Written by Jaron Pearlman   

The revolutionary creator of the Russian Revolution (1917-1918) Vladimir Lenin once said ‘Fascism is capitalism in decay’. While his legacy to Russia is questionable (matters which we shall return to), the Bolshevik founder was astute in his statement that eerily foreshadowed the impending fall of the Weimar Republic into Nazi Germany.

Ironically Lenin’s revolution eventually gave way to Joseph Stalin, who was just as vicious as Hitler with domestic policy, prejudice, and suppression of individualism.

My own addition to Lenin’s words would be that the dissolution of any power structure leads to fascism; in fact it may be the absolute and inherent nature our established societal archetypes. It’s historically evident that capitalism, communism, theocracies, and imperialism all react to loss of power by gripping the populace tighter and applying overt discrimination.

Clearly central control of capitol, central control of resources, central control of beliefs, and central control of potential governing persons, all end up ultimately betraying the majority of any nation’s people.

One reason I see this as being absolute in its ultimate outcome is that each of these systems share two things in common: Consolidation of power and building a society from ‘the top down’.

These hierarchical tendencies of organization do stem from necessity though. As human beings have populated the globe, then developed our vast array of technologies and conveniences, it is arguable that consolidated power was actually necessary to guide the world into the modern age.

Without widely available education, literacy, and cross cultural communication the budding world of man was in need of societal forms that could make ‘executive decisions’ while giving set rules/standards of living for the general populace. The agricultural and technological revolutions for example, may not have been feasible without defined authoritative systems.

On the contrary, now it is my growing belief that these archetypes are not only vestigial but are completely harmful to continued human progress.

Before suggesting alternatives to this conundrum, examination of these claims is required.

(Please keep in mind in the following that I am not referring to fascism as its economic definition of nationalist socialism under a dictator; rather its incarnation as a prejudiced police state under autocratic/oligarchic rule.)

As alluded to, Russia provides a very interesting case study in power consolidation. It has consistently been a nation of experiments, itself being a hybrid product of East Asian conquest by the Khans, Christian Orthodoxy/Nordics from the north and east, Muslim Tatars from the south (many stemming from the Khans voluntary conversion), Jewish immigration into the Pale of Settlement from the Middle East and former Khazaria, Western European colonialism, and of course the indigenous Slavic population that varies widely from north to south.

After successfully rejecting the yoke of Eastern Khanate control, Russia adopted Imperialism as its national form as well as Christian Orthodoxy (which is at odds, oddly enough, with Roman Catholicism). Initially Russian Emperors and Empresses (Tsars and Tsaristas) were indigenous people of the Rus, based out of Kiev in modern day Ukraine.

With the ownership of the Khans rejected, Russia was now free to determine its own economy and national identity.

What happened however was a simple swap of prejudices. What was initially Khanate oppression of the Slavs and non-Tatar peoples- became Slavic oppression of those from Khanate decent and non-Christian Orthodox peoples. Many northern immigrants from Sweden and the Nordic countries were also oppressed for not being indigenous people of the Rus, as were the Jews.

The Early Russian Tsars and Tsaristas ended up overcompensating for their hijacked identity in pre-Imperial Russia by antagonizing many ethnic/religious minorities and adopting ambitious expansionism (also partly due to frequent revolutionary attempts).

This yielded land all the way to the White Sea, Lithuania/Poland, and the tundra of Siberia (where eventually Imperial China halted southern expansion into Manchuria). Eventually however, a trend emerged where male Russian heirs to the throne were married into Germanic bloodlines, like that of Catherine the Great.

As German blood and Eastern European policies and culture overtook Imperial Russia a great false austerity overtook the land. Wealth/food was even more dramatically hoarded among vassals and the Royal Family, while suddenly even Slavic peoples were now added to the list of oppressed; under the new expectations to wear western clothes and follow acceptable religious secularism/customs.

Soon famine overtook much of the nation as a result of this authoritative hoarding. Not far on its heels the Empire had expanded perhaps too much and began to falter at its peripheries with revolution; that required more spending to suppress, prompted harsher laws/domestic environment, suppressed individualism, and created more nationalist paranoia of traitors.

Hence, imperial theocracy became fascism.

Russia’s Imperial decline was unusual. Rather than a facing a singular, violent revolution Tsar Nicholas II simply spread himself so thin with matters of war that the people’s revolution very easily commenced. In fact, he took the revolution so lightly that it wasn’t even initially obvious to him that he wasn’t the Tsar anymore. He eventually abdicated and was placed under house arrest for three years before his execution.

Imperialism and theocracies outdate concepts like capitalism or communism by a long shot (though not egalitarianism). It is very clear why extortion and subjugation are easy in an imperial or theocratic environment, as all property belongs to either the Royal Family/subjects or religious institutions. This also creates dehumanized and disconnected leaders that are too far up the socioeconomic ladder to possibly make rational decisions for the bottom of it.
Capitalism and communism exist much more in concept than in practice like their predecessors. I personally see them as a natural step in societal evolution. Imperialism/theocracy existed to raise the baby that is humanity, while these two were duel philosophies on helping us to walk.
Imperial Russia fell into a Provisional Government that was overthrown by Lenin’s Communist Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks believed (oppositely of their moderate Menshevik cousins) that communism could rise out of the lower class immediately. While the spirit of their revolution was admirable and exactly what many Russians wished for, it failed to provide the education, economy, and equality that had been advertised.

What prompted this could’ve been the failure to raise the massive slums of Russia into the middle class. Illiteracy was still a serious problem, as was basic education and ability to even understand national Russian issues in rural communities, which made up much of Russia.

The state imposed system of communism in the USSR was an ever growing nightmare of bureaucracy. The list of provisions and laws set in place were constantly growing, and after Lenin’s death became ever more imposing and divisive.

When a Georgian bureaucrat named Joseph Stalin came to power, he chased off the last of the Old Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, as well as any hope for real, functional communism. He not only ‘communized’ the land itself but the supply of nearly every necessity, creating yet another famine.

Stalin’s Russia involved secret police, brutal and widespread executions/prejudices, consolidation of wealth to the state, famine, poor education, and extended power to his own office. To utter anything critical of this fake ‘communism’ or Stalin himself was a death warrant, an excuse to be called a traitor.

This left the general population in just about the same spot as they had been under Imperial rule. Afraid, impoverished, and subjugated. Now the King and his servants didn’t own the land/food but the State did, and not the people.

Hence, communism became fascism.

Speaking on communism briefly before moving on, it’s impossible not to bring up Karl Marx. Marx suggested that no good society could come without confronting our basic animal instincts and adapting to them. Some of his main points were:
1.) The worker has a right to feel empowered by his work. Toiling just to survive in a biased system is akin to slavery-therefore solidarity must be established among the workers and people. In other words, when one succeeds all will succeed.

2.) That privatization of industry sabotages the relationship between the people and industry/trade. By introducing profit motive and competition it’s inevitable that profit will become the only motive in competition.

3.) That communism is a system that is needed to fix our animal desires to dominate and undermine. It is a society that only is there to unify the men and women of civilization so we can address the human societal desires in the future (presumably when we are more responsible).

Marx was certainly an idealist- but many of his points reinforce why leftist politics are so prominent in much of the world that is trying to raise itself from the decimation of imperialism, colonialism, debt peonage, and slavery.
While capitalism is renowned as communisms opposite, they both (supposedly) aim at the dispersion of power. While communism proposes the state as a power/resource proxy, capitalism proposes the same of those with higher amounts of capital (with the assumption that ‘free market’ and hard work will keep the money flowing). The real result in practice though, is a rigged game wherein there is no more equality than in any other caste system.
The obvious choice of showing capitalism becoming fascism is the Weimar Republic.

Much as with Russia, Germany was becoming very sick of its imperial form of government by the early 20th century; and after the defeat of the Central Powers in WW1, a full-scale revolution took place. It wasn’t until 1919, however, that the Weimar Republic formally came to be a constitutional republic just like the United States. This included a bill of individual rights and a parliament (The Reichstag).

The rights themselves even included habeas corpus, inviolability of residence, correspondence privacy, freedom of speech/expression, assemblies, associations, and expropriation.

So what went so wrong? How did a near clone of the fledgling USA become one of the most notorious nations in history?

By 1918 the United States and the UK (the leaders of the capitalist world) and the WW1 Allies were set to rebuild and economically integrate Germany. However there was a problem. Germany was expected to pay a hefty sum in war debts/grievances to the scarred world, but had little money or readily available resources to do it with.

To amend this immense debt the Weimar Republic authorized the creation of a Central Bank (a common move), which would be structured by/under advisory of prominent and insanely wealthy capitalist investors. Among the assets of these investors was a plethora of newly developed multinational companies, thriving off the boom of the technological revolution.

Thus, these western investors controlled the new German currency, the companies rebuilding Germany, and the companies that were harvesting German resources en masse. This completely skewed any potential for a working constitutional republic or representation. Weimar fiat money hyper inflated as the top of the capitalist caste system manipulated its worth beyond standardization; and then price gouged every facet of German economy leaving no hope for recovery.

As the money became worthless, jobs left, private German companies went bankrupt or were acquired by the state or abroad, and the parliament was increasingly bought off by industrial lobbyists (sound familiar?). Eventually it took ludicrous amounts of money just to even buy bread or vegetables for a single family.

After the burning of the Reichstag (covered in my article ‘Biased Education: Assuring We Don’t Learn from the World Wars’) the threat of terrorism, obvious loss of national sovereignty, and revived German nationalism brought extreme power to the Chancellors office: that of Adolf Hitler.

In the name of safety and protectionism from foreign meddling he stripped all citizens of their rights, constitution, and false representation. What is interesting however, is that unlike many revolutions Hitler retained not only state capitalism (capitalism where state owned industry is dominant), but also many ties with the same cross national companies whose investors had bankrupted the Weimar Republic (perhaps thinking he could contain their influence and make some money for Germany).

In this case, capitalist power had become so great for so few that a handful of businessmen were able to sabotage an entire new nation that had just escaped imperialism. Trust me, this is not an isolated incident.

Hence, capitalism became fascism.

The great shining beacon of capitalism in the modern world is of course the United States. Americans pride themselves on terms like ‘free market’, ‘democracy’, and of course ‘liberty’. In actuality the USA political system is a planned/dominated market, whose dominant state capitalist companies choose the potential politicians for the people to ‘elect’ from. They also control currency worth with no standardization. In this way there is no representation of the American people.
A ‘free market’ would imply that there is no preference from the state as to which companies have greater influence over policy, which get bigger tax breaks, and which are immune to going bankrupt. Lack of control of incumbency, campaign financing deregulations, the distorted electoral college system, and inflating American currency are all to blame and prove this point.
The USA Federal Reserve is very much the same in practice as the bank of the Weimar Republic. It too is knotted up with the largest companies/banks that run our dominated market; and uses currency inflation to inflate (or pop) markets on command, finance wars to ‘rebuild’ nations like the Weimar, and send jobs overseas with free trade- so that products Americans used to make can be sold back to them under cost and at an inflated rate.
Self-proclaimed anarcho-capitalist Murray Rothbard combated these power issues with capitalism by taking it to the other (anti-state) extreme, where it’s literally every man/community for itself. In his mind, all sizes of communities should (for example) be able to hire their own police forces dependent on who they want to protect them and how much they could collectively spend. While interesting to think about, it seems like a serious step towards feudalism (which is akin to imperialism).
One thesis of capitalism vs. communism is that capitalists maintain the opposite of Marx’s stance on worker solidarity. To a (pure) capitalist, competition in the market yields better products, since companies must compete. In practice though, a free market will only become a dominated market once one investor/company/bank gets too successful and starts consolidating power. At a certain point of political influence, a large company can make both federal regulation AND deregulation work to their eventual advantage.
The problem persists that all of these forms of governance are built by those at the top, who then regulate those at the bottom. This is why each example ends similarly, and why these archetypes must be addressed and renounced.

In their place I foresee the potential for politics to become a basic facet of everyone’s life, instead of hollow words, fabled practices, and the clear divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’; where the bottom builds the top and regulates it.

Where politicians are recycled so quickly that they never reach the end of their term, and their campaigns aren’t a lottery. Where there are no career politicians. Where everyone has the education and opportunity to engage directly in said politics. Where authoritarian structures are removed when they are obsolete instead of festering into hateful tumors. Where republics have true autonomy (under ONLY a reasonable SIMPLE constitution) and can issue their own standardized currencies. Where workers committees elect company leaders from their ranks. Where industry meddling/state interventionism is condemned and understood by the populace. Where neither money nor oligarchies are left to tend policies. Where we literally realize that only we can save us from ourselves.

Noam Chomsky’s definition of anarchism is the constant upheaval and questioning of entrenched power structures. These upheavals don’t need to be violent. They just need to be constant. And they don’t need to destroy infrastructure, in fact they may just improve it. Why can’t we have competitive industry AND worker solidarity? Why can’t we have individualism AND socialism?

The truth those with excessive power don’t want you to know is a society can now be built from the bottom up. It can be done however we wish, and it is the next step in societal evolution. Technology has caught up with the dreams of hundreds of generations of humanity, and presented this opportunity.

The child crawled through imperial muck and toddled through communism/capitalism; but now finally it is ready to walk.