Constitutional Longevity. Was Religiosity...

charles brown cdehbrown at hotmail.com
Tue Jun 16 18:57:23 PDT 1998


Dennis Redmond wrote, and I agree with him:
>On Tue, 16 Jun 1998 Dhlazare at aol.com wrote:
>
>> I still don't see how you can have fascism within the context of a
bourgeois-
>> liberal republic.
>
>The point is that the same social forces which created
bourgeois-liberal
>republics also drove the creation of fascism. The Italian, German and
>Japanese fascists really didn't do anything to their European
>and Asian neighbors, remember, that the European colonial powers hadn't
>already done to their colonial territories (war, extermination,
slavery,
>etc.), or that white Americans didn't do to their imported African
slaves.
>Adorno and Horkheimer's "Dialectic of Enlightenment" is the classic
>diagnosis of this problem, where liberalism, far from being just a nice
>idea or a golden ideal, turns out to have sown the seeds of the later
>fascist regimes, just as the entrepreneurial economy was merely
>the forerunner to the state-monopoly welfare and warfare states which
>succeeded such. The rule of markets has always and everywhere been a
>catastrophe.
>
>-- Dennis
>

Italy and Germany were liberal or bourgeois democratic-republics in which Fascism and Nazism arose. The democratic-republic is the preferred form of bourgeois rule (See _The State and Revolution_, by V.I. Lenin , "A democratic republic is the best possible political shell for capitalism.." ; page 14 International edition ,1971). The bourgeisie rule with more finesse than monarchs. The tyranny is not continuous, but intermittent. From an historical perspective, fascism is intermittent compared to the more continuous bourgeoisie democratic-republic.

With respect to the U.S. democratic republic, which it claimed to be from the beginning (and was, but with contradictions), slavery was as bad or worse than fascism. It existed in a mixed mode with a democratic republic. Jefferson, the archtype American liberal, PERSONIFIES this mixed mode, contradiction.

Charles Brown

______________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list