RE: [Marxism] National Socialism rides again

["Mark Lause" <MLause@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I have a real problem with discussions in which the participants insist
that they are defining words the right way...and often in ways that
other people don't.  We can call ourselves anything we want, of course,
but the point of using words is to make ourselves understood to other
people.

Socialists of the 1890s--followers of Bellamy--often called themselves
"Nationalists"--even National Socialists--because they favored
"nationalization" of industries and resources.  However, I fully agree
with Melvyn's sentiments as to why piratefish@xxxxxxxxx or anyone after
the fascist movements of the 1920s and 30s would call themselves
"National Socialist."  It is likely to confuse more than clarify.
Surely we have enough to argue over without adding Babel to our
problems.

On the other hand, I must say that Comrade Melvyn is simply in error
when he writes: "Populism is fascism in disguise."  This has no relation
to our historical experience.  In American history, the "Populists" were
the often very radical farmers who launched their own "People's Party"
(as opposed to the parties of business and profits) in 1890-92.  The
organizational roots were in the Farmers' Alliances, which sought to
form a cooperative mass movement of all farmers, including a "Colored
Farmers' Alliance" in the Deep South.  This led the Populists, in the
heyday of their movement, to take strong stands about equal rights in
the South.  Many of the Populists also embraced the radical land
reformism of Henry George, the nationalism of Bellamy, and most of the
founders of the Socialist Party came by way of the Populists.

Confusing and muddling this label came directly from the post-World War
II academic assault on all things radical in the American past.  In the
same sense that all radicalisms were equally obnoxious to
good-old-"Americanism," communism was portrayed as Nazism in a different
form...and the urban intelligencia easy wrote off the Populists of the
past as sort of Deliverance banjo boys.  From the mid-1960s, historians
successfully refuted this and did much to reestablish the genuinely
radical credentials of the Populists.

However, by the early 1970s, the self-reformed and self-lobotomized
world of bourgeois "journalism" had taken up the equation of "populist"
with "demagogue"...the impulse to become "popular" by appeal to
"irrational fears," as one of them explained, based on race, class, etc.
While the media started by pinning the "populist" tag on George Wallace
during this racist national campaigns, more recent right-wingers--like
Pat Buchanan and other corporate flunkies--have accepted the term.

Solidarity!
Mark L.




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