Re: [Marxism] Dashiell Hammett

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 17:55:28 -0400 Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
> 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. 

The part about Truman being a New Dealer is an import
point.  The witchhunt under Truman was in large degree
an effort at reshaping the New Deal coalition for the
cold war.  Under FDR, the CPUSA and its fellow travelers
had, for all intents and purposes, joined the New Deal coalition.
That suited officials in the Roosevelt Administration and
in Truman's first administration just fine, since the
Communists, especially during the Second World
War, helped to quell labor unrest.  Indeed, during
the war, they were the strongest supporters of
no-strike pledges within the defense industries.

However, after the war, the US ruling class now
viewed the Soviet Union as its chief adversary.
Under these conditions, the Truman Administration
viewed the Communists as not only dispensible,
but they were viewed as a political element that
had to be actively suppressed, since they were
perceived as an obstacle to the type of mobilization
that was thought to be necessary for waging the
cold war.  The new outlook was probably best
articulated in Arthur Schlessinger's 1949 book,
The Vital Center, where he called for his fellow
liberal Democrats to abandon Popular Front-type
politics in favor of a politics that would remain
committed to the reforms of the New Deal era
but would also be firmly and militantly anti-communist
and anti-Soviet.

> 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. 

But the nature of the witchhunt changed somewhat when Eisenhower
took office.  The witchhunt was now used by reactionary
Republicans as a weapon against New Deal Democrats,
including Democrats who were themselves extremely
anticommunist.  It was wielded against the Eastern
Establishment, which included many Republicans
but who were perceived by the extreme rightwing
Republicans to be "soft on Communism" and 
perhaps, just as importantly, soft on the New Deal.
Thus McCarthy with some success, sought to conitnue
and intensify the  purge of the the State Department 
that had begun earlier with the efforts of people
like Richard Nixon campaign against Eastern
Establishment types like Alger Hiss, who were 
thought to be insufficiently nationalistic.
McCarthy's downfall came when overreached himself by
attempting to take on the Department of the Army.
However, other Republican politicians like Richard
Nixon, who had preceded him in the effort to purge
the State Department, proved to be more successful
politically.

> 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.

The Carter Administration represented the Democratic Party's
first attempt to break free of its traditional support for New Deal
type reformism.  In other words it was an effort to bring the
party into harmony with the efforts of big capital to start rolling back,
first the reforms of the 1960s and eventually, the reforms of the
1930s, as capital sought to reverse the long term decline of profits
that it had been experiencing.

> 
> 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. 

And by doing so, removed what for many people was a perceived
alternative to capitalism.  During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher
had proclaimed that "there is no alternative", by which she
meant that there was not only no alternatives to capitalism,
but that there were no viable alternatives to the laissez-faire
capitalism that she championed.  The economic crisis of the
mid-1970s had persuaded many people that social democratic
style reformism was no longer economically viable. If one
did not opt for outright socialism, then indeed there seemed
to be no alternative to the policies supported by both Thatcher
and Reagan.  And the ruling classes in the West took full
advantage of the collapse of the Soviet bloc to proclaim that
indeed no alternative to capitalism could be seriously
entertained.  Thus, the ending of the cold war proved
to be a victory for the Western ruling classes at home
as well as abroad.

> 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.
> 
>   
     .
For capitalism, economic crises are a both a threat and
source of strength to the system.  They are a threat
because they call into question the very legitimacy of
the system.  But on the other hand, economic crises
by destroying capital and driving down wages create
conditions for renewed profitiability for the next
round of capital accumulation.
     .   .
> 
> 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.

Those comarades had failed to perceive that the massive
destruction of capital that had occured in Europe and
Japan during the war had created new opportunities
for capital accumulation for the postwar period.
They also failed to take into account the success 
of the military Keynesianism that was being followed
during the cold.  All that massive military spending was
taking place in the name of fighting off the Soviet Union
was providing the economy with sustained stimulus.

> 
> 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 
>

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