The appeal of socialism was so great in the era that fascism arose, that the bourgeoisie made demogogic imitation of socialist ideology a central feature of their main counterrevolutionary thrust.
Goddamn the bourgeoisie.
Charles Brown
>>> <Apsken at aol.com> 01/13 2:38 PM >>>
Off-list James heartfield asked me for documentation of my report on Paul
Mattick's connection to Otto Strasser. Below is a copy of my reply.
Incidentally, the political point is not simply one of 50-plus years past.
Several of the insurgent Nazi terror groups, both in the U.S. and in Europe,
are Strasserite (revolutionary anti-capitalist plebeian national socialist --
"red" Nazis) whose political lines are pitched to militant proletarians,
marginal family farmers, and struggling petit bourgeois. Some of them believe
that sections of the Marxist left also are prospective converts.
Ken Lawrence
James,
Unfortunately my archives are beyond my reach in Mississippi, in the hands of a hostile former spouse. Some years ago at a Socialist Party book bazaar in Chicago I purchased a run of Living Marxism from the 1940s and 50s, which included a pile of the organization's leaflets. Among those was the one advertising the Strasser tour.
Abstractly, it should not have surprised me, because it reflected the triumph of spontaneist politics above all, as well as the view that Leninism is the main enemy of the proletariat. But I was myself part of the broader spontaneist Marxist current myself, being a friend and comrade of C.L.R. James, so this caused me plenty of soul searching.
The Who's Who I quoted also says this about Strasser: "During his exile in Sweden and Canada, Otto Strasser became an advocate of 'solidarism', a third path between capitalism and communism, which he gave a national-socialist, Christian and decentralized 'Europeanist' colouring. Returning to post-war West Germany, Otto Strasser tried and failed to win public support for these ideas in the 1950s after he had recovered his German citizenship. In other respects he appeared to have learned nothing from the past, still espousing a vicious, demagogic anti-semitism in his journmalistic publications."
I think you can see from that the points that appealed to Mattick. But the collaboration was unforgivable nonetheless.
Ken