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profits in minimum time is going to eventually let's say in fifty years, hurt the entire field of his endeavor, and you will not have provided him a reason for changing his course of action. He is concerned not with what will happen to the entire economy in fifty years, but only with what is happening to him right now. He is not inclined to trade immediate profits for speculative long-range profits, and even what he calls "long range" is usually a period so limited as to enable him personally to reap the fruit.
Basic to the laissez faire economy is the lack of any overall and long range planning even if such planning were to protect and perpetuate the system. This is why in certain respects fascism made such far reaching concessions to labor, as laissez fairism would never be inclined to make voluntarily. This found expression not only in the relatively high standard of living which both the Nazis and the Italian fascists secured for the workers but also in the fulfillment of their pledge to eliminate unemployment. Here was an important contradiction of completely free capitalism, which conceives of a degree of unemployment as an absolutely indispensable balancing factor in the national economy.
In making these concessions the fascist employer correctly believed he was paying a relatively low price for arresting the class struggle that threatened him with ultimate dispossession. The absorption of all social elements into one political party made sure that no one would have the political tools to challenge another. That's how the political neutralization of labor was achieved. That's why, of all his domestic undertakings, Mussolini conceived as the most important one the creation, on December 20, 1923, of a state syndicate that combined both industry representatives and delegates of the fascist trade unions.
THE FASCIST REVOLUTION
Of necessity, fascism had to be a revolutionary and violent movement. It undertook to arrest such self-compelling social processes that it could not count on the enduring voluntary cooperation of the most vital elements in society. This opposition did not come from the working class only; not all sectors of capitalists were willing to compromise their most immediate interests for the sake of perpetuating the basic system.
Under these conditions fascism was a movement which could not have gained and kept the reigns of power without resorting to violence and coercion. Even in Germany, where it took over the government by parliamentary procedure, it could not have perpetuated itself without physically wiping out all those elements whose political leadership could eventually exploit undeniable social contradictions. That's why it has been taken as axiomatic that fascism must resort to violence to attain or to remain in power.
FASCISM BY EVOLUTION
American experience has often contradicted axioms derived from socio-economic and political developments in Europe. Another case in point is the methods by which American labor is being politically neutralized. That such political neutralization has been taking place is obvious. American labor has been put in a position of having openly and officially to disclaim all political ambitions. Even a suspicion that some trade union or its leaders entertain political ambitions elicits vindicative and apologetic denials on their part and provisions in the Taft-Hartley law give this state of affairs legal expression. In neither House of Congress are there members officially representing any labor organization and whenever any congressman is depicted as such, the depiction amounts to a hostile "smear."
Much has been written about how the ambitions of labor in America have been defeated through the application of violence and the circumvention of law. Police interference in strikes, for instance, has never disappeared from American plants. But contending that violence was the primary means of protecting the socio-economic status quo would amount to stretching a point. Yet, while violence was no more than an auxiliary means, the political neutralization of American labor was effectively achieved nevertheless, achieved at a much lesser immediate cost to the employers in America than in Mussolini's Italy and Hitler's Germany. As already suggested, a comparison of relative economic and social achievements of labor in America on the one hand and in fascist Italy and Nazi Germany on the other hand would disclose that in many respects the fascist and the Nazi trade unions have gained farther reaching concessions from management than have some of the most powerful American labor unions. The latter no longer even have the courage to fight for full employment, to which they pay no more than lip service, perfectly resigned to the proposition that some degree of unemployment is "unavoidable."
The difference between the European and American means of political neutralization of labor lies in the fact that while in Europe fascism did not take over the trade unions until it had gained total control of government, in America, the apoliticization of labor unions has been achieved from within the unions themselves. Whether or not a trade union is pledged to a specific political program and platform, when it accepts the responsibility for keeping the activities of its members within the framework and for the perpetuation of the basic socio-economic system, it is a political union and specifically a fascist trade union.
COMPLIANCE OF AMERICAN UNIONS
The leaders of most American trade unions are acutely aware that their social position and prominence are tolerated and their moderate fight for labor benefits considered legitimate only in return for renouncing any political role. Had they refused to make this concession, had they insisted upon representing labor politically, had they allowed their unions to align themselves with or establish their own political parties, as is the universal practice in democracies, they would not be accepted as advisors and consultants to our legislators and executives but rather consigned to our state and federal prisons. In their political function of rendering labor politically ineffective, most American trade unions meet Hitler's definition of union- ism: "The national-socialist trade union is not an instrument of class struggle but an instrument of vocational representation."
Whatever the American trade unions have gained for their self-imposed political passivism and inertia does not exceed management's self-serving interest in keeping labor strong in its consumer capacity. Wherever a conflict between these mutual labor-management interests and the selfish interests of management arises, it is usu- ally resolved in management's favor (witness the deliberate cultivation of an unemployed labor reservoir at all times). Extensive campaigns in the press, ever since the last steel strike, are an ominous prelude of compulsory labor-management arbitration, which will be the law of the land before long. Such legislation will provide an American equivalent to Mussolini's already mentioned labor-management syndicate.
From these concessions of most of the American trade unions stems their complete political compliance with the prevailing regime. Yet, while these trade unions renounce any political role, this renunciation obviously does not apply to political positions supporting the power elite. Labor may not engage in politics, but this principle is indisputably waived whenever labor leaders wish to support the Administration's political steps and policies. Labor may not be political, but it may, and it is encouraged to, denounce all the opponents of our State Department. Labor may not interfere in politics, but who admonishes it for denouncing a Khrushchev or a Castro or cooperating with some crusade of political persecution by a vigilante congressional committee? So, after all, it is not politics trade unions must abstain from but only such politics as would express labor's socio-economic place in society.
This process is responsible for the lack,