Re: [Marxism] Dashiell Hammett

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Einde O'Callaghan wrote:
  > This line was followed for several issues of FI - I don't know if 
any of
> the participants in this forum can comment on the attitudes of the 
> contemporary American left towards McCarthy and McCarthyism.

http://www.columbia.edu/%7Elnp3/mydocs/fascism_and_war/fascism.htm

A witch-hunt in the United States, sometimes called McCarthyism, emerged 
in the United States from nearly the very moment the cold war started. 
The witch-hunt would serve to eradicate domestic opposition to the 
anti-Communist crusade overseas. The witch-hunters wanted to root up and 
eradicate all sympathy to the USSR. President Harry Truman, a Democrat 
and New Dealer, started the anticommunist crusade. He introduced the 
first witch-hunt legislation, a bill that prevented federal employees 
from belonging to "subversive" organizations. When Republican Dwight 
Eisenhower took office, he simply kept the witch-hunt going. The 
McCarthy movement per se emerges out of a reactionary climate created by 
successive White House administrations, Democrat and Republican alike.

I will argue that a similar dynamic has existed in US politics over the 
past twenty years. Instead of having a "cold war" against the socialist 
countries, we have had a "cold war" on the working-class and its allies. 
James Carter, a Democrat, set into motion the attack on working people 
and minorities, while successive Republican and Democratic 
administrations have continued to stoke the fire. Reaganism is Carterism 
raised to a higher level. All Buchanan represents is the emergence of a 
particularly reactionary tendency within this overall tendency toward 
the right.

Attacks on the working-class and minorities have nothing to do with "bad 
faith" on the part of people like William Clinton. We are dealing with a 
global restructuring of capital that will be as deep-going in its impact 
on class relations internationally as the cold war was in its time. The 
cold war facilitated the removal of the Soviet Union as a rival. 
Analogously, the class war on working people in the advanced capitalist 
countries that began in the Carter years facilitates capital's next new 
expansion. Capitalism is a dynamic system. This dynamism includes not 
only war and "downsizing", it also includes fabulous growth in places 
like the East Coast of China. To not see this is to not understand 
capitalism.

"The United States, the most powerful capitalist country in history, is 
a component part of the world capitalist system and is subject to the 
same general laws. It suffers from the same incurable diseases and is 
destined to share the same fate. The overwhelming preponderance of 
American imperialism does not exempt it from the decay of world 
capitalism, but, on the contrary, acts to involve it even more deeply, 
inextricably and hopelessly. US capitalism can no more escape from the 
revolutionary consequences of world capitalist decay than the older 
European capitalist powers. The blind alley in which world capitalism 
has arrived, and the US with it, excludes a new organic era of 
capitalist stabilization. The dominant world position of American 
imperialism now accentuates and aggravates the death agony of capitalism 
as a whole."

This appears in an article in the April 5, 1954 Militant titled "First 
Principles in the Struggle Against Fascism". It is of course based on a 
totally inaccurate misunderstanding of the state of global capital. 
Capitalism was not in a "blind alley" in 1954. The truth is that from 
approximately 1946 on capitalism went through the most sustained 
expansion in its entire history. To have spoken about the "death agony" 
of capitalism in 1954 was utter nonsense. This "catastrophism" could 
only serve to misorient the left since it did not put McCarthyism in 
proper context.

One of the great contributions made by Nicos Poulantzas in his "Fascism 
and the Third International" was his diagnosis of the problem of 
"catastrophism". According to Poulantzas, the belief that capitalism has 
reached a "blind alley" first appeared in the Comintern of the early 
1920's. He blames this on a dogmatic approach to Lenin's "Imperialism, 
The Highest Stage of Capitalism" that existed in a communist movement 
that was all too eager to deify the dead revolutionist.

Lenin's theory of imperialism owed much to Hilferding and Bukharin who 
believed that capitalism was moribund and incapable of generating new 
technical and industrial growth. Moreover, this capitalist system was in 
a perpetual crisis and wars were inevitable. The Comintern latched onto 
this interpretation and adapted it to the phenomenon of fascism. 
Fascism, in addition to war, was also a permanent feature of the 
decaying capitalist system. A system that had reached such an impasse 
was a system that was in a permanent catastrophic mode. The Comintern 
said that it was five minutes to midnight.

The SWP's version of catastrophism did not allow it to see McCarthy's 
true mission. This mission was not to destroy the unions and turn the 
United States into a totalitarian state. It was rather a mission to 
eliminate radical dissent against the stepped-up attack on the USSR, its 
allies and revolutionary movements in the third world. The witch- hunt 
targeted radicals in the unions, the schools, the State Department, the 
media and elsewhere. After the witch-hunt had eradicated all traces of 
radical opinion, the US military could fight its imperialist wars 
without interference from the left. This is exactly what took place 
during the Korean War. There were no visible signs of dissent except in 
the socialist press and in some liberal publications like I.F. Stone's 
Newsletter. This clamp-down on dissent lasted until the Vietnam war when 
a newly developing radicalization turned the witch-hunt back for good.

In the view of the SWP, nothing basically had changed since the 1930's. 
The target of McCarthyite "fascism" was the working-class and its 
unions. The Militant stated on January 18, 1954:

"If the workers' organizations don't have the answer, the fascists will 
utilize the rising discontent of the middle class, its disgust with the 
blundering labor leadership, and its frenzy at being ruined 
economically, to build a mass fascist movement with armed detachments 
and hurl them at the unions. While spouting a lot of radical-sounding 
demagogy they will deflect the anti-capitalist wrath of the middle class 
and deploy it against labor, and establish the iron- heel dictatorship 
of Big Capital on the smoking ruins of union halls."

One wonders if the party leadership in 1954 actually knew any middle- 
class people, since party life consisted of a "faux proletarian" 
subculture with tenuous ties to American society. Certainly they could 
have found out about the middle-class on the newly emerging TV situation 
comedies like "Father Knows Best" or "Leave it to Beaver". Rather than 
expressing "rising discontent" or "frenzy", the middle- class was taking 
advantage of dramatic increases in personal wealth. Rather than plotting 
attacks on union halls like the Silver Shirts did in 1938, they were 
moving to suburbia, buying televisions and station wagons, and taking 
vacations in Miami Beach or Europe. This was not only objectively 
possible for the average middle-class family, it was also becoming 
possible for the worker in basic industry. For the very same reason the 
working-class was not gravitating toward socialism, the middle-class was 
not gravitating toward fascism. This reason, of course, is that 
prosperity had become general.

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