Money, Class, and Culture,
Doing the World,
The Rest Is History

excerpted from the book

Contrary Notions

The Michael Parenti Reader

by Michael Parenti

City Lights Books, 2007, paperback

Money, Class, and Culture

p235
Capitalism works best in the poor countries, where wages are low, regulations and human services are paltry, and unions are weak or nonexistent; the result is that profit margins are higher than ever. Look at capitalist countries like Indonesia, Nigeria, Mexico, the Philippines Haiti, Thailand, El Salvador, and so many others-all so capitalist and all so poor. Their populations get still poorer while a handful of transnational corporate investors get ever richer off them.

p236
... wealth can become addictive. Fortune whets the appetite for more fortune. There is no end to the amount of money one might desire to accumulate... Wealth buys every comfort and privilege that is available, elevating the possessor to the highest social stratosphere, an expression of the aggrandizing self, leaving one feeling almost invulnerable to time and mortality.

... Such is the addictive nature of wealth, keeping all of it together, always adding to it, never subtracting. The family wealth is immortalized in order to secure the family name and fortune though not necessarily the well-being of all family members.

p238
The safest way to remain very rich is to get still richer out on top, never on bottom. Given this rat race, the tendency is for wealth to be pursued without moral restraint. Like any addiction, or any f systemic imperative, money is pursued in that singleminded way, with a disregard for what is right or wrong, just or unjust, helpful harmful to others.

p239
... the government keeps the economy going by massive deficit spending, a large chunk of which goes to the military. To make up for these deficits, the government borrows from rich financial interests at home and abroad. The accumulation of these yearly deficits is what we call the national debt, amounting to upwards of $9 trillion as of the end of 2006. Over the last two decades, the U.S. national debt has skyrocketed by 120 percent or so, mostly driven by conservative presidents: Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and his son, George W. Bush. The U.S. national debt is larger than the national debts of all Third World nations combined.

Conservatives like a big deficit because it represents an upward transfer of income from those who are eventually held responsible to pay it (the general public) to those who hold the notes on the debt (rich creditors). A massive national debt is a way of privatizing the public treasury. The bigger the debt, the larger the portion of the federal budget that finds its way back into the coffers of private creditors, as the government continues to borrow from those it should be taxing.

p240
[... In a country like] India, with a vast impoverished population of a billion people, there are some 80 million who might be designated as middle class, a consumer market much larger than the entire consumer population of most industrialized European nations.

p241
... wealth and poverty do not just exist in an unfortunate but innocent juxtaposition. They endure in a close dynamic interrelationship. Wealth creates poverty and relies on it for its own continued existence. Without slaves how could the slaveholder live in the lavish style to which he is accustomed? Without serfs or overworked peasants, how could the lord be to the manor born? Without the working poor, how could the leisurely rich make do? With no underprivileged, who would be privileged?

p241
During recessions, smaller competitors are weeded out, unions are weakened and often broken, and a reserve supply o unemployed workers grows in number, further helping to depress wages. And depressed wages increase profit margins. In recessions, profits rise faster than wages; indeed, in the severer slumps, wages are not likely to rise at all.

The idea that all Americans experience good and bad times together should be put to rest. Even as the economy declines, rich investors grow richer by grabbing a still bigger slice of whatever exists. During recent recessions, corporate profits rose to record levels, as companies squeezed more output from each employee while paying less in wages and benefits.

p243
philosopher John Locke wrote in 1689

"The great and chief end of Men's uniting into Commonwealths and putting themselves under Government, is the Preservation of their Property.

p243
Adam Smith wrote in 1776

"The necessity of civil government grows up with the acquisition of valuable property." And "till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor." Civil authority, Smith went on, "is in reality instituted for the defense of the rich against the poor, or of those who have some property against those who have none at all."

p244
James Madison wrote

"the most common and durable source" of divisions and conflict within a polity "has been the various and unequal distribution of property [wealth]. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society" and "the first object of government" is "the protection of different and unequal faculties of acquiring property ..."

p245
Michael Waltzer, Civil Disobedience and Corporate Authority in the book Power and Community, p226

"When the state acts to protect [corporate] authority, it does so through the property system; that is, it recognizes the corporation as the private property of some determinate group of [persons] and it protects their right to do, within legal limits, what they (please with their property." 10 Yet, institutions so ruled are said to be the mainstay of democratic pluralism.

p246
... social institutions are controlled by the more active members of the business class in what amounts to a system of interlocking and often interchanging directorates.

p246
Matthew Josephson, The Robber Barons, p317

"In short order the railroad presidents, copper barons, the big dry-goods merchants and the steel masters became Senators, ruling the highest councils of the national government... but they also became in even greater number lay leaders of churches, trustees of universities, partners or owners of newspapers or press services and figures of fashionable, cultured society. And through all these channels they labored to advance their policies and principles."

p248
The primary goal of capitalist cultural dominance is not to provide us with nice concerts and museums but to give capitalism's exploitative reality a benign gloss and providential appearance so that people learn to accept and admire the "stewardship" of the owning class.

p248
[Antonio Gramsci notes that] if a ruling class falls to keep up the appearance of being concerned for the public interest at least some of the time, its legitimacy will decline, its cultural and national hegemony will falter and its power will shrink back to its police and military capacity, leaving it with a more overtly repressive but ultimately less secure rule.

p263
By "imperialism" I mean the process whereby the dominant politico-economic interests of one nation expropriate for their own enrichment the land, labor, raw materials, and markets of another people.

p265
Imperialism is older than capitalism... Emperors and conquistadors were interested mostly in plunder and tribute, gold and glory. Capitalist imperialism differs from these earlier forms in the way it invests in other countries, penetrates cultural and political life, and integrates the overseas economies into an international system of profit accumulation.

p266
North American and European corporations have acquired control of more than three-fourths of the known mineral resources of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

p266
... U.S. corporate-profit rates in the Third World are 50 percent greater than in developed countries and have continued to rise dramatically... Today some four hundred transnational companies control about 80 percent of the capital assets of the global "free market"...

p268
The impoverished lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are known to us as the "Third World" to distinguish them from the "First World" of industrialized Europe and North America and the now largely defunct "Second World" of communist states. Third World poverty, called "underdevelopment," is treated by most Western observers as an original and inherent historic condition. In fact, the lands of Asia, Africa, and Latin America have long produced great treasures of foods, minerals and other natural resources. That is why the Europeans went through so much trouble to plunder them... The Third World is rich. Only its people are poor-and they are poor because of the pillage they have endured.

The process of expropriating the natural resources of the Third World began centuries ago. First, the colonizers extracted gold, silver, furs, silks, and spices; then flax, hemp, timber, molasses, sugar, rum, rubber, tobacco, calico, cocoa, coffee, cotton, copper, coal, palm oil, tin, iron, ivory, and ebony; and still later on, oil, zinc, manganese, mercury, platinum, cobalt, bauxite, aluminum, and uranium. Not to be overlooked is that most hellish of all expropriations: the abduction of millions of human beings into slave labor.

p269
From the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries Europe certainly was "ahead" of Africa, Asia, and Latin America in a variety of things, such as the number of hangings, murders, and other violent crimes; instances of venereal disease, smallpox, typhoid, tuberculosis, cholera, and other such afflictions; social inequality and poverty (both urban and rural); and frequency of famines, slavery, prostitution, piracy, religious massacres and inquisitions.

p269
Superior firepower, not superior culture, has brought the Europeans and Euro-North Americans to positions of global supremacy.

p271
What is called "underdevelopment" is a set of social relations that has been forcefully imposed on countries. With the advent of the Western colonizers, the peoples of the Third World were set back in their development sometimes for centuries. British imperialism in India provides an instructive example. In 1810, India was exporting more textiles to England than England was exporting to India. By 1830, the trade flow was reversed. The British had put up prohibitive tariff barriers to shut out Indian finished goods and were dumping their commodities in India, a practice backed by British gunboats and military force. Within a matter of years, the great textile centers of Dacca and Madras were turned into ghost towns. The Indians were sent back to the land to raise the cotton used in British textile factories. In effect, India was reduced to being a cow milked by British investors.

By 1850, India's debt had grown to 53 million. From 1850 to 1900, its per capita income dropped by almost two-thirds. The value of the raw materials and commodities that the Indians were obliged to send to Britain during most of the nineteenth century amounted yearly to more than the total income of the sixty million Indian agricultural and industrial workers. British imperialism did two things: first, it ended India's development, then it forcibly underdeveloped that country. The massive poverty we associate with India was not an original historical condition that antedates imperialism.

p272
Wealth is transferred from Third World people to the economic elites of Europe and North America (and later on Japan) by the expropriation of natural resources, the imposition of ruinous taxes and land rents, the payment of poverty wages, and the forced importation of finished goods at highly inflated prices. The colonized country is denied the opportunity to develop its own natural resources, markets, trade, and industrial capacity. Self-sustenance and self-employment are discouraged at every turn.

Hundreds of millions of Third World people now live in destitution in remote villages and congested urban slums, suffering hunger and disease, often because the land they once tilled is now controlled by agribusiness firms who use it for mining or for commercial export crops such as coffee, sugar, and beef, instead of growing beans, rice, and corn for home consumption. Imperialism forces millions of children around the world to live nightmarish lives, with their mental and physical health severely damaged. In countries like Mexico, India, Colombia, and Egypt, children are dragooned into health-shattering, dawn-to-dusk labor on farms and in factories and mines for pennies an hour, with no opportunity for play, schooling, or medical care. In India, 55 million children are pressed into the work force. In the Philippines and Malaysia, corporations have lobbied to drop age restrictions for labor recruitment.

When we say a country is underdeveloped, we are implying that it is backward and retarded in some way, that its people have shown little capacity to achieve and evolve. The negative connotations of "underdeveloped" has caused the United Nations, the Wall Street journal, and parties of contrasting political persuasion to refer to Third World countries as developing nations, a term somewhat less insulting than "underdeveloped" but equally misleading.

I prefer to use "Third World" because "developing" still implies that backwardness and poverty were part of an original historic condition and not something imposed by the imperialists. It also falsely suggests that these countries are developing when actually their economic conditions are usually worsening.

p274
What has emerged in the Third World is an intensely exploitative form of dependent capitalism. Economic conditions have worsened drastically with the growth of corporate investment. The problem is not poor lands 'or unproductive populations but self-enriching transnationals.

p275
The local economies of the world are increasingly dominated by a network of international corporations that are beholden to parent companies based in North America, Europe and Japan.

p276
Historically, U.S. capitalist interests have been less interested in acquiring more colonies than in acquiring more wealth, preferring to make off with the treasure of other nations without the bother of owning and administering the nations themselves. Under neo-imperialism, the flag stays home, while the dollar goes everywhere.

After World War II, European powers like Britain and France adopted a similar strategy of neo-imperialism. Left financially depleted by years of warfare, and facing intensified popular resistance from within the Third World itself, they reluctantly decided that indirect economic hegemony was less costly and politically more expedient than outright colonial rule. Though the newly established Third World country might be far from completely independent, it usually enjoyed more legitimacy in the eyes of its populace than a foreign colonial power. Furthermore, under neoimperialism the native government takes up the costs of administering the country while the imperialist interests are free to concentrate on skimming the cream-which is all they really want.

After years of colonialism, the Third World country finds it extremely difficult to extricate itself from the unequal relationship with its former colonizer and impossible to depart from the global capitalist sphere. Those countries that try to make a break are subjected to punishing economic and military treatment by one or another major power, nowadays usually the United States.

The leaders of the new nations may voice revolutionary slogans, yet they find themselves locked into the global corporate orbit, cooperating perforce with the First World nations for investment, trade, and loans. In many instances a comprador class was installed as a first condition for independence, that is, a coterie of rulers who cooperate in turning their own country into a client state for foreign interests. A client state is one that is open to investments on terms that are decidedly favorable to the foreign investors. In a client state, corporate investors enjoy direct subsidies and land grants, access to raw materials and cheap labor, light or nonexistent taxes, no minimum wage or occupational safety laws, no prohibitions on child labor, and no consumer or environmental protections to speak of. The protective laws that do exist go largely unenforced.

The comprador class is well recompensed for its cooperation. Its leaders enjoy opportunities to line their pockets with the foreign aid sent by the U.S. government. Stability is assured with the establishment of security forces, armed and trained by the United States in the latest technologies of terror and repression.

In all, the Third World is something of a capitalist paradise, offering life as it was in Europe and the United States during the nineteenth century, with a rate of profit vastly higher than what might be earned today in a country with strong social regulations, effective labor unions, and higher wage and work standards.

Doing the World

p281
One-third of Russian men never live to sixty years of age. In 1992, Russia's birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II.

The Destruction of Yugoslavia

p286
In 1999 the White House, with other NATO countries in tandem, launched round-the-clock aerial attacks against Yugoslavia for seventy-eight days, dropping 20,000 tons of explosives, and killing upwards of three thousand women, children, and men. All this was done out of humanitarian concern for Albanians in Kosovo-or so we were told. Many of the liberals, progressives, and other leftists of various ideological leanings who opposed President George W. Bush's destruction of Iraq (rightly so) were the same people who supported President Bill Clinton's destruction of Yugoslavia. How strange that they would denounce a war against a dictator and torturer like Saddam Hussein yet support a war against a social democracy like Yugoslavia. Substantial numbers of liberals and other "leftists" were taken in, standing shoulder to shoulder with the White House, NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the IMF, and the mainstream media when it came to Yugoslavia.

In the span of a few months, Clinton bombed four countries: Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq intermittently, and Yugoslavia massively. At the same time, the United States was involved in proxy wars in Angola, Mexico (Chiapas), Colombia, East Timor, and sundry other places. And of course U.S. forces continued to be deployed around the globe, with hundreds of overseas support bases-all in the name of peace, democracy, national security, and humanitarianism.

U.S. leaders have been markedly selective in their "humanitarian" interventions. They have made no moves against the Czech Republic for its mistreatment of the Roma ("gypsies"), or Britain for oppressing the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, or Israel for its continual repression of Palestinians in the occupied territories, or Turkey for what was done to the Kurds, or Indonesia for the slaughter of over 200,000 East Timorese, or Guatemala to stop the systematic extermination of tens of thousands of Mayan villagers. U.S. leaders not only tolerated such atrocities but were often complicit with the perpetrators-who usually happened to be faithful client-state allies dedicated to helping Washington make the world safe for the Fortune 500. Why then did U.S. leaders suddenly develop such strong "humanitarian" concerns regarding Yugoslavia?

Yugoslavia was built on an idea, namely that the Southern Slays would not remain weak and divided peoples, squabbling among themselves and easy prey to outside imperial interests. Together they would compose a substantial territory capable of its own self-development. Indeed after World War II, socialist Yugoslavia became a viable nation and something of an economic success. For many years it had a vigorous growth rate, a decent standard of living, free medical care and education, a guaranteed right to a job, one-month vacation with pay, a literacy rate of over 90 percent, and a high life expectancy. Yugoslavia offered its multi-ethnic citizenry affordable public transportation, housing, and utilities, with a not-for-profit economy that was almost entirely publicly owned, although there was a substantial private sector that included some Western corporations.

Whether Yugoslavia thereby qualified as socialist in the eyes of all left intellectuals is not the question. It was far too socialistic for U.S. policymakers, not the kind of country that free-market global capitalism would normally tolerate. Still, it had been allowed to exist for 45 years, useful as a nonaligned buffer to the Warsaw Pact nations. But once the Soviet Union and the other communist regimes were dissolved, there was no longer any reason to have to tolerate Yugoslavia.

The dismemberment policy was initiated by Germany, the United States, and other Western powers. Yugoslavia was the one country in Eastern Europe that would not voluntarily abolish its public sector and install a free-market system, the one country that had no interest in joining NATO or the European Union. The U.S. goal was to transform the Yugoslav nation into a cluster of weak, dependent right-wing polities whose natural resources would be completely accessible to multinational corporate exploitation, including the enormous mineral wealth in Kosovo; with an impoverished population constituting a cheap labor pool that would help depress wages in Europe and elsewhere, and whose petroleum, engineering, mining, fertilizer, pharmaceutical, construction, and automobile industries would be dismantled or destroyed outright, thereby offering no further competition with existing Western producers.

U.S. rulers also wanted to abolish Yugoslavia's public-sector services and social programs-just as they want to abolish our public-sector services and social programs. The ultimate goal was the privatization and Third Worldization of Yugoslavia, as it is the privatization and Third Woridization of the entire world, including the United States itself. Much of the Yugoslav economy remained in the not-for-profit public sector, including the Trepca mining complex in Kosovo, described in the New York Times as "war's glittering prize ... the most valuable piece of real estate in the Balkans... worth at least $5 billion" in rich deposits of coal, lead, zinc, cadmium, gold, and silver.'

That U.S. leaders planned to dismember Yugoslavia is not matter of speculation but of public record. As early as 1984, the Reagan administration issued U.S. National Security Decision Directive 133: "United States Policy towards Yugoslavia," labeled "secret sensitive." It followed closely the objectives laid out in an earlier directive aimed at Eastern Europe, one that called for a "quiet revolution" to overthrow Communist governments while "reintegrating the countries of Eastern Europe into the orbit of the World market. "

In November 1990 the Bush Sr. administration managed to persuade Congress to pass the 1991 Foreign Operations Appropriations Act, which provided aid only to the separate republics, not to the Belgrade government, and only to those forces whom Washington defined as "democratic," that is, free-market separatist parties.

In 1992. another blow was delivered. A freeze was imposed on all trade to and from Yugoslavia, bringing recession, hyperinflation, greater unemployment, and the virtual collapse of the health care system. At the same time, the IMF and other foreign creditors mandated that all socially owned firms and worker-managed production units be transformed into private capitalist enterprises.

p290
One of the great deceptions, notes Joan Phillips, is that "those who are mainly responsible for the bloodshed in Yugoslavia-not the Serbs, Croats or Muslims, but the Western powers-are depicted as saviors."

p292
None other than Charles Boyd, former deputy commander of the U.S. European command, commented in 1994: "Much of what the Croatians call 'the occupied territories' is land that has been held by Serbs for more that three centuries. The same is true of most Serb land in Bosnia .... In short the Serbs were not trying to conquer new territory, but merely to hold onto what was already theirs."

p293
The Serbs were the designated enemy probably because they presented the biggest obstacle to the breakup of Yugoslavia. They were the largest ethnic group in the federation, the one most committed to keeping the country together, and with a working class that was most firmly socialist.

p294
Are we to trust U.S. leaders and the corporate-owned news media when they dish out atrocity stories? Recall the story about the five-hundred premature babies whom Iraqi soldiers laughingly ripped from incubators in Kuwait, a tale repeated and believed throughout the Gulf war in 1990-91, only to be exposed as a total fabrication years later.

p299
We repeatedly have seen how "rogue nations" are targeted. The process is predictably transparent and not very original. First and foremost, the leaders are demonized. Qaddafi of Libya was a "Hitlerite megalomaniac" and a "madman." Noriega of Panama was a "a swamp rat," "one of the world's worst drug thieves and scums," and "a Hitler admirer." Saddam Hussein of Iraq was "the Butcher of Baghdad," a "madman," and "worse than Hitler." Demonization of the leader then justifies U.S.-led sanctions and military attacks upon the leader's country and people. What such leaders really had in common was that each was charting a somewhat independent course of self-development not in compliance with the dictates of the global free market. 6i

In keeping with this practice, Yugoslav president Slobodan Miloseviç was described by Bill Clinton as "a new Hitler." Earlier he had not be considered so. Initially, Western officials, viewing the ex-banker as a bourgeois Serbian nationalist who might hasten the break-up of the federation, hailed him as a "charismatic personality." Only later, when they saw him as an obstacle rather than a tool, did they begin to depict him as the demon who "started all four wars." This was too much, even for the managing editor of the U.S. establishment journal Foreign Affairs, Fareed Zakaria. He noted in the New York Times that Miloseviç who rules "an impoverished country that has not attacked its neighbors-is no Adolf Hitler. He is not even Saddam Hussein."

Miloseviç was elected as president of Yugoslavia in a contest that foreign observers said had relatively few violations. As of the end of 1999, he presided over a coalition government that included four parties, while opposition parties and publications openly denounced him and demonstrated against his government. These facts went almost unnoticed in the U.S. news media. To reject the demonized image of Miloseviç and of the Serbian people is not to idealize them or claim that Serb forces were faultless. It is merely to challenge the notions fabricated to justify NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia.

While professing to having been discomforted by the aerial destruction of Yugoslavia, many liberals and leftists were convinced that "this time" the U.S. national security state was really fighting the good fight. "Yes, the bombings don't work. The bombings are stupid!" they said at the time, "but we have to do something." In fact, the bombings were other than stupid: they were profoundly immoral. And in fact they did work: they destroyed much of what was left of Yugoslavia, turning it into a privatized, deindustrialized, recolonized, impoverished cluster of mini-republics, submissive wards of the free-market global empire. For U.S. foreign policy it was another smashing success.

p319
CBS-TV anchorman Dan Rather

"We are winners and they are losers and that's why they hate us."

p320
former President Jimmy Carter in 1989 told the New York Times:

You only have to go to Lebanon, to Syria or witness first-hand the intense hatred among many people for the United States because we bombed and shelled and unmercifully killed totally innocent villagers-women and children and farmers and housewives-in those villages around Beirut [an attack ordered by President Ronald Reagan]. As a result of that... we became kind of a Satan in the minds of those who are deeply resentful. That is what... has precipitated some of the terrorists attacks. "

p322
George W Bush

"I'm amazed that there's such misunderstanding of what our country is about that people would know us. Like most Americans, I just can't believe it because know how good we are."

p322
Defense Department study

"Historical data show a strong correlation between U.S. involvement in international situations and an increase in terrorist attacks against the United States.

The Rest Is History

p341
Fascism is the name given to the political movement that arose in Italy under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, who ruled that country from 192.2. to 1943. Nazism was a movement led by Adolph Hitler, who was Germany's dictator from 1933 to 1945. Nazism is considered by most observers to be a variant of fascism, as to a lesser degree was the militaristic government that controlled Japan from 1940 to 1945; so too the Falangist movement led by Francisco Franco, who in 1939 took over Spain after a protracted civil war, with the military aid of the Italian and Nazi fascists.

p342
... the major characteristics of the fascist ideology.

First, the leadership cult, the glorification of an all-knowing, supreme and absolutist leader.

Second, the idolatrous worship of the nation-state as an entity unto itself, an absolute component to which the individual is subsumed. Everything for the state, nothing against the state, nothing outside the state. That was Mussolini's and Hitler's dictum. Hitler's henchman Rudolf Hess once said, "Adolf Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Adolf Hitler," thereby wrapping both the leadership cult and the state cult in one. The leader is the embodiment of the state, and the state is supreme.

Third, glorification of military conquest and jingoism: the state is vitalized and empowered by subduing, conquering, and enslaving other peoples and territories.

Fourth, propagation of a folk mysticism, with its concomitant xenophobia and racism. The Nazi slogan was em Volk, em Reich, em Führer (one people, one empire, one leader), an atavistic celebration of the special blood lineage and wondrous legacy of the people. Along with this comes a disdain for other peoples and nationalities. For the Nazis and most other Eastern European fascists, the core enemy was the Jew, who was seen as the perpetrator of all societal ills. Behind the trade unionists, communists, homosexuals and others were the Jews, wickedly alien creatures who would pollute the pure-blooded and undermine the state.

Fifth, on behalf of the interests of the giant business cartels, there was a concerted suppression, both by the Italian fascists and German Nazis, of all egalitarian working-class loyalties and organizations, including labor unions.

Of these various characteristics of fascism, the last one is rarely talked about by mainstream historians, political scientists and journalists who usually ignore the link between fascism and capitalism, just as they tend to ignore the entire subject of capitalism itself when something unfavorable needs to be said about it. Instead, they dwell on the more bizarre components of fascist ideology: the "nihilist revolt against Western individuality," the mystic yolk attachment, and so forth. Fascism was those things, but along with its irrational appeals it had rational functions. It was a key instrument for the preservation of plutocratic domination.

p347
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued an agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany, as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.

p348
The Italian and German cartels looked to huge armament contracts and related public works as an expanded source of profitable investment. This also fit with their desire for a more aggressive foreign policy that might open new markets and put them on a better footing with their French and English competitors. So the fascists became a very useful ally against the capitalists' two worst enemies: the workers in their own country, and the capitalists in other countries.

Not all the big industrialists and financiers supported fascism with equal fervor. Some, like Thyssen, were early and enthusiastic backers of Hitler. The aged Emil Kurdoff thanked God that he lived long enough to see the Führer emerge as the savior of Germany. Others contributed money to the Nazis but also to other anti-socialist parties on the right. They backed Hitler only when he appeared to be the most effective force against the left. Many of them remained privately critical of the more extreme expressions of Nazi propaganda and were uneasy about the anti-bourgeois rhetoric enunciated by some of the plebeian brownshirts.

Some business elements were not that enamored with Hitler. Light industry had lower fixed costs and more stable profits than heavy industry, and was more dependent on consumer buying power. Consequently, light industrialists were not that keen about a more aggressive foreign policy and subsidies to heavy industry. But when push came to shove, they may not have been close to the fascists, but they were not about to ally themselves with the proletariat against the business class, of which they were a part. They either sided with the cartels or kept their mouths shut.

There was another element in these two societies that not only tolerated the rise of fascism but supported it: the capitalist state itself. Not the parliament as such, but the instruments of the state

that had a monopoly on the legal use of force and violence, the police, the army, and the courts. In Italy years before Mussolini emerged victorious, the police collaborated with the fascists in attacking labor and peasant organizations. They recruited criminals for the fascist squadristi, promising them immunity from prosecution for past crimes. While applications for gun permits were regularly denied to workers and peasants, police guns and cars were made available to Mussolini's goons.

Likewise in Germany immediately after World War I, the military police and the judiciary tended to favor the rightists while suppressing the leftists, a pattern of collaboration that continued into Hitler's day. In other words, these liberal capitalist democracies-that supposedly were "equally opposed to totalitarianism of the left and right"-were not really equally opposed. They often collaborated with the extreme right, those who were protecting the interests of big capital and the existing class structure. If defeating socialism and communism also entailed destroying democracy, so much the worse for democracy.

p350
In Germany, it was the same story. Between 1933 and 1935 wages were lowered anywhere from z to 40 percent, a harsh cut for ordinary workers trying to make ends meet. Wage taxes were instituted. Municipal poll taxes were doubled and other payroll deductions were imposed. The nonprofit mutual-assistance and insurance associations that had existed before the Nazis were abolished. Their funds were taken over by private insurance companies that charged more while paying out smaller benefits. And in Germany, just as in Italy, inflation substantially added to the workers' hardships.

In both Italy and Germany, perfectly solvent publicly owned enterprises, such as power plants, steel mills, banks, railways, insurance firms, steamship companies, and shipyards, were handed over to private ownership. Corporate taxes were reduced by half in both Italy and Germany. Taxes on luxury items for the rich were cut. Inheritance taxes were either drastically lowered or abolished. In Germany between 1934 and 1940 the average net income of corporate businessmen rose by 46 percent. Enterprises that were floundering were refloated with state bonds, recapitalized out of the state treasury. Once made solvent, they were returned to private owners. With numerous enterprises, the state guaranteed a return on the capital invested and assumed all the risks. The rich investor did not have to worry about any losses; if a business did poorly, the investor would be recompensed from the state treasury.

What the fascist state attempts is a final solution to the problem of class conflict. It obliterates the democratic forms that allow workers some room for an organized defense of their interests.

... a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save corporate business from the troublesome impositions of democracy. Fascism's savage service to big capital remains almost entirely a hidden history.

p353
Beginning in August 1918, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan, invaded Soviet Russia in an attempt to overthrow the Bolshevik government. In addition to using their own troops, they provided aid to the reactionary pro-czarist White Guard armies. To justify their action, Western leaders initially announced that the intervention was an attempt to keep Russia in the war against Germany. But the World War ended shortly after the invasion, yet the allies continued in their military campaign against the Bolshevik government for almost another two years. Western rulers also announced that the invasion was an attempt to rescue Czech prisoners-of-war marooned inside Russia. But the plight of the Czech prisoners developed well after the decision to intervene had been contemplated and was seized upon more as an after-the-fact excuse, a rather lame one at that.

In truth, the allied leaders intervened in revolutionary Russia for the same reason conservative rulers have intervened in revolutionary conflicts before and since: to protect the existing social order.

p360
Unlike the communists, the fascists were not a threat to business enterprise; if anything, the fascists had crushed worker organizations in Germany and (Italy and had made those countries safer and more profitable than Lever for private capital.

p364
General Groves, head of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb

"There was never ... any illusion on my part but that Russia was the enemy and that the project was conducted on that basis.

p365
The Soviets lost more than 22 million citizens in World War II, and suffered massive destruction of its cities, utilities, industries, railways, bridges, and collective farms. Following a trip to the USSR in 1947, British Field Marshal Montgomery wrote to General Eisenhower: "The Soviet Union is very, very tired. Devastation in Russia is appalling and the country is in no fit state to go to war." While U.S. cold warriors took steps to remilitarize Germany and form a military pact of Western nations (NATO), a CIA report stated: "There is no conclusive evidence of Soviet preparation for direct military aggression during 1949." Yet the threat was conjured for decades to justify U.S. military build-ups in Europe and elsewhere. Recent research indicates that top U.S. defense officials in the postwar era did not expect a Soviet military attack. Their real fear was that they would lose control of Europe and Asia to socialist revolutions caused by widespread poverty Land economic instability.

Contrary Notions

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