A period of long wave crisis began around 1914, as the previous period had led to a significant strengthening of the working-class in Europe, of rising relative wages, falling relative profits, and a consequent overproduction of capital. It is what created the sharpened conditions that emphasised the need for a single European market and state, which was the basis of WWI, and II, as European capital confronted a rising US capital, and later a rising Japanese capital.
European capital, broke at its weakest link, in Russia, with the 1917 Revolution, and, then, with the revolutions of 1918, in Germany etc., though these latter failed, and failed, again, in Germany, in 1923. In Italy, in the 1920's, the workers began to flex their muscles along the lines set out out, in Part 15, by occupying their factories, and placing production under workers' control. In the US, Taylorism arose, as a managerialist adjunct to Fordism, a professional middle-class manifesto of scientific management, but which the US trades unions also adopted, in opposition to the old incompetent management of the private capitalists.
The needs of the dominant form of property, large-scale socialised capital, cried out for such rationalisation, but, as in 1848, the bourgeoisie shrank back in horror at the working-class, which was the apparent agent of its implementation, as had been most visibly observed in Russia, after 1917. And yet, that process of the role of the state in bringing about this rationalisation over the heads of the workers, provided an obvious solution for the ruling class. As Marx and Engels had noted, in Anti-Duhring,
“In the trusts, free competition changes into monopoly and the planless production of capitalist society capitulates before the planned production of the invading socialist society. Of course, this is initially still to the benefit of the Capitalists.
But, the exploitation becomes so palpable here that it must break down. No nation would put up with production directed by trusts, with such a barefaced exploitation of the community by a small band of coupon-clippers.”
(Anti-Duhring p 358)
And, the biggest trust of all is that of the capitalist state.
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.”
(Anti-Duhring, p 360)
One means of these trusts performing that function, therefore, becomes “national socialism”. As with Stalinism, Nazism requires a totalitarian regime. It imposes the objective interests of large-scale socialised capital, over the immediate interests of the ruling class owners of fictitious-capital, for higher interest/dividend payments and asset prices, but, in so doing, not only saves their system from proletarian revolution, but serves their long-term interests, by creating the basis for increased profits, and so out of which can be paid increased amounts of interest/dividends, rents and taxes.
In Italy, in the 1920's, the response to the workers was the regime of Mussolini, in Britain, as the workers engaged in the mass strikes of 1920, and the General Strike of 1926, not only is the state mobilised against them, but a similar rise of fascist auxiliaries is seen, and the same is seen in Germany, and France, and in the US. The role of Stalinism, and its class collaborationist policy of the Popular Front, undermined these struggles of workers, in the 1920's, and contributed to their defeat. So, the ruling class in these instances, did not need to resort to fascism. Even in Germany, where it was led to do so, later, in the 1930's, it acted to slap down the fascists, in the 1920's, when they attempted their putsch.
And, the reason for that is the difference between fascism, as a movement of the petty-bourgeoisie, whose interests are contradictory to those of the ruling-class, and National Socialism, which exists to implement the measures of rationalisation and so on, objectively required by large-scale socialised capital, by the state, over the heads of the collective owners of that socialised capital (the workers), and in the interests of the ruling class. Those measures of rationalisation and so on, in the 1930's, included the formation of a European single market and state, which Nazism took on in WWII, as a continuation of that requirement manifest in WWI.
In Asia, Japan, as rising imperialist power, took on that role, in its occupation of China, Korea, and so on, as it sought to establish a similar large single market and state, in order to be able to produce on the same kind of scale as its main rival, US imperialism.
As Trotsky described, it is these basic laws of capital that drive towards the imperialist wars, such as WWI and II, not conflicts between “democracy” and “fascism”, or “totalitarianism”, as is, again, being portrayed, today, as the world marches towards WWIII, under a false flag of a war against Russia and China, the hypocrisy of which is most easily seen in the support of that “democratic imperialism” for the genocide being committed by its Zionist ally in Gaza, and by its support for, and arms shipments to numerous dictators, feudal regimes and so on, across the globe, such as that in Saudi Arabia. It is this which is the backdrop to that genocide in Gaza, and explains why western imperialism will not act to end it, why it will continue to arm it, and act as attorney for it, and why it is led to become ever more Bonapartist and authoritarian in its own regimes, in order to prevent any morsel of criticism of it.
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