Not without reason does modern monopolistic capitalism support the National Socialist and fascist reaction. This reaction is to help beat down any resistance of the working masses, in order to set up a realm of industrial serfdom in which productive man is to be regarded merely as an economic automaton without any influence whatsoever on the course and character of economic and social conditions. This Caesarean madness stops at no barrier. Without compunction it rides rough shod over those achievements of the past which have all too often had to be purchased with the heart’s blood of the people. It is always ready to smother with brutal violence the last rights and the last liberties which might interfere with its plans for holding all social activities within the rigid forms set by its will. This is the great danger which threatens us today and which immediately confronts us. The success or failure of monopolistic capitalistic power plans will determine the structure of the social life of the near future.
— Rudolf Rocker[1]
Rudolf Rocker (1873-1958) was a German anarchist scholar and activist. He wrote the lines above when Hitler and his Nazi party dominated Germany and Mussolini and his Fascisti party dominated Italy. What Rocker says in those lines, however, applies no less to our contemporary situation, especially — but by no means exclusively — to our contemporary situation in the corporate capitalist United States of America.
What Rocker tells us those same lines, if only we have the ears to hear it, is that there is an essential connection not only between capitalism and fascism, but also between both and modern technology. That connection can be expressed in the single word domination.
All three, capitalism, fascism, and modern technology, arise precisely from the desire to dominate, which means to rule over, to control, to master.
Rudolf Rocker
* * *
[. . .] The strongest feeling which capitalism awakes and raises with all its might against revolution is nationalism. [. . .][2]
[. . .] Fascism puts the state above the citizens; the state as organization of the nation, is the superior objective to which the citizens are subordinate. Not democracy, not the people’s rights, but authority, the people’s duties stand first. It places the party chief at the head of the state, as a dictator, to rule with his party companions, without interference from parliamentary delegates.[3] — Anton Pannekoek
Anton Pannekoek (1873–1960) was a Dutch astronomer and one of the key theorists of “council communism.” The idea expressed under that latter name is that genuine communism is not a matter of the seizure and holding of power over the state, however supposedly “provisional” the holding of such power is said to be. Rather, genuine communism is a matter of the development and continuing cooperation of workers’ councils.
The word for councils in Russian is ‘soviets.’ That word gave the nation-state established by Lenin and the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution of October 1917 a key part of its name, “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” However, according to Pannekoek the USSR was in reality not an embodiment of communism at all. It was, rather, only an instance of state capitalism, a form of capitalism in which it is the nation-state, rather than individuals or corporations of individuals, that owns and profits from the means of industrial production. That is also the case with the so-called People’s Republic of China that was later established by Mao and his followers, as it with all other states that have called themselves communist during the 20th century.
In the first of the two citations I give at the beginning of this section, consisting of a single sentence from Pannekoek, we are told that capitalism by its very essence fosters nationalism. It does so in order to forestall any attempt at “revolution,” understood as the attempt to subvert, overthrow, and assume control of the capitalist system. Then, in the second and longer citation I give above, he tells us how fascism concentrates and hardens such nationalism into its most virulent form, the form of authoritarianism and dictatorship. Thus, to combine the two passages: fascism is capitalism’s most favored child, and whoever supports that parent helps feed that child.
Anton Pannekoek
* * *
In precapitalist cultures, spiritual beliefs often integrated human activity with nature, understanding them to be intimately bound up with one another. Experience taught people how to live as communities connected with the natural environment, even as they altered it locally to sustain agriculture or to conform to their nature-related spiritual practices. In capitalism, where each individual is thought to be a freestanding part of the social order, independent of any other except through arm’s-length market exchanges, we think very differently. People are no longer considered part of nature. Nature becomes a “resource” that entrepreneurs should have a right to access to get materials necessary for production and the making of profit. “Nature” and “society” appear to become disconnected, rather than being understood as a unity of opposites whose tension is central to all economies, most dramatically in private capital accumulation. — Michael Zweig[4]
Michael Zweig (born 1942) is an emeritus professor of economics at SUNY Stony Brook, where he was also the founding director of the Center for Study of Working Class Life. Whoever reads the above citation from Zweig with ears tuned to hear what his words actually say, will hear much about the interconnection of modern technology with capitalism and fascism.
An important part of what Zweig says in the above passage is that modern technology, unlike premodern technology, separates people from nature, and reduces nature herself to no more than a “resource” for manufacturing products to be sold for profit. To add an important correlate I myself discuss in an earlier post,[5] at the same time that nature is thus reduced to what are commonly called “natural resources,” people get reduced to no more than “human resources.”
That reduction of all things to “resources” indicates the radical opposition that separates modern from premodern technology. In sum, whereas premodern technology sought cultivation, modern technology seeks domination. “Cultivation,” however, is an altogether different thing from “domination.”
Cultivation respects, guards, liberates, and sojourns within and/or alongside that which it cultivates. That is so regardless of what it being cultivated — whether that be land, human beings, relationships, or whatever. The etymological roots of the very word ‘cultivate’ tell us exactly that, if our own ears are cultivated enough to attend to that word’s roots.
On the other hand, domination controls, governs, orders, and tries to be lord and master over whatever it dominates, from earth to the stars to plants, animals, and most especially people. If our ears are not deafened by the orders of our governing rulers, the roots of the word ‘dominate’ also tell us just that.
Michael Zweig
[1] Rudolf Rocker, Nationalism and Culture, translated by Ray E. Chase (ChristieBooks, 2015), the final paragraph of “The Insufficiency of Economic Materialism,” the first chapter of Book One. (The German original of this book first appeared in 1937.)
[2] Anton Pannekoek, The Workers’ Way to Freedom and Other Council Communist Writings (1935-1954), edited by Robyn K. Winters (Oakland, CA: PM Press 2024), p. 81.
[3] Ibid., p. 87.
[4] Michael Zweig, Class, Race and Gender: Challenging the Injuries and Divisions of Capitalism (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2023), p. 122.
[5] See “Homeless Human Resources of Peoples and Cultures,” which I posted on this blog one year ago (on February 13, 2023) and which can be accessed through the “Archive” at the top of his blogsite.