The Future of the Idea of 1968

Declaration of the Deutsche Kolleg (www.deutsches-kolleg.org/)

1. The idea which forms the basis of past events has a future if, on the one hand, its Being appeared in the past and manifested itself as an action-thought (i.e. as idea) and if, on the other hand, it is perceived in the present only as a bundle of deeds in which substantial and unsubstantial matters cannot be distinguished. The events of 1968 and their evaluation are characterised to this day by their being considered as opposites of positive and negative, where a third view does not seem to exist. The German uprising of 1968 had sufficient grounds which need to be explored if it is to be understood.

2. The magnitude of a historical Being can be seen in the intensity with which its appearance influences posterity. The denunciation campaign against participants of the uprising of 1968 in the government of the FRG, is a multiply reflected appearance which, owing to the fact that the Being of an idea appears in the appearance, hits the right people, namely the traitors of the 1968 idea: the chieftains of the Spontaneous Anarchists ("Spontis") who lack all theories and the Communist dogmatists of the 1970s. The 70s were the decade of the social-democratic Communist counter-revolution; this was then inherited by the capitalistic reaction of the 1980s.

3. According to its historical Being, the German `68 was the second uprising against an occupying power since the 17th of June 1953. In accordance with the principle cuius regio eius oeconomia, the occupying powers imposed their obsolete systems of economy, politics and conviction (under violation of the Peoples' right) onto their respective zones of occupation. The student uprising of 1968 in West Berlin and West Germany, against America and capitalism, was led by Central German students with the help of young academic fellow travellers of the West Zone (who often reproached their fathers of having been fellow travellers in the Third Reich as well as in Adenauer's FRG).

4. According to Klaus Mehnert, 1968 was the first world revolution in history. It was undertaken by the youth of the industrial states against capitalism's monetary rule, against its American-Israeli stronghold and for the Realm of Freedom. It was a successful seizure of verbal power, whose words in future first need to be understood by the German People, and then by the other Peoples of the world; otherwise, they will be unable to proceed to the seizure of power and to finally seize possession of their own countries. If, however, they become enabled to seize power, then the Fourth Age of Power will be initiated in the great Peoples of the world by the Fourth German Reich, where the Spirit rules and money, which ruled in the Third Age of Power, will be broken. The Realm of Freedom began with the world revolution of 1968 insofar as it was the victorious seizure of verbal power which will lead to the future seizure of power and possession of the Spirit as the Fourth Age of Power. But the meaning has yet to be correctly grasped, the words which have been heard yet need to be properly understood.

5. The struggle for the inner meaning of 1968, which has been fought for decades and which has currently broken out again, is a struggle for the continuation of the capitalistic economic system and for parliamentarianism as the political form in which money rules the world. The ideological defenders of monetary rule try to obscure the sense of `68 to the best of their abilities, and attempt to falsely attribute the counter-revolution of the 70s as well as the Americanisms of the sympathising youth of the Western Zone to the revolutionaries of `68. The ideological safeguarding of the capitalist rule of money is dependant on the success of this intensive propaganda of obscuring the meaning of 1968. If this smokescreen is torn down, then the seizure of verbal power of `68 will become virulent again, and the immediate task of breaking capitalism, i.e. the rule of money, will again be clear to the developed Peoples of the world. The situation will become dangerous and problematic for the powers in the background, who direct the destiny of the world through the streams of capital which they steer. For when the priority of the self-economies of the Peoples over the market economy is re-established after the next world crisis, the market on the whole, and as such also the capital market, will be put back into the marginal position to which it belongs.


6. The true, i.e. world-revolutionary, `68 begins in April 1965 with Rudi Dutschke determining the fixed-point of the strategy. Determined as this fixed-point, which was to be the starting point of the strategy, was the ultimate goal of the technological process which even then was clearly recognisable, and today is obvious: the "tendency of total unemployment" (R. Dutschke, Geschichte ist machbar, ed. Miermeister, Berlin 1980, p. 32) with simultaneous unemployed production. With this, the disappearance of the working class was presupposed. In developed countries, the revolution could now no longer be burdened onto the industrial workers. The tasks of the revolution had to be assumed by those who had the confidence to do so.

7. In such a situation, the ruling class is for the first time in world history no longer ordained to be the one which is fed by the masses, but on the contrary, the rulers have to feed the ruled. Rule now has a different meaning and content. Suppression no longer serves the privation of added value. Intellectual life itself is drowned in the sea of stupidities. Maintenance of power has now become the single focus of the rulers. Abstract power, however, is the self-abolition of the rule which has become abstract and has thus lost all its significance. The relationship between the rulers and the ruled has dialectically completely changed, and it is in this sense that the theoreticians of `68 always spoke of the end of the rule of man over (other) men, of self-determination and also of democracy qua self-determination of the Peoples as well as each individual person. For each person to be able to lead a self-determined life within his respectively self-determined People, was, is and always will be the ideal of all who feel committed to the idea of 1968.

8. In those days this Dutschkistic strategy was boldest utopia, which today is understood by many intelligent people. Due to the technical-industrial and scientific revolutions of the past decades Dutschkism has become even more comprehensible. It will determine all programmes and strategies of the twenty-first century. In all these strategies the rational organisation of the Realm of Necessity and as such the material provision of each People will only be the preliminary task, the organisation and structuring of the Realm of Freedom, however, will be the main task.

9. The International Vietnam Congress which was organised by the SDS (Socialist German Students' Union) in February 1968 at the Technical University in West Berlin, was world historically the first internationale of the national revolutionaries. Our solidarity was with the Vietnamese revolution, the Vietnamese war for reunification, i.e. with a national revolution and not with conservativist, liberalist, socialist or other revolutions of a certain class. The categorical imperative that followed from this was quite rightly: "It is the duty of a revolutionary, to make the revolution happen!" We ourselves were the German revolutionaries, and the Communist students harvested derision whenever they drew our attention to the workers or even to trade union work.

10. It was against this national revolutionary principle of `68 that the social-democratic Communist counter-revolution arose in the 70s. In an ever reactionary fashion and with the double blade of reform and revolution, they posited the working class as the subject of history. It was confirmed in this by the farseeing powers of the conservatives and liberals, who in the revival of the class-struggle scheme sensed the chance for a revitalisation of their class rule, which indeed came about in the 1980s.

11. The counter-revolution of the 70s created the scene of the "Spontis" as a movement comprised out of the ruins of the losers, i.e. the hotchpotch of those fellow travellers of the Western Zone who were part of `68, but failed to return from this revolutionary awakening into the normality of the FRG. The national revolutionary line of the original `68 was maintained and continued to be persecuted in the successor organisations of the SDS. The Waffen-SDS (Red Army Fraction) took up the armed struggle and despite all tactical misjudgements and judicial mistakes, also hit legitimate targets of any national struggle of liberation. This manifested itself in assassinations of military personnel of the occupying power, in attacks against German collaborators and in the murder of a person who had betrayed the national revolutionary volksgemeinschaft to the interests of a class.

12. A further exponent of the national revolutionary line of the 70s was the Theory-SDS which continued to follow the theoretical programme of 1968 and brought it to a close in the mid 1980s. The national right-wing was then increasingly influenced by the original `68 movement with anti-capitalism and anti-Americanism from 1985 onwards, due to an alliance which had still been prepared by Dutschke. From 1990 onwards, the anti-capitalist moment increased as a result of the influx of Central German youths, who impressively defended themselves against the racially alien substitute occupiers in the folk-uprisings of Hoyerswerda and Rostock-Lichtenhagen. In the first half of the 90s the Theory-SDS introduced a programme and a theory to the awakening German national movement, which is based on the perfected theory of `68. The Theory-SDS reconstituted itself as the Deutsches Kolleg, as an educational institution of the national liberation movement of the Germans, which merged theory and terror – the weapon of theory and the theory of the weapon – in the year 2000. Both in its negative presupposition – the struggle of national liberation against the occupying power of monetary rule – as well as in its positive perspective – the organisation of the Realm of Freedom –, the idea of `68 contains an instruction of procedure for the German People (as well as all the other Peoples) which is rich in tradition, sated with the present and filled with the future.

13. Each nationalism begins at the many borders of its own nation, at the other nations, and as such as internationalism. Similarly, in economic life the market starts off at the boundary of the communities; it starts as a world market and has the inner market, which penetrates deeper and deeper inwardly and which ultimately necessitates the differentiated power of inland customs duty, as its final result. Nationalism is the truth of internationalism. Measure is the idea of Being.

14. The oldest and most despicable traitor of the `68 idea amongst the current members of the FRG government is Otto Schily. He is attempting to push the ban of the NPD through precisely because this party, which in 1968 still stood firmly behind the American occupying power and the capitalistic system of exploitation, has moved onto the most resolute anti-capitalist and anti-American course. This new political course of the NPD is borne by the German youth, in particular by the Central German youth. With the deployment of special units of the German Border Police, Schily has now spoken out a "Declaration of War against our Offspring" (Die Welt, 20.02.2001, p. 10). Dutschkism continues to live in this youth, whose feelings revolt against a system which in April 1968 managed to get a young worker from Saxony-Anhalt to shoot Rudi Dutschke.

15. Each person who is psychologically healthy, feels existential disgust towards capitalism, i.e. the rule of money. This disgust is insurmountable. Against this disgust, as well as the desire for salvation, capitalism will fail. Probably more ignominiously than Communism did.

DEUTSCHES KOLLEG http://www.deutsches-kolleg.org/

America Has Fallen to a Jacobin Coup

by Paul Craig Roberts


The most important casualties of September 11 are respect for truth and American liberty. Propaganda has replaced deliberation based on objective assessment of fact. The resurrection of the Star Chamber has made moot the legal protections of liberty.

The US invasion of Iraq was based on the deliberate suppression of fact. The invasion was not the result of mistaken intelligence. It was based on deliberately concocted "intelligence" designed to deceive the US Congress, the American public, and the United Nations.

In an interview with Barbara Walters on ABC News, General Colin Powell, who was Secretary of State at the time of the invasion, expressed dismay that he was the one who took the false information to the UN and presented it to the world. The weapons of mass destruction speech, he said, is a "blot" on his record. The full extent of the deception was made clear by the leaked top secret "Downing Street Memos."

Two and one-half years after the March 2003 invasion, the US Congress and the American people still do not know the reason Iraq was invaded. The US is bogged down in an expensive and deadly combat, and no one outside the small circle of neoconservatives who orchestrated the war knows the reason why. Many guesses are rendered – oil, removal of Israel’s enemy – but the Bush administration has never disclosed its real agenda, which it cloaked with the WMD deception.

This itself is powerful indication that American democracy is dead. With the exception of rightwing talk radio, everyone in America now knows that the invasion of Iraq was based on false information. Yet, 40 percent of the public and both political parties in Congress still support the ongoing war.

The CIA has issued a report that the war is working only for Osama bin Laden. The unprovoked American aggression against Iraq, the horrors perpetrated against Muslims in Abu Ghraib prison, and the slaughter and mistreatment of Iraqi noncombatants, have radicalized the Muslim world and elevated bin Laden from a fringe figure to a leader opposed to American hegemony in the Middle East. The chaos created in Iraq by the US military has provided al Qaeda with superb training grounds for insurgency and terrorism. Despite overwhelming evidence that the "war on terror" is in fact a war for terror, Republicans still cheer when Bush says we have to "fight them over there" so they don’t come "over here."

If fact played any role in the decision to continue with this war, the US would not be spending hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars to provide recruits and training for al Qaeda, to radicalize Muslims, and to destroy trust in the United States both abroad and among its own citizens.

American casualties (dead and wounded) of this gratuitous war are now approximately 20,000. In July, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld said the war might continue for 12 years. US casualties from such protracted combat would eat away US troop strength. Considering the well-publicized recruitment problems, America would require a draft or foreign mercenaries in order to continue a ground war. Like the over-extended Roman Empire, the US would have to deplete its remaining wealth to pay mercenaries.

Dead and wounded Americans are too high a price to pay for a war based on deception. This alone is reason to end the war, if necessary by impeaching Bush and Cheney and arresting the neoconservatives for treason. Naked aggression is a war crime under the Nuremberg standard, and neoconservatives have brought this shame to America.

There is an even greater cost of the war – the legal system that protects liberty, a human achievement for which countless numbers of people gave their lives over the centuries. The Bush administration used September 11 to whip up fear and hysteria and to employ these weapons against American liberty. The Orwellian-named Patriot Act has destroyed habeas corpus. The executive branch has gained the unaccountable power to detain American citizens on mere suspicion or accusation, without evidence, and to hold Americans indefinitely without a trial.

Foolishly, many Americans believe this power can only be used against terrorists. Americans don’t realize that the government can declare anyone to be a terrorist suspect. As no evidence is required, it is entirely up to the government to decide who is a terrorist. Thus, the power is unaccountable. Unaccountable power is the source of tyranny.

The English-speaking world has not seen such power since the 16th and 17th centuries when the Court of Star Chamber became a political weapon used against the king’s opponents and to circumvent Parliament. The Star Chamber dispensed with juries, permitted hearsay evidence, and became so reviled that "Star Chamber" became a byword for injustice. The Long Parliament abolished the Star Chamber in 1641. In obedience to the Bush regime, the US Congress resurrected it with the Patriot Act. Can anything be more Orwellian than identifying patriotism with the abolition of habeas corpus?

Historians are quick to note that the Star Chamber was mild compared to Gitmo, to the US practice of sending detainees abroad to be tortured, and to the justice (sic) regime being run by Attorney General "Torture" Gonzales and his predecessor, "Draped Justice" Ashcroft, who went so far as to say that opposition to the Patriot Act was itself the mark of a terrorist.

The time-honored attorney-client privilege is another casualty of the "war on terror." Taking their cue from the restrictions placed on lawyers representing Stalin’s victims in the 1930s show trials, Justice (sic) Department officials seek to limit attorneys representing terrorist suspects to procedural niceties. Lynn Stewart, attorney for Omar Abdel Rahman, was handed a letter by a Justice (sic) Department prosecutor instructing her how to represent her client. When she did what every good lawyer would do and represented her client aggressively, she was arrested, indicted and convicted.

Many conservative lawyers have turned a blind eye, because Stewart is regarded as a leftwing lawyer whom they dislike. Only a few civil libertarians, such as Harvey Silverglate, have pointed out that prosecutors cannot create felonies by writing letters to attorneys. Stewart was convicted for violating a prosecutor’s letter (technically, a Special Administrative Measure). This should make it obvious even to the blind that American democracy has lost all control over law.

Federal officials have sensed the sea change in American law: arbitrary actions and assertions by federal officials are taking the place of statutory legislation. We saw an example recently when the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) announced that news media covering the New Orleans hurricane story were prohibited from taking pictures of the bodies of inhabitants drowned when the levees failed. Nowhere is FEMA given authority to override the First Amendment. Yet, FEMA officials saw no reason not to issue its decree. Rome had one caesar. America has them throughout the executive branch.

We see the same exercise of arbitrary authority in break-ins by police into New Orleans homes in order to confiscate legally owned firearms. No authority exists for these violations of the Second Amendment. No authority exists for the forceful removal of residents from non-damaged homes. Tyrannical precedents are being established by these fantastic abuses of government authority.

In the US today nothing stands in the way of the arbitrary exercise of power by government. Federal courts have acquiesced in unconstitutional detention policies. There is no opposition party, and there is no media, merely huge conglomerates or collections of federal broadcasting licenses, the owners of which are afraid to displease the government.

The collapse of the institutions that confine government to law and bind it with the Constitution was sudden. The president previous to Bush was impeached by the House for lying about a sexual affair. If we go back to the 1970s, President Richard Nixon had the decency to resign when it came to light that he had lied about when he first learned of a minor burglary. Bush’s failures are far more serious and numerous; yet, Bush has escaped accountability.

Polls show that a majority of Americans have lost confidence in the Iraq war and believe Bush did a poor job responding to flooded New Orleans. Many Americans hope that these two massive failures have put Bush back into the box of responsible behavior from which September 11 allowed him to escape. However, there is no indication that the Bush administration sees any constraints placed on its behavior by these failures.

The identical cronyism and corrupt government contract practices, by which taxpayers’ money is used to reward political contributors, so evident in Iraq, is now evident in New Orleans.
Despite having been fought to a stalemate by a few thousand insurgents in Iraq, the Bush administration continues to issue thunderous threats to Syria and Iran.

To press its fabricated case against Iran’s alleged weapons of mass destruction program, the Bush administration is showing every foreign diplomat it can corral an hour-long slide show titled, "A History of Concealment and Deception." Wary foreigners are reminded of the presentations about Iraq’s WMD and wonder who is guilty of deception, Iran or the Bush administration.

Now that the war in Iraq has established that US ground forces cannot easily prevail against insurgency, the Bush administration is bringing new military threats to the fore. The neocon orchestrated "Doctrine for Joint Nuclear Operations" abandons the established doctrine that nuclear weapons are last-resort options. The Bush administration is so enamored of coercion that it is birthing the doctrine of preemptive nuclear attack. US war doctrine is being altered to eliminate the need for a large invasion force and to use "preventive nuclear strikes" in its place.

Is this the face that the American people want to present to the world? It is hard to imagine a greater risk to America than to put the entire world on notice that every country risks being nuked based on mere suspicion. By making nuclear war permissible, the Bush administration is crossing the line that divides civilized people from barbarians. The United States is starting to acquire the image of Nazi Germany. Knowledgeable people should have no trouble drawing up their own list of elements common to both the Bush and Hitler regimes: the use of extraordinary lies to justify military aggression; reliance on coercion and threats in place of diplomacy; total belief in the virtue and righteousness of one’s cause; the equating of factual objections or "reality-based" analysis to treason; the redirection of patriotism from country to leader; the belief that defeat resides in debate and a weakening of will; refuge in delusion and denial when promised results don’t materialize.

As Professor Claes Ryn made clear in his book, America the Virtuous, the neoconservatives are neo-Jacobins. There is nothing conservative about them. They are committed to the use of coercion to impose their agenda. Their attitude is merciless toward anyone in their way, whether fellow citizen or foreigner. "You are with us or against us." For those on the receiving end, the Nazi and Jacobin mentalities come to the same thing.

The Bush administration has abandoned American principles. It is a Jacobin regime. Woe to its citizens and the rest of the world.

(Article taken from www.lewrockwell.com)

Workers Power & the Ultraright

By Ean Frick

When Marx talked about the working class attaining socialism he used the phrase “the self-emancipation of the proletariat.” This can mean many things but most obviously it means that workers would seize control ofthe means of production and run them according to the the needs of their class or community. This phrase also defines what is not socialism. This proletarian self-emancipation is not by way of a vanguard of middle-class professionals who are essentially acting on behalf of the workers(i.e. representativedemocracy) despite that they are not from that class, nor is socialism the mere nationalization (herereferring to nation-statism), which just puts the power of production in the hands of state and thus keeps the manager-worker relation in tact. What can be found to be most faithful to Marx’s phrase inradial theory is the socialism of the guildsocialists, councilists and syndicalists, whodescribed a system workers councils linked by federations of other councils.This is very much theeconomic structure envisioned by the French libertarian socialist and nationalist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

This idea of direct workers control was named by the French anti-authoritarians of May ‘68 as autogestion, for the trend of thought clearly has some origins in France as early as Blanqui and the Communards. While the slogan and theory of workerspower is mostly associated with the Left, it is onlyfound on the far fringes(i.e. ultraleft, utopian, andlibertarian) of which these currents faithful to ithave very little to do with what is generallyconsidered the Left politically.But this isn’t the only place on the politicalspectrum that these ideas are found. These currentscan be best described as the ultraright (the mirrorimage of its compliment the ultraleft), though theyare often labeled incorrectly as ‘far-right’ and ‘fascist’ by liberal mainstream opinion.

The firstgroup is the Distributists, focused around the philosophy of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, who preached an economic philosophy where ownership of the means of production would be spread out among the community as much as possible. They also wished to see a return to the guild system and sought thee limination of banks and usury. This is clearly much more in the spirit of socialism than a system where managerial duties are in the hands of a few state bureaucrats as was in place in Russia from 1922-1991. But Chesterton, Belloc and other Distributists didn’t derive their ideas from Marx or any other thinkers normally associated with the Left, but rather from the teachings of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum, where the Pope addressed the issue of the condition of the working classes and supported their right to form unions.

The following group was actually considered fascist both in contemporary discourse as well as upon its inception, however, it’s ideology had much more incommon with syndicalism than what is generally definedas fascism. The Faiscieau was formed in 1925 by George Valois, a one time anarcho-syndicalist who had met with the brilliant radical thinker Georges Sorelas well as Charles Maurras, he was also the founder of the Cercle Proudhon, a group of intellectuals committed to a national syndicalist France. Though the Faiscieau certainly had some fascist dressing,mostly in the aesthetic sense(marches, uniforms, ect.) but also claiming an admiration for Mussolini, from the start they were not your typical fascist party. While authentic fascist Benito Mussolini is quoted assaying: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power”, Valois wished to see the economy run by those actually involved in manufacturing goods. This would clearly mean that workers would have control over the means of production as they are most involved in the manufacturing process.Valois also saw his fascism as a revolt against bourgeois rule,which differs from authentic fascism which was committed to protecting the interests of the ruling class against the tide of Marxism. Valois was also committed to an absolutely free trade unionism.

In Aphorisms , written by Jón Ögmundarson, Valois is attacked for “Abandoning the transcendence of democracy, capitalism and Bolshevism in favour of a class free despotism opposed to materialism but offering nothing in it's place.” Ögymndarson also attacks futurism as “Nothing more then an adolescent rejection of what one is by birth and the obligation sentailed as a result in favour of a directionless and violent vitality imbued stylish inconsequentials" This is worth noting given an interesting similarity between futurism and the politics of the Faiscieau. Since Valois’ main target was the bourgeoisie, not socialism, he saw Marxists as “brother enemies.” Hiscriticism of Marxism lay in the fact that he thought it encouraged workers to be lazy but also because the insistence on demands for higher wages was irrespective of productivity. While this isostensibly a reactionary, anti-worker position, when considered with the fact that Valois envisioned theworkers taking control of means of production it appears as a proto-futurist position where the worker and machine are one and the worker gets as much out of his labor as he puts in. Here the being who controls the means of production in the new society would alsobe constantly indebted to the technology of the meansof production, but since this society would also be holarchic, there would be no worry about excess products or rampant economic-technological growth that would seek to conquer and subjugate the natural environment.

Another place where the idea of workers autonomy is found on the far fringes of the Right is in integralnationalism. One of the central ideas of integralnationalism is the theory of blood and soil. This issimply the idea that any racial, ethnic or regional groups of people deserve the right to live off the landthey descended from. This idea clearly goes against modern capitalism where people are expected to movefrom place to place for the sake of jobs, which are becoming all the more transient, and ethnic, racial orregional heritage have little meaning in a world where commodities are the primary factor in human interaction. What is also implied by blood and soilis that the group of people in question would live offthe land organically and self-sufficiently. In the setting of a small, village community this would clearly constitute as agrarian ‘workers power’ so to speak. Here the Law of Least Effort could easily be applied. Since every member of the society would be involved in its sustainment, there wouldn’t be any citizens mooching of the labor of others. This would be the truest form of a self-determining society, which each citizen being collectively autonomous.

The most recent example of the ultraright supporting workers power comes from the intellectual mind behind the Nouvelle Droite, Alain de Benoist. In The French New Right in the Year 2000, de Benoist and Champetier call for the regroupment of individuals in a society along the lines of spontaneous community: “Communities are constituted and maintain themselves on the basis of who belongs to them. Membership is all that is required. There is the vertical reciprocity of rights and duties, contributions and distributions, obedience and assistance, and a horizontal reciprocity of gifts, fraternity, friendship, and love. The richness of social life is proportional to the diversity of the members: this diversity is constantly threatened either by shortcomings (conformity, lack of differentiation) or excesses (secession,atomization).” They also call for the political power to be in the hands of local communities: “Local communities would have to make decisions by and for themselves in all those matters which concern them directly, and all members would have to participate at every stage of the deliberations and of the democratic decision-making.” Direct democracy, rather than the current bureaucratic farce of democracy, would also bea logical conclusion for an autonomous society:“Renewing the democratic spirit implies not settling for mere representative democracy, but seeking to also put into effect, at every level, a true participatory democracy (‘that which affects all the people shouldbe the business of all the people’).” The fact that the ideals of workers power, the theory of direct control of the means of production, have survived the death of modernism, where many outdated philosophical myths were finally done away with (i.e the idea of Hegelian linear progress, the abstract man,universalism, emphasis on reason) despite the fact that were are still dealing with their excesses, is worth noting. It is also interesting that the current voice for autonomous community control comes from a philosopher who claims to be beyond the dualism ofLeft/Right as well as is one of the main voices behind the European New Right.

While there are still those elements on the farthest fringes of the Left, known collectively as left communists or ultralefts, espousing historical workers autonomy theory, if one reads their writings they will soon see that they are highly critical of what is normally considered the Left and really deserve to be classed as trueradicals, committed more to libertarian methodology than any flimsy abstraction of ‘left-wing’ thought. It is essential to put forth the ideas of direct control over the means of production since they represent a viable economic solution for a society inwhich the archetype of the Anarch is to survive.

THE RIGHT TO MAKE WAR (1912)

by Friedrich von Bernhardi

Since 1795, when Immanuel Kant published in his old age his treatise on"Perpetual Peace," many have considered it an established fact that war is the destruction of all good and the origin of all evil. In spite of all that history teaches, no conviction is felt that the struggle between nations is inevitable, and the growth of civilization is credited with a power to which war must yield. But, undisturbed by suchhuman theories and the change of times, war has again and again marched from country to country with the clash of arms, and has proved its destructive as well as creative and purifying power. It has not succeeded in teaching mankind what its real nature is. Long periods of war, far from convincing men of the necessity of war, have, on the contrary, always revived the wish to exclude war, where possible, from the political intercourse of nations.

This wish and this hope are widely disseminated even to-day. The maintenance of peace is lauded as the only goal at which statesmanship should aim. This unqualified desire for peace has obtained in our days a quite peculiar power over men's spirits. This aspiration finds its public expression in peace leagues and peace congresses; the Press of every country and of every party opens its columns to it. The current in this direction is, indeed, so strong that the majority of Governments profess--outwardly, at any rate--that the necessity of maintaining peace is the real aim of their policy; while when a war breaks out theaggressor is universally stigmatized, and all Governments exert themselves, partly in reality, partly in pretence, to extinguish the conflagration.

Pacific ideals, to be sure, are seldom the real motive of their action. They usually employ the need of peace as a cloak under which to promote their own political aims. This was the real position of affairs at the Hague Congresses, and this is also the meaning of the action of the United States of America, who in recent times have earnestly tried to conclude treaties for the establishment of Arbitration Courts, first andforemost with England, but also with Japan, France, and Germany. No practical results, it must be said, have so far been achieved.

We can hardly assume that a real love of peace prompts these efforts. This is shown by the fact that precisely those Powers which, as the weaker, are exposed to aggression, and therefore were in the greatest need of international protection, have been completely passed over in the American proposals for Arbitration Courts. It must consequently be assumed that very matter-of-fact political motives led the Americans, with their commercial instincts, to take such steps, and induced "perfidious Albion" to accede to the proposals. We may suppose that England intended to protect her rear in event of a war with Germany, but that America wished to have a free hand in order to follow her policy of sovereignty in Central America without hindrance, and to carry out her plans regarding the Panama Canal in the exclusive interests of America. Both countries certainly entertained the hope of gaining advantage over the other signatory of the treaty, and of winning the lion's share for themselves. Theorists and fanatics imagine that they see in the efforts of President Taft a great step forward on the path to perpetual peace, and enthusiastically agree with him. Even the Minister for Foreign Affairs in England, with well-affected idealism, termed the procedure of the United States an era in the history of mankind.

This desire for peace has rendered most civilized nations anemic, and marks a decay of spirit and political courage such as has often been shown by a race of Epigoni. "It has always been," H. von Treitschke tells us, "the weary, spiritless, and exhausted ages which have played with the dream of perpetual peace."

Everyone will, within certain limits, admit that the endeavours to diminish the dangers of war and to mitigate the sufferings which war entails are justifiable. It is an incontestable fact that war temporarily disturbs industrial life, interrupts quiet economic development, brings widespread misery with it, and emphasizes the primitive brutality of man. It is therefore a most desirable consummation if wars for trivial reasons should be rendered impossible, and if efforts are made to restrict the evils which follow necessarily in the train of war, so far as is compatible with the essential nature of war. All that the Hague Peace Congress has accomplished in this limited sphere deserves, like every permissible humanization of war, universal acknowledgment. But it is quite another matter if the object is to abolish war entirely, and to deny its necessary place in historical development.

This aspiration is directly antagonistic to the great universal laws which rule all life. War is a biological necessity of the first importance, a regulative element in the life of mankind which cannot be dispensed with, since without it an unhealthy development will follow, which excludes every advancement of the race, and therefore all real civilization. "War is the father of all things." [A] The sages of antiquity long before Darwin recognized this. [Footnote A: (Heraclitus of Ephesus).]

The struggle for existence is, in the life of Nature, the basis of all healthy development. All existing things show themselves to be the result of contesting forces. So in the life of man the struggle is not merely the destructive, but the life-giving principle. "To supplant or to be supplanted is the essence of life," says Goethe, and the strong life gains the upper hand. The law of the stronger holds good everywhere. Those forms survive which are able to procure themselves the most favourable conditions of life, and to assert themselves in theuniversal economy of Nature. The weaker succumb. This struggle isregulated and restrained by the unconscious sway of biological laws and by the interplay of opposite forces. In the plant world and the animal world this process is worked out in unconscious tragedy. In the human race it is consciously carried out, and regulated by social ordinances. The man of strong will and strong intellect tries by every means to assert himself, the ambitious strive to rise, and in this effort the individual is far from being guided merely by the consciousness of right. The life-work and the life-struggle of many men are determined, doubtless, by unselfish and ideal motives, but to a far greater extent the less noble passions--craving for possessions, enjoyment and honour, envy and the thirst for revenge--determine men's actions. Still more often, perhaps, it is the need to live which brings down even natures of a higher mould into the universal struggle for existence and enjoyment.

There can be no doubt on this point. The nation is made up of individuals, the State of communities. The motive which influences each member is prominent in the whole body. It is a persistent struggle for possessions, power, and sovereignty, which primarily governs the relations of one nation to another, and right is respected so far only as it is compatible with advantage. So long as there are men who have human feelings and aspirations, so long as there are nations who strive for an enlarged sphere of activity, so long will conflicting interests come into being and occasions for making war arise.

"The natural law, to which all laws of Nature can be reduced, is the law of struggle. All intrasocial property, all thoughts, inventions, andinstitutions, as, indeed, the social system itself, are a result of the intrasocial struggle, in which one survives and another is cast out. The extrasocial, the supersocial, struggle which guides the external development of societies, nations, and races, is war. The internal development, the intrasocial struggle, is man's daily work--the struggle of thoughts, feelings, wishes, sciences, activities. The outward development, the supersocial struggle, is the sanguinary struggle ofnations--war. In what does the creative power of this struggle consist? In growth and decay, in the victory of the one factor and in the defeatof the other! This struggle is a creator, since it eliminates."

[B] [Footnote B: Clauss Wagner, "Der Krieg als schaffendes Weltprinzip."]

That social system in which the most efficient personalities possess the greatest influence will show the greatest vitality in the intrasocial struggle. In the extrasocial struggle, in war, that nation will conquer which can throw into the scale the greatest physical, mental, moral, material, and political power, and is therefore the best able to defend itself. War will furnish such a nation with favourable vital conditions, enlarged possibilities of expansion and widened influence, and thus promote the progress of mankind; for it is clear that those intellectual and moral factors which insure superiority in war are also those which render possible a general progressive development. They confer victory because the elements of progress are latent in them. Without war, inferior or decaying races would easily choke the growth of healthy budding elements, and a universal decadence would follow. "War," says A.W. von Schlegel, "is as necessary as the struggle of the elements in Nature."

Now, it is, of course, an obvious fact that a peaceful rivalry may existbetween peoples and States, like that between the fellow-members of a society, in all departments of civilized life--a struggle which need not always degenerate into war. Struggle and war are not identical. This rivalry, however, does not take place under the same conditions as the intrasocial struggle, and therefore cannot lead to the same results. Above the rivalry of individuals and groups within the State stands the law, which takes care that injustice is kept within bounds, and that the right shall prevail. Behind the law stands the State, armed with power, which it employs, and rightly so, not merely to protect, but actively to promote, the moral and spiritual interests of society. But there is no impartial power that stands above the rivalry of States to restrain injustice, and to use that rivalry with conscious purpose to promote the highest ends of mankind. Between States the only check on injustice is force, and in morality and civilization each people must play its own part and promote its own ends and ideals. If in doing so it comes into conflict with the ideals and views of other States, it must either submit and concede the precedence to the rival people or State, or appeal to force, and face the risk of the real struggle--i.e., of war--in order to make its own views prevail. No power exists which can judge between States, and makes its judgments prevail. Nothing, in fact,is left but war to secure to the true elements of progress the ascendancy over the spirits of corruption and decay.

It will, of course, happen that several weak nations unite and form a superior combination in order to defeat a nation which in itself is stronger. This attempt will succeed for a time, but in the end the more intensive vitality will prevail. The allied opponents have the seeds of corruption in them, while the powerful nation gains from a temporary reverse a new strength which procures for it an ultimate victory over numerical superiority. The history of Germany is an eloquent example of this truth.

Struggle is, therefore, a universal law of Nature, and the instinct of self-preservation which leads to struggle is acknowledged to be a natural condition of existence. "Man is a fighter." Self-sacrifice is a renunciation of life, whether in the existence of the individual or in the life of States, which are agglomerations of individuals. The first and paramount law is the assertion of one's own independent existence. By self-assertion alone can the State maintain the conditions of life for its citizens, and insure them the legal protection which each man is entitled to claim from it. This duty of self-assertion is by no means satisfied by the mere repulse of hostile attacks; it includes the obligation to assure the possibility of life and development to the whole body of the nation embraced by the State.

Strong, healthy, and flourishing nations increase in numbers. From a given moment they require a continual expansion of their frontiers, they require new territory for the accommodation of their surplus population. Since almost every part of the globe is inhabited, new territory must, as a rule, be obtained at the cost of its possessors--that is to say, by conquest, which thus becomes a law of necessity.

The right of conquest is universally acknowledged. At first the procedure is pacific. Over-populated countries pour a stream of emigrants into other States and territories. These submit to the legislature of the new country, but try to obtain favourable conditionsof existence for themselves at the cost of the original inhabitants, with whom they compete. This amounts to conquest.

The right of colonization is also recognized. Vast territories inhabitedby uncivilized masses are occupied by more highly civilized States, and made subject to their rule. Higher civilization and the correspondingly greater power are the foundations of the right to annexation. This right is, it is true, a very indefinite one, and it is impossible to determine what degree of civilization justifies annexation and subjugation. The impossibility of finding a legitimate limit to these international relations has been the cause of many wars. The subjugated nation does not recognize this right of subjugation, and the more powerful civilized nation refuses to admit the claim of the subjugated to independence.This situation becomes peculiarly critical when the conditions ofcivilization have changed in the course of time. The subject nation has, perhaps, adopted higher methods and conceptions of life, and the difference in civilization has consequently lessened. Such a state of things is growing ripe in British India.

Lastly, in all times the right of conquest by war has been admitted. It may be that a growing people cannot win colonies from uncivilized races, and yet the State wishes to retain the surplus population which the mother-country can no longer feed. Then the only course left is to acquire the necessary territory by war. Thus the instinct of self-preservation leads inevitably to war, and the conquest of foreign soil. It is not the possessor, but the victor, who then has the right.The threatened people will see the point of Goethe's lines: "That which them didst inherit from thy sires, In order to possess it, must be won." The procedure of Italy in Tripoli furnishes an example of such conditions, while Germany in the Morocco question could not rouse herself to a similar resolution.

In such cases might gives the right to occupy or to conquer. Might is at once the supreme right, and the dispute as to what is right is decided by the arbitrament of war. War gives a biologically just decision, since its decisions rest on the very nature of things.

Just as increase of population forms under certain circumstances a convincing argument for war, so industrial conditions may compel the same result. In America, England, Germany, to mention only the chief commercial countries, industries offer remunerative work to great masses of the population. The native population cannot consume all the products of this work. The industries depend, therefore, mainly on exportation. Work and employment are secured so long as they find markets which gladly accept their products, since they are paid for by the foreign country. But this foreign country is intensely interested in liberating itself from such tribute, and in producing itself all that it requires. We find, therefore, a general endeavour to call home industries into existence, and to protect them by tariff barriers; and, on the other hand, the foreign country tries to keep the markets open to itself, to crush or cripple competing industries, and thus to retain the consumer for itself or win fresh ones. It is an embittered struggle which rages in the market of the world. It has already often assumed definite hostile forms in tariff wars, and the future will certainly intensify this struggle. Great commercial countries will, on the one hand, shut their doors more closely to outsiders, and countries hitherto on the down-grade will develop home industries, which, under more favourable conditions of labour and production, will be able to supply goods cheaper than those imported from the old industrial States. These latter will see their position in these world markets endangered, and thus it may well happen that an export country can no longer offer satisfactory conditions of life to its workers. Such a State runs the danger not onlyof losing a valuable part of its population by emigration, but of also gradually falling from its supremacy in the civilized and political world through diminishing production and lessened profits.

In this respect we stand to-day at the threshold of a development. We cannot reject the possibility that a State, under the necessity of providing remunerative work for its population, may be driven into war. If more valuable advantages than even now is the case had been at stake in Morocco, and had our export trade been seriously menaced, Germany would hardly have conceded to France the most favourable position in the Morocco market without a struggle. England, doubtless, would not shrink from a war to the knife, just as she fought for the ownership of the South African goldfields and diamond-mines, if any attack threatened her Indian market, the control of which is the foundation of her world sovereignty. The knowledge, therefore, that war depends on biological laws leads to the conclusion that every attempt to exclude it from international relations must be demonstrably untenable. But it is not only a biological law, but a moral obligation, and, as such, an indispensable factor in civilization.

The attitude which is adopted towards this idea is closely connected with the view of life generally.

If we regard the life of the individual or of the nation as something purely material, as an incident which terminates in death and outward decay, we must logically consider that the highest goal which man can attain is the enjoyment of the most happy life and the greatest possible diminution of all bodily suffering. The State will be regarded as a sortof assurance office, which guarantees a life of undisturbed possession and enjoyment in the widest meaning of the word. We must endorse the view which Wilhelm von Humboldt professed in his treatise on the limits of the activity of the State.[D] The compulsory functions of the State must be limited to the assurance of property and life. The State will be considered as a law-court, and the individual will be inclined to shun war as the greatest conceivable evil.

[Footnote D: W. von Humboldt, "Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Grenzen derWirksamkelt des Staates zu bestimmen."]

If, on the contrary, we consider the life of men and of States as merely a fraction of a collective existence, whose final purpose does not rest on enjoyment, but on the development of intellectual and moral powers,and if we look upon all enjoyment merely as an accessory of the chequered conditions of life, the task of the State will appear in a very different light. The State will not be to us merely a legal and social insurance office, political union will not seem to us to have the one object of bringing the advantages of civilization within the reach of the individual; we shall assign to it the nobler task of raising the intellectual and moral powers of a nation to the highest expansion, and of securing for them that influence on the world which tends to the combined progress of humanity. We shall see in the State, as Fichte taught, an exponent of liberty to the human race, whose task it is to put into practice the moral duty on earth. "The State," says Treitschke,"is a moral community. It is called upon to educate the human race by positive achievement, and its ultimate object is that a nation should develop in it and through it into a real character; that is, alike for nation and individuals, the highest moral task."

This highest expansion can never be realized in pure individualism. Man can only develop his highest capacities when he takes his part in a community, in a social organism, for which he lives and works. He must be in a family, in a society, in the State, which draws the individual out of the narrow circles in which he otherwise would pass his life, and makes him a worker in the great common interests of humanity. The State alone, so Schleiermacher once taught, gives the individual the highest degree of life.[E]

[Footnote E: To expand the idea of the State into that of humanity, and thus to entrust apparently higher duties to the individual, leads to error, since in a human race conceived as a whole struggle and, by implication, the most essential vital principle would be ruled out. Any action in favour of collective humanity outside the limits of the State and nationality is impossible. Such conceptions belong to the wide domain of Utopias.]

War, from this standpoint, will be regarded as a moral necessity, if it is waged to protect the highest and most valuable interests of a nation. As human life is now constituted, it is political idealism which calls for war, while materialism--in theory, at least--repudiates it.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/11352/11352-8.txt

The death of the nation-state

by Patrick J. Buchanan

© 2006 Creators Syndicate Inc.

Yugoslavia is gone, forever. The country that emerged from World War I and Versailles as the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, land of the South Slavs, has passed into history.

In 1991, Macedonia peacefully seceded. Slovenia and Croatia fought their way out, and Bosnia broke free after a war marked by the massacre at Srbenica and NATO intervention. Bosnia is itself subdivided into a Serb and a Croat-Muslim sector.

After the 78-day U.S. bombing of Serbia by the United States and the ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the province in the wake of the NATO war, Kosovo is 90 percent Muslim and Albanian. Loss of this land that was the cradle of the Serb nation seems an inevitability.

The disintegration of Yugoslavia, the second partition of Czechoslovakia and the breakup of the Soviet Union into 15 nations – many of which had never before existed – seem to confirm what Israeli historian Martin van Creveld and U.S. geostrategist William Lind have written.
The nation-state is dying. Men have begun to transfer their allegiance, loyalty and love from the older nations both upward to the new transnational regimes that are arising and downward to the sub-nations whence they came, the true nations, united by blood and soil, language, literature, history, faith, tradition and memory.

Imperial and ideological nations appear, for the foreseeable future, to be finished. The British and French, greatest of the Western empires, are long gone. Throughout the 19th and early 20th century, the Irish, though its sons had fought to erect and maintain the Victorian "empire on which the sun never set" – and defend it in World War I – fought relentlessly to be free of it. They wanted, and in 1921 won, a small nation of their own, on their own small island.
The Irish preferred it to being part of the British Empire.

The call of ethnicity, nationalism, religion, faith and history pulled apart the greatest of all the ideological empires, the Soviet Empire and the Soviet Union, that "prison house of nations."
Transnational institutions, the embryonic institutions of a new world government to which the elites of the West and Third World are transferring allegiance and power, include the United Nations, the EU, the World Trade Organization, the International Criminal Court, the International Court of Justice, the International Seabed Authority, the Kyoto Protocol, the IMF and the World Bank.

The sub-nations, or ex-nations, struggling to be born or break free include Scotland, Catalonia and the Basque country of Spain, Corsica, northern Italy and Quebec in the West. Iraq, as we have seen, is a composite of peoples divided by tribe, ethnicity and faith – as are Iran, Pakistan and India. Jordanians are Palestinian Arabs, with a minority of Bedouins.

Lind argues that not only are nations subdividing, losing their monopolies on the love and loyalty of their peoples, but they are being superseded by "non-state actors" that are challenging the monopoly on warfare enjoyed by the nation-state since the Treaty of Westphalia, which ended the Thirty Years War.

Among the more familiar non-state actors are the Crips and Bloods, Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, the Mexican and Colombian drug cartels, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the racial nationalists of MEChA, the white supremacists of Aryan Nations, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and Hezbollah, the Maoists of Nepal and the Tamil Tigers.

Among the central questions of our time is a central question of any time: Who owns the future?
Of late, the transnational vision has lost its allure. Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales and most of Latin America reject the NAFTA vision of Bush and Vicente Fox. The French and Dutch voted down the EU Constitution, which now appears dead. The Doha round of world trade negotiations is headed for the rocks. Hostility is rising to bringing Turkey into the EU.

Arabs and Turks in Europe identify more and more with the Islamic faith they have in common and the countries whence they came, not the one in which they live and work.

So, too, do millions of illegal aliens in the United States. They march defiantly under Mexican flags in American streets demanding the rights of U.S. citizens – while an intimidated political class rushes to accommodate and appease them, assuring itself this is but the latest reincarnation of Ellis Island.

As the Old Republic trudges to its death, less and less do we hear that incessant blather about the American Empire, "the world's last superpower" and "our unipolar moment."

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50338

Pat Buchanan was twice a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination and the Reform Party’s candidate in 2000. He is also a founder and editor of The American Conservative. Now a political analyst for MSNBC and a syndicated columnist, he served three presidents in the White House, was a founding panelist of three national TV shows, and is the author of seven books.

Who, Whom? (1944)

by F.A. Hayek

'The finest opportunity ever given to the world was thrown away because the passion of equality made vain the hope for freedom'.

Lord Acton

IT is significant that one of the commonest objections to competition is that it is "blind." It is not irrelevant to recall that to the ancients blindness was an attribute of their deity of justice. Although competition and justice may have little else in common, it is as much a commendation of competition as of justice that it is no respecter of persons.

That it is impossible to foretell who will be the lucky ones or whom disaster will strike, that rewards and penalties are not shared out according to somebody's views about the merits or demerits of different people but depend on their capacity and their luck, is as important as that, in framing legal rules, we should not be able to predict which particular person will gain and which will lose by their application.

And this is nonetheless true, because in competition chance and good luck are often as important as skill and foresight in determining the fate of different people.The choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseeable circumstances.

This is no less relevant because in a system of free enterprise chances are not equal, since such a system is necessarily based on private property and (though perhaps not with the same necessity) on inheritance, with the differences in opportunity which these create. There is, indeed, a strong case for reducing this inequality of opportunity as far as congenital differences permit and as it is possible to do so without destroying the impersonal character of the process by which everybody has to take his chance and no person's view about what is right and desirable overrules that of others.

The fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society.

Although under competition the probability that a man who starts poor will reach great wealth is much smaller than is true of the man who has inherited property, it is not only possible for the former, but the competitive system is the only one where it depends solely on him and not on the favors of the mighty, and where nobody can prevent a man from attempting to achieve this result.

It is only because we have forgotten what unfreedom means that we often overlook the patent fact that in every real sense a badly paid unskilled worker in this country has more freedom to shape his life than many a small entrepreneur in Germany or a much better paid engineer or manager in Russia.

Whether it is. a question of changing his job or the place where he lives, of professing certain views or of spending his leisure in a particular manner, although sometimes the price he may have to pay for following his inclinations may be high, and to many appear too high, there are no absolute impediments, no dangers to bodily security and freedom, that confine him by brute force to the task and the environment to which a superior has assigned him.

That the ideal of justice of most socialists would be satisfied if merely private income from property were abolished and the differences between the earned incomes of different people remained what they are now is true.

What these people forget is that, in transferring all property in the means of production to the state, they put the state in a position whereby its action must in effect decide all other incomes. The power thus given to the state and the demand that the state should use it to "plan" means nothing else than that it should use it in full awareness of all these effects.

To believe that the power which is thus conferred on the state is merely transferred to it from others is erroneous. It is a power which is newly created and which in a competitive society nobody possesses. So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people-nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else.

What our generation has forgotten is that the system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. It is only because the control of the means of production is divided among many people acting independently that nobody has complete power over us, that we as individuals can decide what to do with ourselves. If all the means of production were vested in a single hand, whether it be nominally that of "society" as a whole or that of a dictator, whoever exercises this control has complete power over us.

Who can seriously doubt that a member of a small racial or religious minority will be freer with no property so long as fellow-members of his community have property and are therefore able to employ him, than he would be if private property were abolished and he became owner of a nominal share in the communal property. Or that the power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest fonctionnaire possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work? And who will deny that a world in which the wealthy are powerful is still a better world than one in which only the already powerful can acquire wealth?

It is pathetic, yet at the same time encouraging, to find as prominent an old communist as Max Eastman rediscovering this truth:

"It seems obvious to me now--though I have been slow, I must say, in coming to the conclusion--that the institution of private property is one of the main things that have given man that limited amount of free and equalness that Marx hoped to render infinite by abolishing this institution. Strangely enough Marx was the first to see this. He is the one who informed us, looking backwards, that the evolution of private capitalism with its free market had been a precondition for the evolution of all our democratic freedoms. It never occurred to him, looking forward, that if this was so, these other freedoms might disappear with the abolition of the free market."

It is sometimes said, in answer to such apprehensions, that there is no reason why the planner should determine the incomes of individuals. The social and political difficulties involved in deciding the shares of different people in the national income are so obvious that even the most inveterate planner may well hesitate before he charges any authority with this task.

Probably everybody who realizes what it involves would prefer to confine planning to production, to use it only to secure a "rational organization of industry," leaving the distribution of incomes as far as possible to impersonal forces.

Although it is impossible to direct industry without exercising some influence on distribution, and although no planner will wish to leave distribution entirely to the forces of the market, they would probably all prefer to confine themselves to seeing that this distribution conforms to certain general rules of equity and fairness, that extreme inequalities are avoided, and that the relation between the remuneration of the major classes is just, without undertaking the responsibility for the position of particular people within their class or for the gradations and differentiations between smaller groups and individuals.

We have already seen that the close interdependence of all economic phenomena makes it difficult to stop planning just where we wish and that, once the free working of the market is impeded beyond a certain degree, the planner will be forced to extend his controls until they become all comprehensive. These economic considerations, which explain why it is impossible to stop deliberate control just where we should wish, are strongly reinforced by certain social or political tendencies whose strength makes itself increasingly felt as planning extends.

Once it becomes increasingly true, and is generally recognized, that the position of the individual is determined not by impersonal forces, not as a result of the competitive effort of many, but by the deliberate decision of authority, the attitude of the people toward their position in the social order necessarily changes. There will always exist inequalities which will appear unjust to those who suffer from them, disappointments which will appear unmerited, and strokes of misfortune which those hit have not deserved. But when these things occur in a society which is consciously directed, the way in which people will react will be very different from what it is when they are nobody's conscious choice.

Inequality is undoubtedly more readily borne, and affects the dignity of the person much less, if it is determined by impersonal forces than when it is due to design. In a competitive society it is no slight to a person, no offense to his dignity, to be told by any particular firm that it has no need for his services or that it cannot offer him a better job. It is true that in periods of prolonged mass unemployment the effect on many may be very similar.

But there are other and better methods to prevent that scourge than central direction. But the unemployment or the loss of income which will always affect some in any society is certainly less degrading if it is the result of misfortune and not deliberately imposed by authority. However bitter the experience, it would be very much worse in a planned society. There individuals will have to decide not whether a person is needed for a particular job but whether he is of use for anything, and how useful he is. His position in life must be assigned to him by somebody else.

While people will submit to suffering which may hit anyone, they will not so easily submit to suffering which is the result of the decision of authority. It may be bad to be just a cog in an impersonal machine; but it is infinitely worse if we can no longer leave it, if we are tied to our place and to the superiors who have been chosen for us. Dissatisfaction of everybody with his lot will inevitably grow with the consciousness that it is the result of deliberate human decision.

Once government has embarked upon planning for the sake of justice, it cannot refuse responsibility for anybody's fate or position. In a planned society we shall all know that we are better or worse off than others, not because of circumstances which nobody controls, and which it is impossible to foresee with certainty, but because some authority wills it.

And all our efforts directed toward improving our position will have to aim, not at foreseeing and preparing as well as we can for the circumstances over which we have no control, but at influencing in our favor the authority which has all the power. The nightmare of English nineteenth-century political thinkers, the state in which "no avenue to wealth and honor would exist save through the government," would be realized in a completeness which they never imagined-though familiar enough in some countries which have since passed to totalitarianism.

As soon as the state takes upon itself the task of planning the whole economic life, the problem of the due station of the different individuals and groups must indeed inevitably become the central political problem. As the coercive power of the state will alone decide who is to have what, the only power worth having will be a share in the exercise of this directing power. There will be no economic or social questions that would not be political questions in the sense that their solution will depend exclusively on who wields the coercive power, on whose are the views that will prevail on all occasions.

I believe it was Lenin himself who introduced to Russia the famous phrase "who, whom?"-- during the early years of Soviet rule the byword in which the people summed up the universal problem of a socialist society. Who plans whom, who directs and dominates whom, who assigns to other people their station in life, and who is to have his due allotted by others? These become necessarily the central issues to be decided solely by the supreme power.

More recently an American student of politics has enlarged upon Lenin's phrase and asserted that the problem of all government is "who gets what, when, and how." In a way this is not untrue. That all government affects the relative position of different people and that there is under any system scarcely an aspect of our lives which may not be affected by government action is certainly true. In so far as government does anything at all, its action will always have Borne effect on "who gets what, when, and how."

There are, however, two fundamental distinctions to be made. First, particular measures may be taken without the possibility of knowing how they will affect particular individuals and therefore without aiming at such particular effects. This point we have already discussed. Second, it is the extent of the activities of the government which decides whether everything that any person gets any time depends on the government, or whether its influence is confined to whether some people will get some things in some way at some time. Here lies the whole difference between a free and a totalitarian system.

The contrast between a liberal and a totally planned system is characteristically illustrated by the common complaints of Nazis and socialists of the "artificial separations of economics and politics" and by their equally common demand for the dominance of politics over economics. These phrases presumably mean not only that economic forces are now allowed to work for ends which are not part of the policy of the government but also that economic power can be used independently of government direction and for ends of which the government may not approve. But the alternative is not merely that there should be only one power but that this single power, the ruling group, should have control over all human ends and particularly that it should have complete power over the position of each individual in society.

That a government which undertakes to direct economic activity will have to use its power to realize somebody's ideal of distributive justice is certain. But how can and how will it use that power? By what principles will it or ought it to be guided? Is there a definite answer to the innumerable questions of relative merits that will arise and that will have to be solved deliberately? Is there a scale of values, on which reasonable people can be expected to agree, which would justify a new hierarchical order of society and is likely to satisfy the demands for justice?

There is only one general principle, one simple rule which would indeed provide a definite answer to all these questions: equality, complete and absolute equality of all individuals in all those points which are subject to human control. If this were generally regarded as desirable (quite apart from the question whether it would be practicable, i.e., whether it would provide adequate incentives), it would give the vague idea of distributive justice a clear meaning and would give the planner definite guidance.

But nothing is further from the truth than that people in general regard mechanical equality of this kind as desirable. No socialist movement which aimed at complete equality has ever gained substantial support. What socialism promised was not an absolutely equal, but a more just and more equal, distribution. Not equality in the absolute sense but "greater equality" is the only goal which is seriously aimed at.

Though these two ideals sound very similar, they are as different as possible as far as our problem is concerned. While absolute equality would clearly determine the planner's task, the desire for greater equality is merely negative, no more than an expression of dislike of the present state of affairs; and so long as we are not prepared to say that every move in the direction toward complete equality is desirable, it answers scarcely any of the questions the planner will have to decide.

This is not a quibble about words. We face here a crucial issue which the similarity of the terms used is likely to conceal. While agreement on complete equality would answer all the problems of merit the planner must answer, the formula of the approach to greater equality answers practically none. Its content is hardly more definite than the phrases "common good" or "social welfare."

It does not free us from the necessity of deciding in every particular instance between the merits of particular individuals or groups, and it gives us no help in that decision. All it tells us in effect is to take from the rich as much as we can. But, when it comes to the distribution of the spoils, the problem is the same as if the formula of "greater equality" had never been conceived.

Most people find it difficult to admit that we do not possess moral standards which would enable us to settle these questions-if not perfectly, at least to greater general satisfaction than is done by the competitive system. Have we not all some idea of what is a "just price" or a "fair wage"? Can we not rely on the strong sense of fairness of the people? And even if we do not now agree fully on what is just or fair in a particular case, would popular ideas not soon consolidate into more definite standards if people were given an opportunity to see their ideals realized?

Unfortunately, there is little ground for such hopes. What standards we have are derived from the competitive regime we have known and would necessarily disappear soon after the disappearance of competition. What we mean by a just price, or a fair wage is either the customary price or wage, the return which past experience has made people expect, or the price or wage that would exist if there were no monopolistic exploitation.

The only important exception to this used to be the claim of the workers to the "full produce of their labor," to which so much of socialist doctrine traces back. But there are few socialists today who believe that in a socialist society the output of each industry would be entirely shared by the workers of that industry; for this would mean that workers in industries using a great deal of capital would have a much larger income than those in industries using little capital, which most socialists would regard as very unjust.

And it is now fairly generally agreed that this particular claim was based on an erroneous interpretation of the facts. But once the claim of the individual worker to the whole of "his" product is disallowed, and the whole of the return from capital is to be divided among all workers, the problem of how to divide it raises the same basic issue.

What the "just price" of a particular commodity or the "fair" remuneration for a particular service is might conceivably be determined objectively if the quantities needed were independently fixed. If these were given irrespective of cost, the planner might try to find what price or wage is necessary to bring forth this supply. But the planner must also decide how much is to be produced of each kind of goods, and, in so doing, he determines what will be the just price or fair wage to pay.

If the planner decides that fewer architects or watchmakers are wanted and that the need can be met by those who are willing to stay in the trade at a lower remuneration, the "fair" wage will be lower. In deciding the relative importance of the different ends, the planner also decides the relative importance of the different groups and persons. As he is not supposed to treat the people merely as a means, he must take account of these effects and consciously balance the importance of the different ends against the effects of his decision. This means, however, that he will necessarily exercise direct control over the conditions of the different people.

This applies to the relative position of individuals no less than to that of the different occupational groups. We are in general far too likely to think of incomes within a given trade or profession as more or less uniform. But the differences between the incomes, not only of the most and the least successful doctor or architect, writer or movie actor, boxer or jockey, but also of the more and the less successful plumber or market gardener, grocer or tailor, are as great as those between the propertied and the propertyless classes.

And although, no doubt, there would be some attempt at standardization by creating categories, the necessity of discrimination between individuals would remain the same, whether it were exercised by fixing their individual incomes or by allocating them to particular categories.

We need say no more about the likelihood of men in a free society submitting to such control-or about their remaining free if they submitted. On the whole question, what John Stuart Mill wrote nearly a hundred years ago remains equally true today:

"A fixed rule, like that of equality, might be acquiesced in, and so might chance, or an external necessity; but that a handful of human beings should weigh everybody in the balance, and give more to one and less to another at their sole pleasure and judgement, would not be borne unless from persons believed to be more than men, and backed by supernatural terrors."

These difficulties need not lead to open clashes so long as socialism is merely the aspiration of a limited and fairly homogeneous group. They come to the surface only when a socialist policy is actually attempted with the support of the many different groups which together compose the majority of a people. Then it soon becomes the one burning question which of the different sets of ideals shall be imposed upon all by making the whole resources of the country serve it. It is because successful planning requires the creation of a common view on the essential values that the restriction of our freedom with regard to material things touches so directly on our spiritual freedom.

Socialists, the cultivated parents of the barbarous offspring they have produced, traditionally hope to solve this problem by education. But what does education mean in this respect? Surely we have learned that knowledge cannot create new ethical values, that no- amount of learning will lead people to hold the same views on the moral issues which a conscious ordering of all social relations raises. It is not rational conviction but the acceptance of a creed which is required to justify a particular plan.

And, indeed, socialists everywhere were the first to recognize that the task they had set themselves required the general acceptance of a common Weltanschauung, of a definite set of values. It was in these efforts to produce a mass movement supported by such a single world view that the socialists first created most of the instruments of indoctrination of which Nazis and Fascists have made such effective use.

In Germany and Italy the Nazis and Fascists did, indeed, not have much to invent. The usages of the new political movements which pervaded all aspects of life had in both countries already been introduced by the socialists. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, and which delights in making all problems questions of party Weltanschauung, was first put into practice by the socialists. An Austrian socialist writer, speaking of the socialist movement of his country, reports with pride that it was its "characteristic feature that it created special organizations for every field of activities of workers and employees."

Though the Austrian socialists may have gone further in this respect than others, the situation was not very different elsewhere. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children from the tenderest age into political organizations to make sure that they grew up as good proletarians. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views.

It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and forms of address. It was they who by their organization of "cells" and devices for the permanent supervision of private life created the prototype of the totalitarian party. Balilla and Hitlerjugend, Dopolavoro and Kraft durch Freude, political uniforms and military party formations, are all little more than imitations of older socialist institutions.'

So long as the socialist movement in a country is closely bound up with the interests of a particular group, usually the more highly skilled industrial workers, the problem of creating a common view on the desirable status of the different members of society is comparatively simple. The movement is immediately concerned with the status of one particular group, and its aim is to raise that status relatively to other groups.

The character of the problem changes, however, as in the course of the progressive advance toward socialism it becomes more and more evident to everyone that his income and general position are determined by the coercive apparatus of the state, that he can maintain or improve his position only as a member of an organized group capable of influencing or controlling the state machine in his interest.

In the tug-of-war between the various pressure groups which arises at this stage,, it is by no means necessary that the interests of the poorest and most numerous groups should prevail. Nor is it necessarily an advantage for the older socialist parties, who avowedly represented the interests of a particular group, to have been the first in the field and to have designed their whole ideology to appeal to the manual workers in industry. Their very success, and their insistence on the acceptance of the whole creed, is bound to create a powerful countermovement-not by the capitalists but by the very large and equally propertyless classes who find their relative status threatened by the advance of the elite of the industrial workers.

Socialist theory and socialist tactics, even where they have not been dominated by Marxist dogma, have been based everywhere on the idea of a division of society into two classes with common but mutually conflicting interests: capitalists and industrial workers. Socialism counted on a rapid disappearance of the old middle class and completely disregarded the rise of a new middle class, the countless army of clerks and typists, administrative workers and schoolteachers, tradesmen and small officials, and the lower ranks of the professions.

For a time these classes often provided many of the leaders of the labor movement. But as it became increasingly clear that the position of those classes was deteriorating relatively to that of the industrial workers, the ideals which guided the latter lost much of their appeal to the others. While they were all socialists in the sense that they disliked the capitalist system and wanted a deliberate sharing-out of wealth according to their ideas of justice, these ideas proved to be very different from those embodied in the practice of the older socialist parties.

The means which the old socialist parties had successfully employed to secure the support of one occupational group - the raising of their relative economic position-cannot be used to secure the support of all. There are bound to arise rival socialist movements that appeal to the support of those whose relative position is worsened. There is a great deal of truth in the often heard statement that fascism and National Socialism are a sort of middle-class socialism-only that in Italy and Germany the supporters of these new movements were economically hardly a middle class any longer. It was to a large extent a revolt of a new underprivileged class against the labor aristocracy which the industrial labor movement had created.

There can be little doubt that no single economic factor has contributed more to help these movements than the envy of the unsuccessful professional man, the university-trained engineer or lawyer, and of the "white-collared proletariat" in general, of the engine driver or compositor and other members of the strongest trade-unions whose income was many times theirs. Nor can there be much doubt that in terms of money income the average member of the rank and file of the Nazi movement in its early years was poorer than the average trade-unionist or member of the older socialist party-a circumstance which only gained poignancy from the fact that the former had often seen better days and were frequently still living in surroundings which were the result of this past.

The expression "class struggle a rebours," current in Italy at the time of the rise of fascism, did point to a very important aspect of the movement. The conflict between the Fascist or National Socialist and the older socialist parties must, indeed, very largely be regarded as the kind of conflict which is bound to arise between rival socialist factions. There was no difference between them about the question of its being the will of the state which should assign to each person his proper place in society. But there were, as there always will be, most profound differences about what are the proper places of the different classes and groups.

The old socialist leaders, who had always regarded their parties as the natural spearhead of the future general movement toward socialism, found it difficult to understand that with every extension in the use of socialist methods the resentment of large poor classes should turn against them. But while the old socialist parties, or the organized labor in particular industries, had usually not found it unduly difficult to come to an understanding for joint action with the employers in their particular industries, very large classes were left out in the cold. To them, and not without some justification, the more prosperous sections of the labor movement seemed to belong to the exploiting rather than to the exploited class.

The resentment of the lower middle class, from which fascism and National Socialism recruited so large a proportion of their supporters, was intensified by the fact that their education and training had in many instances made them aspire to directing positions and that they regarded themselves as entitled to be members of the directing class.

While the younger generation, out of that contempt for profitmaking fostered by socialist teaching, spurned independent positions which involved risk and flocked in ever increasing numbers into salaried positions which promised security, they demanded a place yielding them the income and power to which in their opinion their training entitled them. While they believed in an organized society, they expected a place in that society very different from that which society ruled by labor seemed to offer. They were quite ready to take over the methods of the older socialism but intended to employ them in the service of a different class.

The movement was able to attract all those who, while they agreed on the desirability of the state controlling all economic activity, disagreed with the ends for which the aristocracy of the industrial workers used their political strength.

The new socialist movement started with several tactical advantages. Labor socialism had grown in a democratic and liberal world, adapting its tactics to it and taking over many of the ideals of liberalism. Its protagonists still believed that the creation of socialism as such would solve all problems. Fascism and National Socialism, on the other hand, grew out of the experience of an increasingly regulated society's awakening to the fact that democratic and international socialism was aiming at incompatible ideals.

Their tactics were developed in a world already dominated by socialist policy and the problems it creates. They had no illusions about the possibility of a democratic solution of problems which require more agreement among people than can reasonably be expected.

They had no illusions about the capacity of reason to decide all the questions of the relative importance of the wants of different men or groups which planning inevitably raises, or about the formula of equality providing an answer. They knew that the strongest group which rallied enough supporters in favor of a new hierarchical order of society, and which frankly promised privileges to the classes to which it appealed, was likely to obtain the support of all those who were disappointed because they had been promised equality but found that they had merely furthered the interest of a particular class.

Above all, they were successful because they offered a theory, or Weltanschauung, which seemed to justify the privileges they promised to their supporters.

http://www.word-gems.com/wealth.hayek.who.html

The Essence of Archaism

by Guillaume Faye

[Guillaume Faye, born in 1949, was, along with Alain de Benoist, one of principal organizers of GRECE (Groupement de Recherche et d'Etude sur la Civilisation Européenne) and of the New Right, which he left 1986, reproaching his former colleagues for their increasing timidity and sterile intellectualism. Preferring to follow his own path as agitator and Nietzschean provocateur, he has recently published in rapid succession L'Archéofuturisme (1998), La colonisation de l'Europe (2000), and Pourquoi nous combattons (2001).

In Archéofuturisme Faye envisages, sometime within the next two decades, a large-scale civilizational crisis, provoked by what which he calls a "convergence of catastrophes." For the post-crisis world Faye proposes, in terms that at times recall the Italian Futurists of the early twentieth century, the construction of a European Empire founded on essential, archaic values and on a bold, aggressive exploitation of science and technology: hence the concept of "archeofuturism," the re-emergence of archaic social configurations in a new context.]

It is probable that only after the catastrophe which will bring down modernity, its world-wide saga and its global ideology, that an alternate vision of the world will necessarily impose itself. No one will have had the foresight and the courage to apply it before chaos erupted. It is thus our responsibility -- we who live, as Giorgio Locchi put it, in the interregnum -- to prepare, from this moment forward, a post-catastrophic conception of the world. It could be centered on archeofuturism. But we must give content to this concept.

It is necessary, first, to return the word "archaic" to its true meaning, which, in its Greek etymon archê, is positive and non-pejorative, signifying both "foundation" and "beginning" -- that is, "founding impetus." Archê also means "that which is creative and immutable" and refers to the central concept of "order." To attend to the "archaic" does not imply a backward-looking nostalgia, for the past produced egalitarian modernity, which has run aground, and thus any historical regression would be absurd. It is modernity itself that now belongs to a bygone past.
Is "archaism" a form of traditionalism? Yes and no. Traditionalism advocates the transmission of values and, correctly, combats the doctrines of the tabula rasa. But it all depends on which traditions are transmitted. Not every tradition is acceptable -- for example, we reject those of universalist and egalitarian ideologies or those which are fixed, ossified, demotivating. It is surely preferable to distinguish from among various traditions (transmitted values) those which are positive and those which are detrimental.

The issues that disturb the contemporary world and threaten egalitarian modernity with catastrophe are already archaic: the religious challenge of Islam; geopolitical contests for scarce resources, agricultural land, oil, fisheries; the North-South conflict and colonizing immigration into the Northern hemisphere; global pollution and the physical clash of empirical reality against the ideology of development. All these issues plunge us back into age-old questions, consigning to oblivion the quasi-theological political debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which were little more than idle talk about the sex of angels.

Moreover, as the philosopher Raymond Ruyer, detested by the left-bank intelligentsia, foretold in his two important works, Les nuisances idéologiques and Les cents prochains siècles, once the historical digression of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has finally closed, with egalitarianism's hallucinations having descended into catastrophe, humanity will return to archaic values, that is, quite simply, to biological and human (anthropological) values: distinctive sexual roles; the transmission of ethnic and popular traditions; spirituality and sacerdotal organization; visible and supervisory social hierarchies; the worship of ancestors; initiatory rites and tests; the reconstruction of organic communities that extend from the individual family unit to the overarching national community of the people; the deindividualization of marriage to involve the community as much as the couple; the end of the confusion of eroticism and conjugality; the prestige of the warrior caste; social inequality, not implicit, which is unjust and frustrating, as in today's egalitarian utopias, but explicit and ideologically justifiable; a proportioned balance of duties and rights; a rigorous justice whose dictates are applied strictly to acts and not to individual men, which will encourage a sense of responsibility in the latter; a definition of the people and of any constituted social body as a diachronic community of shared destiny, not as a synchronic mass of individual atoms, etc.

In short, future centuries, in the great pendulum movement of history that Nietzsche called "the eternal recurrence of the identical," will in some way revisit these archaic values. The problem for us, for Europeans, is not, through our cowardice, to allow Islam to impose them on us, a process which is surreptitiously occurring, but to reimpose them on ourselves, while drawing upon our historical memory.

Recently, an important French press baron -- whom I cannot name, but known for his left-liberal sympathies -- made to me, in essence, the following disillusioned remark: "Free-market economic values are gradually losing out to Islamic values, because they are exclusively based on individual economic profit, which is inhuman and ephemeral." Our task is to ensure that the inevitable return to reality is not imposed upon us by Islam.

Obviously, contemporary ideology, hegemonic today but not for much longer, regards these values as diabolical, much as a mad paranoiac might see the features of a demon in the psychiatrist trying to cure him. In reality, they are the values of justice. True to human nature from time immemorial, these archaic values reject the Enlightenment error of the emancipation of the individual, which has only ended in the isolation of this individual and in social barbarism. These archaic values are just, in the Ancient Greek sense of the term, because they take man for what he is, a zoon politicon ("a social and organic animal integrated into a communatarian city-state"), and not for what he is not, an isolated and asexual atom fitted out with universal but imprescriptible pseudo-rights.

In practical terms, archaism's anti-individualist values permit self-realization, active solidarity and social peace, unlike egalitarianism's pseudo-emancipating individualism, which ends in the law of the jungle.

Excerpted from L'Archéofuturisme (Paris: L'Aencre, 1998). Trans. Irmin. The original French text is online at the Faye archive. Ellipses in the online text have been removed.