Proudhon a Precursor of Fascism?
NOMAD, MAX
Proudhon a Precursor of Fascism? Review by max NOMAD ftgHKK JOSEPH PROUDHON, HARBINGER OF FASCISM. ByJ.Salwyn gtlHfiuo, Reprinted from the Ameri-Hirtoivai Review. July, 1946. RjADING or...
...Their ambition was not cheap credit for attaining economic independence, but a chanea to get a salaried job with the central or local bureaucracy, or with the various enterprises owned or controlled by either of them...
...Professor Schapiro admits that there "is no hint of the totalitarian corporative state in Proudhon's writings...
...A sort of peon system there is, a patron renting the chairs to the *V...
...The middle classes and lower middle classes championed by Proudhon were altogether different from those which constituted the chief support of Fascism...
...clearer thinking, wider knowledge here, would be of immediate service, for instance, in the re-education of Germany ami Japan...
...They are even more distorting than the casual remarks ma<!e •n the same subject by . . . Karl Marx...
...No wonder then that P. J. Prodhon, often referred to as "The Father of Anarchy," wtl bound to suffer a similar fate...
...The conclusions drawn by the author from all this array of bewildering material is that Proudhon's hostility to both capitalism and Socialism reflected the fact that he spoke on behalf of the middle class whose interests he saw threatened both by the financiers from above and by the rebellious workers from below...
...And Schrodinger's little book is a well-spring of wisdom for the layman, Isith in its clear presentation of life's beginning and continuance, and In its final speculation on man's control of his will...
...that he was full of contempt for univer-al suffrage —all of them reasons why the French monarchists—particularly at the time when Sorel had his short-lived flirtation with lawn—suddenly discovered a great affection for him...
...Cambridge Univereity t'it»$ (Uacmil-lan), 1495...
...even to get to own your own '•tea you a minor capitalist...
...and certainly few havt) looked more keenly, and shown more dearly what they have aeen...
...Trant-Uttd from the Chiuete by Evan King, Hem York: Reynal and Hiteheork...
...1.76...
...but such examinations lie beneath the currents of our time...
...The new middle and lower middle class of the Mussolini-Hitler era uonsisted chiefly of the educated and semi-educated scions of the old middle class...
...For tvfalitai ianiem is the essence of Fascism—including its original red variety...
...Frankly, it was a heroic task, for of all the united classics of revolutionary theory ihe age of Besancon was the least read of...
...Poverty in China HCKSffAW BOY...
...Henry W. Ehrmann...
...It has often been mentioned before that Proud-ton was opposed to labor unions and to rtrikes...
...That was the old middle and lower middle class...
...By Lan Shaw...
...Ami so were also the passages glorify-'«C war for its own sake, which are 1 "hocking as anything that Oswald Spengier perpetrated on the same theme...
...that he hailed the coup d'etat •f Louis Bonaparte...
...The facts presented by Professor Schapiro are not exactly new...
...By admitting this, he abandons his thesis...
...that he was a rabid opponent of feminism...
...will open your own eyes...
...Tills might be subtitled "A physicist looks at biology...
...In a similar way Bakonin, the champion of revolutionary anarchism and reputed -negator" of the State, was, on the basis tl his forgotten writings and particularly his letters, debunked by various writers as the spiritual sire of Bolshevism — the very antithesis of what an-srchbm is supposed to stand for...
...315 payen...
...RjADING or re-reading old classics of gacial theory occasionally leads to bef-faf conclusions...
...91 panes...
...On the other baud, Proudhon's "anarchism" or "anti-Statism" was at bottom only an Utopian or paradoxical formulation of the small producer's hostility to a voracious, ubiquitous and all-powerful bureaucracy swallowing up a substantial part of the nation's income...
...The work was undertaken by Professor J. Salwyn Schapiro with the assist-incsof Dr...
...With powerful strokes, in rich "»il, we see the life of a rickshaw ull«, m his endless struggle for substance...
...However, it is here where he makes his great mistake...
...Perhaps In the new China---'"book in a vivichpicture or one aspect "the old...
...T. S. What Makes ManTick...
...This may seem abstract...
...Such recent physical stumbling-blocks as the Brownian movement and the quantum jump are not only interlinked with the problems of bulb and heredity, but become building-stones on which rest* an explanation simple and lucid as a summer well-spring...
...Hence the basic principle of Fascism is the deification of the State with its millions of jobs covering every aspect of the nation's life...
...view ivy JOStPH T. SHIPLEY YYHA T IS LIFE/ BY EruinSchridtnycr...
...In the meantime, "What Is Life...
...With that essence absent from Proudhon all his counter-revolutionary and reactionary vagaries are not sufficient to stamp him a precursor of Fascism...
...It est only some of Saint Simon's followers who after their teacher's desth (tabined a few of his concepts with MM of the socialist ideas which were in Ike French "air" a century ago...
...And this is where Professor Schapiro sees the interesting analogy between Proudhonitm and Fascism which he quite correctly calls a movement of the middle classes...
...them all, with his "property is theft" tkgaa, purloined by the way from an i r ier French writer, perhaps the only tiling that survived from the two score relumes of hia collected works...
...The author of What It Property/ had in mind the interests of the small independent producers and of those who aspired to join their ranks, that is, of the skilled workers who hoped to open their own little shops...
...h»45...
...The present reviewer klmits, however, that the passages about the Jews and the Negroes were quite ww to him...
...2.76...
...Bul ap-*r«ntly bandits didn't let you own it The struggle for food and the "«*** of sex—though there seems '•^e energy in these haulers, for both '""Wen and men work-consumes their and if the rickshaw boy we watch *«*ks from it at the end, there is no "Nation of what awaits him around Vorner...
...For nearly a century gaint Simon had enjoyed the reputation being an "Utopian Socialist" — until , careful study of hia forgotten and never read works enabled a German K*olar to establish the quite disconcert-,„( truth that the vaunted "Socialism" rf the great thinker was in reality nerely an inspired championship of modern industrialism under which the atnufscturers, managers and scholars ,0uW lord it over the toiling masses...
...KmOWN already by translations ol bis "listic short stories, Lau Shaw is now tinted in a full-lenglh novel of poverty H'hma...
Vol. 28 • December 1945 • No. 49
