After several years, I’m still looking for a working definition of “middle class” from the Left and the Democrat Party that even remotely resembles the American private sector definition, as we reshaped it over the past century and a half. You see, in the rest of the world, and for well over 2000 years, the “middle class” was always an arm of the monarchy, usually the civil service, licensed professional and merchant class.
In his The Great Offensive (1933), Maurice Hindus, a 1930s apologist for the Soviet “experiment” going on in Russia, made a casual comment about how the Bolsheviks viewed the rising enthusiasm for “national socialism” or fascism, in western Europe, offhandedly referred to it as “middle class socialism”.
No one really thought about it at the time, a throwaway sentence in a book about an entirely-new-type of-state-in-the-making, but the phrase was heavy with hidden meaning about the difference between Marxist and non-Marxist ideas of socialism. Hindus was distinguishing between the process of omelet-making in the New Soviet Union, a country of 200 million of mostly poor illiterates living for centuries under a feudal regime of monarchs and their factotums, where millions of eggs had to be broken in order to shock Russians into modernity, against a western Europe, increasingly defined by elected governments and a large, bureaucratic state middle class, where far fewer eggs needed to be broken to move people toward a state-desired purpose.
Hindus was saying in essence that fascism was just a variation of Marx-Leninist socialism, only one more fitted for economies and political systems that were more evolved and totalitarianism unneeded.
So, when World War II ended, Nazism buried, the newly democratically-elected governments of Europe could redesign themselves as “democratic socialists” along the same economic lines of the national socialist model that defined the German Reich in 1930s. All they had to do was exclude the xenophobic nationalism of the Germans, and that awful name “fascist” which they could then hurl at anyone who wasn’t just like them. The totalitarian heavy-handedness of Nazism; secret police, speech control, warrantless arrests, were unneeded in the New Europe. Henceforward “fascist” would refer to those kinds of totalitarian activities and not the more definitive aspects of fascism, such as the over-arching alliance between the state and its various industrial-economic bases. That would be called something else.
So the core of fascism, an economic alliance between the State and Big Business, has been in full dress array for many years. The European Union was just the most recent expression of its expanse. And since big business in Europe was well developed, and the people largely fitting into assigned social slots for a generation or more, there was no need to break many eggs. In Marxist terms, there has been no need for the state to own the means of production when it could control it much more humanely.
That seems to be changing in Europe.
So, when Barack Obama emerged on the American scene in 2008, and his Marxist training had became known, it was only natural that people here would call him a “communist” which spiritually he likely is, and intellectually thinks he is. But in the clear light of history he is, and always has been, a fat-cat “middle class socialist”. A fascist. As is his party, not to mention a few Republicans, although they all come wrapped differently.
In fact, we now know this to define the “new world order”, which is no longer secret, witness the January 2017 World Economic Forum at Davos, where (still-Communist) China’s premier Li Kiqiang was received to applause as the new state/corporate leader of this new order, to the approval of some of the world’s largest and most powerful global corporations.
Thank Donald Trump for this premature “outing” of the marriage between Marx and capitalism..
At least for now European fascism and American fascism are not necessarily on the same track, at least since the election and inauguration of Donald Trump. But the kinds of forces behind Trump’s election are now rising in Europe. Trump has invigorated long-dormant feelings of nationalism there, and a dislike for super-state management that shows no signs of ever stopping its malignant growth, much less drawing back. (There is plenty of evidence that bureaucracies can’t stop trying to grow, much less voluntarily going on a diet. Like parasites they will cling to their host even to the point that they kill the host…and themselves in the process.)
In every European nation lines are being drawn between the peoples’ desire to be free of over-management by states who cannot seem to give even an inch, to take back more control of their own lives. The extent to which the engines of the state in England were used to undo Brexit (without success) shows how far the state class will go to hold onto every inch of territory. State media in most Euro countries have defined “fake news” to mean only news items that are contrary to state purposes. So, their struggle is similar to our own, and their growing cynicism of state (and media) sincerity does not bode well for a happy end for the fascist arrangement the World Order has in mind.
And, if you have not been noticing, the middle eastern migration crisis, in part caused by some serious miscalculations by our own White House with Arab Spring (2009-2013) and the rise of ISIS (with the help of Google and Facebook, and their own kumbaya innocence) have put the old Soviet empire in eastern Europe, the Balkans, on the front line of this migration since most of them have to traverse Bulgaria, Hungary, and old Yugoslavia to get to the Faire Hills of Germany. Instead, today, they run into walls, yes, those kinds of walls, and armed border guards, for the new members of the EU in the Balkans have struck out on their own, denying their masters in Brussels, and begun to deny passage across their lands. And Austria, of Old Europe, has now sent troops to help their Balkan neighbors, who they used to rule over, breaking with the West.
The times, they sure are a ‘changing.
In summary, the globalist-defined world economy is fascist in aspect. The relationship between our federal government and certain global businesses is and has been for the past 8 years in reality, and past 16 sentimentally, fascist.
For reasons I won’t spend several thousand words to explain, many of Americans who call themselves socialist today are indeed fascist…in all likelihood because of that awful name they’d been brought up to hate, and to only call their worst enemies. Many leftists are stupid, while many are cunning. Either way they will always accuse their enemies of their own conspiracy.
So then, can anyone tell me by what definition anyone can brand Donald Trump a “fascist”? Can we get this definition in writing? Can we hire a hall?
This should be fun.
