Capitalism in Decay

I’m not going to lie to you: if you’ve been a socialist for a while, chances are pretty high that corporate America’s support for the Third Reich is yesterday’s news to you.

That being said, what may be news to you is just how important it was to the Third Reich. In fact, I’ve recently arrived at the conclusion that the Yankee bourgeoisie’s support was so important that Imperial America might as well have been allied with the Reich!

Quoting Jacques R. Pauwels’s The Myth of the Good War, pages 39–40:

It also deserves mention that Hitler did not suddenly forfeit the considerable fund of sympathy he had commanded in high circles in the United States when he unleashed the dogs of war with his attack on Poland on September 1, 1939, or when in May 1940 his military machine overran the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France.

When on June 26, 1940, a [Reich] commercial delegate organized a dinner at the Waldorf‐Astoria Hotel in New York in order to celebrate the victories of the Wehrmacht in Western Europe, the evening was attended by leading industrialists such as James D. Mooney, a top executive of General Motors.

As a result of GM’s services to [the Third Reich], Mooney had already been honoured by Hitler with the same medal Henry Ford had received from the Führer. (Yet another American mogul who had made himself deserving of the Third Reich and therefore received a medal from Hitler during a 1937 visit to [the Reich], was IBM’s Thomas Watson.)

Five days later the [Reich’s] victories were again celebrated in New York, this time by means of a party hosted by the previously mentioned pro‐fascist Texaco boss, Rieber. Among the leaders of corporate America who attended this function were the same James D. Mooney and Henry Ford’s son, Edsel. In that same summer — the zenith of Hitler’s career — Rieber also provided generous moral and material support to a [Fascist] emissary who visited the United States in order to make propaganda for the cause of the Third Reich.^30^

It was not without reason that [Imperial] America’s automobile manufacturers and oil tycoons shared in the [Fascist] triumph. Without the trucks, tanks, planes, and other equipment supplied by the [Reich’s] subsidiaries of Ford and GM, and without the large quantities of strategic raw materials, notably rubber as well as diesel oil, lubricating oil, and other types of fuel shipped by Texaco and Standard Oil via Spanish ports, the [Reich’s] air and land forces would not have found it so easy to defeat their adversaries in 1939 and 1940.

Albert Speer, [the Chancellor’s] architect and wartime armament minister, would later state that without certain kinds of synthetic fuel made available by U.S. firms, [the Fascist bourgeoisie] “would never have considered invading Poland.” The American historian Bradford Snell agrees; alluding to the controversial rôle played by Swiss banks during the war, he comments that “the Nazis could have attacked Poland and Russia without the Swiss banks, but not without General Motors.”

[The Fascist bourgeoisie’s] military successes were based on a new form of warfare, the blitzkrieg, consisting of extremely swift and highly synchronized attacks by air and by land. But without the aforementioned American support and without state‐of‐the‐art communications and information technology provided by ITT and IBM, the [Fascist bourgeoisie] could only have dreamed of blitzkriege and blitzsiege (“lightning wars” followed by “lightning victories”).^31^

(Emphasis added. I also need to admit that it required a good deal of strength on my part to simply not paste the entirety of chapter 2 here!)

On a side note, as much as propertarians enjoy decrying FDR and all of the Fascists as ‘socialists’, we really have no good reason to believe that a ‘pure’ free market could have prevented this. It’s clear that ‘the government’ never forced these businesses to export anything to the Fascists, and despite Washington’s attempt to regulate exports to the Fascists, many businesses easily bypassed it.

Likewise, one should be careful to avoid the petty bourgeois oversimplification that corporations were the real problem here. Of course the offenders were corporate, but supporting small businesses is not the answer, since many petty bourgeois gentiles like William Dudley Pelley already respected the European Fascists and most of the petty bourgeoisie dreams of making it big one day anyway.

The solution, then, shall come when the lower classes, after the upper classes can no longer appease them, abolish capital, the law of value, generalised commodity production, and wage labour. In other words, when the lower classes negate capitalism.