organization, in many
ways a monopoly. This is the Jewish National Fund, or Keren Kayemeth.
The Fund traces its origins back to a proposal made by Theodore Herzl
at the Fifth Zionist Conference in Basel, Switzerland: "A fund must be
established by the Jewish people of the world to redeem the soil of
Eretz Yisrael." Today the Jewish National Fund owns about 90% of the
land inside Israel's 1967 borders. According to the rules of the fund,
this land cannot be sold, but only leased for 49-year cycles, after
which the lease must be renegotiated. According to the fund, this is an
expression of the Mosaic law, which it says discourages "large,
monopolistic land holdings." Since 1960, the Jewish National Fund has
been designated by the government as the sole agency for land
development in Israel, and the land is under the administration of the
Israel Lands Authority, a government agency. As a result, the Israeli
government administers the quasi-totality of the land in the country,
which can be leased for usufruct, but not bought.
In practice, the Jewish National Fund is in the orbit of international
financiers and money launderers. For example, the board of directors of
the Jewish National Fund of Greater New York included as of 1983
Michael J. Lazar, since indicted by a federal grand jury in the Parking
Violations Bureau scandal that continues to rock the administration of
New York City Mayor Ed Koch. Lazar was the 1985 recipient of the JNF
annual Tree of Life Award.
The Trilaterals' U.S. corporate state
From the moment of its inception about a dozen years ago, the
operational network known today as Project Democracy has had as its
goal the subversion of the United States constitutional order in favor
of a one-party, totalitarian and corporatist fascist regime, combining
the horrors of the historical precursors depicted so far. One aspect of
these efforts by Project Democracy has involved the creation of an
extensive and lawless invisible government, as has already been made
clear in this report. But beyond all this, Project Democracy aims at
definite changes in the structure of the government and institutions of
the United States, of a kind so extensive that they could not be
accomplished without a virtual obliteration of the Constitution. The
starting point for this totalitarian plan was the Trilateral
Commission, an organization created for the purpose of executing the
policy of oligarchical and financier groupings making up the American,
European, and Japanese branch of the broader East-West finance
oligarchy known as the Trust.
The Trilateral Commission was founded in the wake of Watergate and the
oil crisis of 1973, events which the future Trilateral commissars had
connived to create. One of the earliest projects of the Trilateral
Commission was a study on the "ungovernability" of modern democracy in
an era of economic crisis and social upheaval. This project was
directed by Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the director of the Trilateral
Commission. One of the results of this project that later came into the
public domain was a book entitled The Crisis of Democracy by Michel
Crozier, Samuel P. Huntingon, and Joji Watanuki. It is to be assumed
that the published version of this study and its appendices is a very
diluted rendering of the discussions that went on among the rapporteurs
and the Trilateral commissars. The Crisis of Democracy was a part of
the agenda at the yearly meeting of the Trilateral Commission that took
place in Tokyo, Japan on May 31, 1975. This was the same Trilateral
meeting at which the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, was
presented by FIAT chief Gianni Agnelli, and appointed by the commissars
to be the next President of the United States.
The starting point of The Crisis of Democracy is the collapse of such
economic progress as had characterized the 1960s, and the advent of the
post-industrial society. Brzezinski's introduction compares the
atmosphere of 1975 with the early 1920s, when Oswald Spengler published
his mystical Untergang des Abendlandes,, The Decline of the West. The
three authors start off their analysis by quoting Willy Brandt, as he
was about to step down as German Federal Chancellor in 1974, saying,
"Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it;
after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the
surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a
politburo or a junta will not make that much difference." Then there is
a quote fron an unnamed senior British official to the effect that if
the United Kingdom fails to solve the problem of simultaneous inflation
and economic depression, "parliamentary democracy would ultimately be
replaced by a dictatorship." There is also a warning from Prime
Minister Takeo Miki that "Japanese democracy will collapse" unless the
confidence of the people in their political leaders can be restored.
This is all related by the authors to the economic dimension of the
crisis:
"This pessimism about the future of democracy has coincided with a
parallel pessimism about the future of economic conditions.
Economists have discovered the fifty-year Kondratieff cycle,
according to which 1971 (like 1921) should have marked the
beginning of a sustained economic downturn from which the
industrialized capitalist world would not emerge until the end of
the century. The implication is that just as the political
developments of the 1920s and 1930s furnished the ironicand
tragic- aftermath of a war fought to make the world safe for
democracy, so also the 1970s and 1980s might furnish a similarly
ironic political aftermath to twenty years of sustained economic
development designed in part to make the world prosperous enough
for democracy." (pp. 2- 3)
Added to this obvious implication that economic depression would prove
fatal to democratic forms by creating the necessary preconditions for
fascist mass movements was the related idea that the United States
Constitution could be overthrown in the aftermath of military defeat by
the Soviet Union or perhaps by another power. The Trilateral meeting in
question, it should be recalled, was taking place just a few weeks
after the fall of Saigon. The Trilateral authors make this point as
follows:
"With the most active foreign policy of any democratic country,
the United States is far more vulnerable to defeats in that area
than other democratic governments, which, attempting less, also
risk less. Given the relative decline in its military, economic,
and political influence, the United States is more likely to face
serious military or diplomatic reverses during the coming years
than at any previous time in its history. If this does occur, it
could pose a traumatic shock to American democracy." (p. 5)
In addition to these crisis factors, the study also points to dynamics
considered internal to the political process which are generating
instability:
"Yet, in recent years, the operations of the democratic process do
indeed appear to have generated a breakdown of traditional means
of social control, a delegitimation of political and other forms
of authority, and an overload of demands on government exceeding
its capacity to respond."(p. 8)
The study itself makes clear that the three Trilateral commissars are
especially concerned about the economic demands made upon elected
representatives by constituency groups which may contradict the
austerity and primacy of debt service demanded by oligarchical
financier factions.
This theme dominates the chapter on the United States contributed by
Samuel P. Huntington, who at various times has been a manager of the
Harvard Center for International Affairs, the international network
associated with Henry Kissinger. Huntington writes according to the
canons of empirical social science, but the basic dictatorial intent
nevertheless shines through. He describes the two great leaps in the
expenditures of the U.S. federal government, the Defense Shift of the
1950s and the Welfare Shift of the 1960s. He concludes that after these
two shifts had vastly increased federal spending, the student revolt of
the 1960s plus Watergate combined to produce "a substantial increase in
government activity and a substantial decrease in governmental
authority. By the early 1970s Americans were progressively demanding
and receiving more benefits from their government and yet having less
confidence in their government than they had a decade earlier." "The
expansion of government activities produced doubts about the economic
solvency of government; the decrease in governmental authority produced
doubts about the political solvency of government." (p. 64) Reading ex
contrario, it emerges that Huntington's ideal government would be an
authoritarian regime capable of imposing drastic austerity. His problem
is his despair that the U.S. government will fill the bill.
Increased government spending is leading to high deficits, even as
public confidence in government declines, says Huntongton. He is
especially concerned about the "decay of the party system," with the
decline in clear party identification by the majority of the citizenry,
the rise of split-ticket voting, and a decrease in party loyalty from
one election to the next. As for the political parties themselves,
Huntington's finding is that "the popular attitude towards parties
combines both disapproval and contempt." (p. 87) Huntington also sees a
decline in the mass base of the parties, plus a decline in the power of
party organization. This raises the spectre of a successful political
challenge to the power of people like the members of Trilateral
Commission: "The lesson of the 1960s was that American political
parties were extraordinarily open and extraordinarily vulnerable
organizations, in the sense that they could be easily penetrated, and
even captured, by highly motivated and well- organized groups with a
cause and a candidate." (p. 89) Had Huntington been writing today, he
would have crystallized his fears on this score with a single word:
"LaRouche.
Huntington is willing to explore the alternative that the political
parties may have to be done away with: "It could be argued that
political parties are a political form peculiarly suited to the needs
of industrial society and that the movement of the United States into a
post-industrial phase hence means the end of the party system as we
have known it." "In less developed countries, the principal alternative
to party government is military government. Do the highly developed
countries have a third alternative?" (p. 91)
Huntington sees the entire government in crisis, with congressmen
falling prey to the rising expectations of their constituents while the
presidency is in decline. Part of the latter problem is that a
presidential candidate needs to assemble an electoral coalition of
voters in order to win the White House, but must then assemble a
governing coalition of various power brokers. Huntington views the two
processes as perhaps antithetical.
The recommendations that conclude the analysis of the crisis in U.S.
democracy include such pablum as "moderation in democracy," more
authoritarianism, and the need for greater apathy on the part of the
population. "Democracy is more of a threat to itself in the United
States," writes Huntington.
The real conclusions reached by the Trilateral Commission were
doubtless more far-reaching, as can be inferred from the appendices of
the book. When the Crozier-Huntington-Watanuki study was presented to
the commission, it was introduced by Ralf Dahrendorf, the head of the
London School of Economics. The chief threat running through
Dahrendorf's remarks was that Huntington had neglected corporatist
elements in his prescription. Dahrendorf's argument deserves to be
quoted at some length:
"Democratic governments find it difficult to cope with the power
of extraparliamentary institutions which determine by their
decisions the life chances of as many (or in some cases more)
people as the decisions of governments can possibly determine in
many of our countries. Indeed, these extraparliamentary
institutions often make governmental power look ridiculous. When I
talk about extraparliamentary institutions, I am essentially
thinking of two powerful economic institutions--giant companies
and large and powerful trade unions.
The greater demand for participation, the removal of effective
political spaces from the national to the international level, and
the removal of the power to determine people's life chances from
political institutions to other institutions are all signs of what
might be called the dissolution of the general political public
which we assumed was the basis of real democratic institutions in
the past. Instead of there being an effective political public in
democratic countries from which representative institutions emerge
and to which representative institutions are answerable, there is
a fragmented public and in part a nonexistent public. There is a
rather chaotic picture in the political communities of many
democratic countries.
My main point here is that as we think about a political public in
our day, we cannot simply think of a political public of
individual citizens exercising their common sense interests on the
marketplace, as it were. In rethinking the notion of the political
public, we have to accept the fact that most human beings today
are both individual citizens and members of large organizations.
We have to accept the fact that most individuals see their
interests cared for not only by an immediate expression of their
citizenship rights (or even by political parties which organize
groups of interests) but also by organizations which at this
moment act outside the immediate political framework and which
will continue to act whether governments like it or not. And I
believe, therefore, somewhat reluctantly, that in thinking about
the political public of tomorrow we shall have to think of a
public in which representative parliamentary institutions are
somehow linked with institutions which in themselves are neither
representative nor parliamentary. I think it is useful to discuss
the exact meaning of something like an effective social contract,
or perhaps a "Concerted Action" or "Conseil ;aaeconomique et
social" for the political institutions of advanced democracies. I
do not believe that free collective bargaining is an indispensable
element of a free and democratic society. I do believe, however,
that we have to recognize that people are organized in trade
unions, that there are large enterprises, that economic interests
have got to be discussed somewhere, and that there has got to be a
negotiation about some of the guidelines by which our economies
are functioning. This discussion should be related to
representative institutions. There may be a need for reconsidering
some of our institutions in this light, not to convert our
countries into corporate states, certainly not, but to convert
them into countries which in a democratic fashion recognize some
of the new developments which have made the effective political
public so much less effective in recent years.
For a reader who has followed the exposition up to this point, not much
comment is necessary. Despite his very explicit disclaimer, Dahrendorf
is indeed talking about a covert and overt institutional transformation
toward a corporate state. We have seen several previous attempts to
accomplish exactly what he is proposing here. One was D'Annunzio's
Consiglio dei Provvisori, and another was Mussolini's Camera dei Fasci
e delle Corporazioni. But the Trilateral Commission still needed a
means of transition to corporatist rule. It was momentarily to propose
it in the form of Project Democracy.
The appendix to The Crisis of Democracy also contains a series of
formal concluding statements by the Trilateral Commission at the close
of debate on the ungovernability report. At a certain point, the text
turns toward question of workers' self-management, co-determination
(Mitbestimmung) as practiced in the Federal Republic of Germany, and
the need for new modes of organization to alleviate the tensions that
characterize post-industrial society. At that point, a new heading is
introduced, as follows:
"7. Creation of New Institution for the Cooperative Promotion of
Democracy"
The effective working of democratic government in the Trilateral
societies can now no longer be taken for granted. The increasing
demands and pressures on democratic government and the crisis in
governmental resources and public authority require more explicit
collaboration. One might consider, therefore, means of securing
support and resources from foundations, business corporations,
labor unions, political parties, civic associations, and, where
possible and appropriate, government agencies, for the creation of
an institute for the strengthening of democratic institutions. The
purpose of such an institute would be to stimulate collaborative
studies of common problems involved in the operations of democracy
in the Trilateral societies, to promote cooperation among
institutions and groups with common concerns in this area among
the Trilateral regions, and to encourage the Trilateral societies
to learn from each other's experience how to make democracy
function more effectively in their societies. There is much which
each society can learn from the others. Such mutual learning
experiences are familiar phenomena in the economic and military
fields; they must also be encouraged in the political field. Such
an institute could also serve a useful function in calling
attention to questions of special urgency, as, for instance, the
critical nature of the problems currently confronting democracy in
Europe." (p. 187)
With that, Project Democracy was unleashed against the world.
In the final discussion that followed Dahrendorf's remarks, the task of
the new institute was made clearer. One participant suggested that
Dahrendorf's idea of associating non-parliamentary groups with the
parliamentary process ought to be seen in relation to international
political systems, and not just in a national framework. At the close,
"one Commissioner ;obWas it David Rockefeller?;cb expressed his support
'very concretely' for the proposed institute for the strengthening of
democratic institutions." (p. 203)
Transforming the political parties
Project Democracy is thus by pedigree an international fascist-
corporatist organization designed to supplant democratic constitutional
republics with veiled and overt fascist regimes. It is a kind of
bankers' Comintern--the Comintern of Bukharin, to be sure. As some of
the citations adduced here suggest, it appears that one of the first
tasks contemplated for the nascent Project Democracy network was the
fomenting of coups d';aaetat in Western Europe, as was also indicated
by abundant empirical evidence manifest at that time.
What is the nature of Project Democracy's planned institutional
transformation for the United States? Project Democracy intends to
complete the evolution of the Republican and Democratic parties,
especially the Democrats, away from their previous status as mass-
based political machines responsive to the demands of constituencies
and regional and local interests. Under the pretext of increasing the
cohesion and responsibility of the parties, they are to acquire
dictatorial control over the votes and opinions of elected officials,
as for example, congressmen. The two parties are to become increasingly
remote from the citizenry, and subjected to an increasingly
authoritarian top-down control. Candidates are to become more and more
like party functionaries, and are to be chosen by a tiny group of party
leaders acting in synergy with the finance oligarchs. This will include
presidential candidates most emphatically. Primary elections are to be
gradually abolished in favor of a fascist-corporatist smoke-filled
room.
The specifically corporatist dimension of such a system in evolution
from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is provided by the merger of
the AFL-CIO top bureaucracy with the fused Democratic and Republican
National Committees and fundraising apparatus. Despite the decline in
the relative weight of trade unions in the U.S. workforce, the AFL-CIO
is still by far the largest membership organization in the United
States. This kind of troika is accurately reflected on the board of the
National Endowment for Democracy. The AFL-CIO, by virtue of its close
interfaces with the State Department, the Agency for International
Development, the Labor Department, the Commerce Department, the Special
Trade Representative, and the intelligence community, is virtually a
government agency, precisely in the way that Bukharin wanted trade
unions to be. By closely controlling the financing of candidates,
access to the media, party endorsement, candidate debates, and the
related election apparatus, the backers of Project Democracy think that
they can in effect choose the Congress and choose the President.
In this proposed silent putsch by Project Democracy, the
RNC/DNC/AFL-CIO lockstep would acquire sovereignty over the U.S.
federal government, in much the same way that the Soviet Politburo and
Central Committee Secretariat control the Soviet Council of Ministers
and Supreme Soviet. For Project Democracy, it is much more convenient
for sovereignty to be located in an informal combine of private
organizations, which cannot be subjected to government oversight,
Freedom of Information Act demands, or financial audit and
accountability, but which can and do receive large amounts of official
government funding, as well as the largesse conduited through Oliver
North's Swiss bank accounts.
At the same time, Project Democracy is well aware of the value of
maintaining a facade of respect for constitutional forms during the
time in which the passage from authoritarianism to totalitarianism is
being negotiated. It can be recalled that it took Mussolini some three
years to go from head of the government to dictator, and still longer
for the full institutional panoply of the totalitarian state to be set
forth. In that transition, the suppression of opposition political
groups and publishing enterprises was carried out gradually by
squadristi and secret police. Today, these functions are assigned to
the William Welds and the Oliver Revells. In the meantime, Project
Democracy will find ways to denigrate and vilify the United States
Constitution, even while going through the pretense of celebrating its
anniversary.
Realizing the design
The following examples will document the ongoing attempts to realize
this design.
Project Democracy as the Trilateral Comintern.
Samuel Huntington, as Harvard professor and director of
Kissinger's Center for International Affairs, appears to have
found a special niche as scorekeeper for Project Democracy's
series of international coups. In a recent volume entitled Global
Dilemmas, there appears Huntington's essay, "Will more Countries
become democratic?" Huntington, the theorist of democratic
ungovernability, starts off with a ringing endorsement of Project
Democracy: "The Reagan administration moved far beyond the Carter
administration's more limited concern with human rights and first
launched 'Project Democracy' and 'The Democracy Program' to
promote democratic institutions in other societies, and then
persuaded Congress to create a 'National Endowment for Democracy'
to pursue this goal on a permanent basis. In the early 1980s, in
short, concern with the development of new democratic regimes has
been increasing among academics and policymakers." (p.253)
Huntington is in touch with Freedom House, another node of the
Project Democracy network, and cites Freedom House's yearly survey
of how many people live under democratic conditions around the
world. In January 1984, for example, Freedom House found that 36%
of the world's people were living in democracies, a level that was
about equal to that of 10 years earlier. This corresponded to 52
free countries. Huntington prefers to describe democracy as
"polyarchy," a neologism coined by one of his fellow academics.
For Huntington, democracy is most highly correlated with
Protestantism. The article concludes with a hit list, leading off
with the "bureaucratic-authoritarian" regimes of Ibero- America,
including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. Then come the
East Asian "newly industrializing" countries, like South Korea,
Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Then come the Philippines, the
Dominican Republic, Grenada, and El Salvador. In general,
Huntington concludes that "the limits of democratic development in
the world may well have been reached." (p. 276)
Corporatism
In early 1975, Nicholas von Hoffman devoted his column in the
Washington Post to revelations that certain prime financial
supporters of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party have a
"hidden agenda for American politics ... a planned economy ...
state capitalism ... fascism without lampshade factories." Hoffman
stated that the then- President of the United Auto Workers,
Leonard Woodcock, was "willing to surrender the economic planning
to the megacorporations." In March 1975, Challenge magazine
carried an article entitled "The Coming Corporatism," by R.E. Pahl
and J.T. Winkler. The article stated in part:
"Corporatism is a distinct form of economic structure. It was
recognized as such in the 1930s by people of diverse
political backgrounds, before Hitler extinguished the
enthusiasm which greeted Mussolini's variant. The fact that
our blinkered political vocabulary now sees the alternative
pure forms of economy as simply "capitalism" or "socialism"
is a consequence of the fact that the Axis powers lost the
Second World War.
This "corporatism" is a comprehensive economic system under
which the state intensively channels predominantly privately
owned business towards four goals, which have become
increasingly explicit during the current economic crisis:
Order, Unity, Nationalism, and "Success."
Those, then, are the four aims. Let us not mince words.
Corporatism is fascism with a human face. What the parties are
putting forward now is an acceptable face of fascism; indeed a
masked version of it, because so far the more repugnant political
and social aspects of the German and Italian regimes are absent or
only present in diluted form.
The same year saw the creation of an Initiative Committee for
National Economic Planning with a press conference attended by
Woodcock, Robert Roosa, and Wassily Leontieff. Among the sponsors
of ICNEP were J.K. Galbraith and Robert McNamara. At the same
time, officials of the Swedish, German, British, and Italian
parties of the Second International were expressing the idea that,
whereas in the last depression, the financiers had turned to
fascist mass movements to impose corporatism and austerity, this
time the social democrats could survive by showing that they were
the most efficient agency for corporatist austerity.
Corporatism in 1988.
Signs are multiplying that with the present acceleration of
economic collapse, corporatist agitation may become more
widespread. One harbinger of such a trend is the highly
ideologized candidacy of former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt. In
declaring his candidacy for President, Babbitt proposed a
"gain-sharing" plan under which he claimed that by 1996
"two-thirds of American workers would directly share in the
profits and losses of their own business." When asked whether such
a policy were not a return to corporatism, Babbitt answered that
he preferred to call it "competitiveness" or "futurism," and later
admitted that he was not sure of the meaning of corporatism.
Babbitt's candidacy is designed to expose broad strata of the
population to various parts of the Trilateral ideological
inventory.
The 1980 presidential candidacy of Trilateral Commission member
Rep. John Anderson was also a vehicle for spewing out
Malthusianism and anti-constitutional propaganda. Anderson's
platform charged that despite the advent of post-industrial
society, the Republicans and Democrats were still too
"consumption-oriented." The platform stated: "The traditional
parties were reasonably effective mechanisms for distributing the
dividends of economic growth. But during a period in which the
central task of government is to allocate burdens and orchestrate
sacrifices, these parties have proved incapable of making the
necessary hard choices. We are prepared to tell the American
peopple what we must do, and allocate the burden in a manner
sensitive to both economic efficiency and social equity."
Babbitt's current rhetoric is strikingly similar.
Cutler vs. the Constitution.
A leading part in the Trilateral-Project Democracy effort to
overthrow the Constitution is played by Lloyd Cutler and his
Committee on the Constitutional System. Cutler had begun
assaulting the Constitution in late 1980, when he published an
article urging "changes in our Constitution" in Foreign Affairs.
There he argued that the present form of government is ill-suited
to facing difficult choices of the kind that it is increasingly
called upon to make. Cutler's remedies of 1980 included limiting
the President to a single six-year term, to make him more remote
from political demands; concurrent terms for President, Vice
President, Senators, and Congressmen, to increase the chances that
the same party will dominate in all these offices; and the ability
of the President to dissolve Congress and call new elections as a
way out of a deadlock of the executive and the legislative
branches.
In January 1987, the Committee on the Constitutional System took
the same point of departure: "Changes in the Constitution should
not be shunned, however, if critical modern problems cannot be
solved by other means." The CCS indicated among the signs of
strain in the present order "the mounting national debt, fueled
anew each year by outsized and unsustainable deficits that defy
the good intentions of legislators and Presidents." Part of the
cause is attributed to factors which "weaken the parties and
undermine their ability to draw the separated parts of government
into coherent action." For the CCS, the "weakening of the parties
in the electoral arena has contributed to the disintegration of
party cohesion among the officials we elect to public office." The
decline of party cohesion and party accountability is the main
point addressed by the CCS proposals for "strengthening" the
parties.
Among the remedies offered are a policy of packing Presidential
nominating conventions with party nominees and office holders,
optional or even obligatory straight-ticket voting, and public
financing of congressional campaigns with the party getting half
of the take to assure "cohesion." The CCS is for federal elections
every four years, permitting members of Congress to serve in the
cabinet, easier ratification of arms control and other treaties in
the Senate, presidential appearances in Congress to answer
questions, a shadow cabinet for the party out of power, and a
mechanism for dissolving Congress in the event of a deadlock.
It is evident that these measures would amount to the introduction
of a parliamentary system, in which congressmen would be subjected
to the merciless discipline of party whips. In such a
parliamentary system, the party that wins a majority also elects
the executive, an idea that has been repeatedly proposed by former
Sen. J. William Fulbright. Although the resemblance to the British
parliamentary system is marked, it should be recalled that the
Israeli Knesset is, if anything, a more extreme or "pure" form of
parliamentary arrangement. The Cutler proposals to subvert the
separation-of-powers and checks-and-balances features of the U.S.
Constitution are simply a blueprint for exactly the tyranny that
the framers of the Constitution sought to rule out. The sympathies
of Cutler and his Trilateral co-thinkers go out to Israel, where
there is no constitution.
Chairman Kirk the Totalitarian.
As the 1988 presidential elections approach, the signs of party
dictatorship in the election process multiply. In March 1986,
after the victory of two associates of Lyndon LaRouche in the
Illinois Democratic primary elections for lieutenant governor and
secretary of state, New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote an
op-ed in the New York Times in which he called for the abolition
of primary elections, and the choosing of candidates by the party
leadership. Later, Fabian Palomino, a political aide to New York
Gov. Mario Cuomo, who directed the operations of throwing "non-
endorsed" Democratic candidates off the September primary ballot,
was quoted as saying that "the best primary is no primary."
Chairman Paul Kirk of the Democratic National Committee and
Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf of the Republican National Committee are
acting together increasingly to police the presidential election
process. Kirk and Fahrenkopf more and more resemble the duumviri
of a single party, like Stalin and Bukharin during the middle
1920s. Is there a dime's worth of differnce between Kirk's
Democrats and Fahrenkopf's Republicans? Comparing the Carter and
Reagan administrations, we observe a remarkable continuity on such
policies as Volcker austerity economics and support for Ayatollah
Khomeini of Iran, to name just two. The direction is clear: Apart
from the activities of a maverick like LaRouche, America is well
on its way to becoming a one-party state.
Thus, the Kirk-Fahrenkopf tandem have arrogated to themselves the
organization of the 1988 presidential debates, a matter that up to
now has been handled by the individual candidates in negotiation
with the League of Women Voters. Kirk and Fahrenkopf reply that
they are seeking to "institutionalize" the debates and strengthen
the role of the parties in the political process. Kirk has
announced his intention to exclude the LaRouche campaign from
consultation and debates, and it is clear that third-party
candidates will have no chance.
Kirk has also announced a set of "rules" for the 1988 presidential
contest, and says he will enforce obedience to this code on the
candidates. We thus have the singular spectacle of the party
chairmen, who used to be relatively anonymous hacks, now
disciplining a gaggle of presidential aspirants like a classroom
of unruly schoolboys. Future Presidents must first be taught to
obey.
The idea of concentrating a very large number of state
presidential primary elections on a single day (like the so-called
Southern Super Tuesday of March 15, 1988), is also a step away
from federalism and toward a one-party state. The traditional
February to June "long season" of primary elections gave a
determined outsider the ability to parlay an early success into
later momentum through an extended series of almost weekly
engagements. "Super Tuesday" means that big bucks, like those
provided by Impact 88, the consortium of Democratic money-bags,
will be at a premium from the outset.
At the same time, there is an effort to de-emphasize the primary
contests altogether. Since the candidate will be chosen by the
party bosses anyway, why traipse through the proverbial thousand
living rooms of such places as New Hampshire and Iowa? This is the
advice of former Virginia Gov. Charles Robb to Georgia Sen. Sam
Nunn. Robb recommends a kind of institutional campaign, waged in
Nunn's case from the chairman's seat of the Senate Armed Services
Committee, thus guaranteeing maximum media visibility and
virtually no contact with the vulgar masses. In the same way, it
may be that former Sen. Howard Baker's disclaimer of presidential
ambition after his assumption of the post of White House chief of
staff is disingenuous to the degree that the White House may be
seen as the "bully pulpit" for running for the presidency.
The Future?
Samuel Huntington, in his recent book American Politics, develops
a perspective for the future development of the American political
system in the framework of conflict between increasingly
authoritarian and ultimately totalitarian state control, on the
one hand, and an underlying American value system and
world-outlook-- which he calls the "American Creed--on the other.
In Huntington's view, there is no doubt that the regime will
become more oppressive: "An increasingly sophisticated economy and
active involvement in world affairs seem likely to create stronger
needs for hierarchy, bureaucracy, centralization of power,
expertise, big government specifically, and big organizations
generally." (p. 228)
But this will conflict with the ideological American Creed, based
on liberty, equality, individualism, and democracy and rooted in
"seventeenth-century Protestant moralism and eighteenth-century
liberal rationalism." (p. 229) Something has to give, says
Huntington. On the one hand, there is a possibility that the
American Creed could be junked, and "there are some signs that
values are changing." "In the 1960s and 1970s in both Europe and
America, social scientists found evidence of the increasing
prevalence of 'postbourgeois' or postmaterialist' values,
particularly among younger cohorts. In a somewhat similar vein,
George Lodge foresaw the displacment of Lockean, individualistic
ideology in the United States by a 'communitarian' ideology,
resembling in many aspects the traditional Japanese collective
approach.
Huntington predicts that the conflict between individualistic
values and the centralized regime may explode early in the coming
century specifically between 2010 and 2030, in a period of ferment
and dislocation like the late 1960s: "If the periodicity of the
past prevails, a major sustained creedal passion period will occur
in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century." At
this time, he argues, "the oscillations among the responses could
intensify in such a way as to threaten to destroy both ideals and
institutions." (p. 232) Such a process would be acted out as
follows:
"Lacking any concept of the state, lacking for most of its
history both the centralized authority and the bureaucratic
apparatus of the European state, the American polity has
historically been a weak polity. It was designed to be so,
and the traditional inheritance and social environment
combined for years to support the framers' intentions. In the
twentieth century, foreign threats and domestic economic and
social needs have generated pressures to develop stronger,
more authoritative decision-making and decision-implementing
institutions. Yet the continued presence of deeply felt
moralistic sentiments among major groups in American society
could continue to ensure weak and divided government, devoid
of authority and unable to deal satisfactorily with the
economic, social and foreign challenges confronting the
nation. Intensification of this conflict between history and
progress could give rise to increasing frustration and
increasingly violent oscillations between moralism and
cynicism. American moralism ensures that government will
never be truly efficacious; the realities of power ensure
that government will never be truly democratic.
This situation could lead to a two-phase dialectic involving
intensified efforts to reform government, followed by
intensified frustration when those efforts produce not
progress in a liberal- democratic direction, but obstacles to
meeting perceived functional needs. The weakening of
government in an effort to reform it could lead eventually to
strong demands for the replacement of the weakened and
ineffective institutions by more authoritarian structures
more effectively designed to meet historical needs. Given the
perversity of reform, moralistic extremism in the pursuit of
liberal democracy could generate a strong tide toward
authoritarian efficiency. (p. 232)
Huntington then quotes Plato's celebrated passage on the way that
the "culmination of liberty in democracy is precisely what
prepares the way for the cruelest extreme of servitude under a
despot."
The message is clear: sooner or later, all roads lead to Behemoth.
Fascism as an aftermath of defeat. Nous sommes trahis! cried the
French in 1870 as they recoiled from defeat in war. For the
Germans of 1918, it was the Dolchstosslegende, the stab in the
back of the fighting army by the surrender of the politicians. For
D'Annunzio and Mussolini, it was the vittoria mutilata, the
inability of Orlando to impose Italy's territorial and colonial
demands in the imperialist haggling of Versailles. Each of these
reproaches, whatever their historical merits might have been,
became vital factors in engendering mass fascist mentality and
mass fascist movements.
Parallels exist between such figures as Oliver North and the
arditi who accompanied D'Annunzio to Fiume. According to former
National Security Council director Robert McFarlane, "Lt. Col.
Oliver North's experiences in the Vietnam War may have led him to
secretly channel proceeds from the Iran arms sales to the
Nicaraguan rebels while he was an NSC aide," according to an
article published in the Washington Times in March 1987. The
article quotes McFarlane, interviewed while recovering from a
suicide attempt, as follows:
"For people who went through that, and Colonel North surely
did, you come away with the the profound sense of very
intolerable failure. That is, a government must never give
its word to people who may stand to lose their lives and then
break faith. And I think it's possible that in the last year
we've seen a commitment made to human beings in Nicaragua
that is being broken.
As we have seen, the filibustering expedition of D'Annunzio to
Fiume was a kind of dress rehearsal for Italian fascism. In post-
World War I Germany, it was a similar kind of filibustering
activity, the military campaigns of the Baltic Freikorps against
the Bolsheviks, that created a significant part of the fascist
potential which later aggregated in the Nazi Party. For the
fascism of Project Democracy, the close historical parallel is the
filibustering in Central America around the Contra war.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1) See Ralph H. Bowen, German Theories of the Corporate State, p. 2
2) Finer, Mussolini's Italy, p. 499
3) G. Lowell Field, The Syndical and Corporative Institutions of
Italian Fascism,p. 137
4) Cited in Stephen Cohen, Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 30
5) Asher Arian, Politics in Israel,p. 206
End
