Greek election thread.

[Starry Messenger]

29. Right, the class basis of the petty boug. makes them reactionary.

There are some articles by R. Palme Dutt that talk about the economic conditions present before the rise of fascism too. There is a book he wrote also Fascism and Social Revolution, but I haven't had a chance to look through it yet. Here's an excerpt from a counter-review of his book:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/dutt/articles/1935/question_of_fascism.htm

The Question of Fascism and Capitalist Decay

Both tendencies can be traced in particular phases and situation; but the tendencies to decay, the retrograde tendencies continually grow stronger than before, and the tendencies to advance grow weaker than before. (“The monopolist form of capital increasingly develops the elements of parasitical degeneration, decay and decline of capitalism”—C. I. Program.)[1] And fascism is precisely a sharp and intensified expression of this process, and a direct factor in carrying it forward.

In order to see more clearly the character and significance of this process, compare the elements of “decay” noted by Lenin twenty years ago, on the basis of the facts of imperialism before the World War, and the enormous further development of these elements of decay today. Lenin noted as particular evidence of decay:

1. Parasitism and the growth of the rentier and “rentier-State”;

2. The beginning of “the economic possibility of slowing down technical progress”, as instanced in trusts buying up inventions in order to suppress them.

Today after twenty years we are able to note as further features carrying this process forward:

1. Large-scale state-organized destruction of the productive forces and restriction of production;

2. Increased resistance to technical development and non-utilization of inventions, except in the military sphere, developing even into a widespread ideological hostility to inventions beginning to find expression in governmental, scientific, business and economic circles;

3. Development of the anti-scientific and anti-cultural campaign, cutting down of education, burning of books—also a form of destruction of the productive forces;

4. Chronic large-scale mass unemployment of a type previously unknown—again a deterioration and destruction of the productive forces;

5. Devotion of an increasing proportion of the productive forces to non-productive purposes connected with war preparation.

All these phenomena of present day capitalism, which receive their sharpest expression in fascism, are of the greatest significance for the process of increasing decay that is taking place.

Against this picture of present day capitalism in increasing decay, with fascism as at once an expression of this process and an accelerating factor, {...}