PETER DRUCKER’S BEST BOOK ON FASCISM
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

“My best book would have been, Managing Ignorance. Peter Drucker

We need to sell more Girl Scout Cookies

We older we get the more we lose, but then again, if we act wisely by reason of our age, the more our progeny have to look forward to. On November 11, 2005, yet another friend of humankind died. We call Peter Drucker our friend because he urged us to see ourselves not merely as means to ends or as slaves to masters, but first of all to know ourselves as ends in ourselves, and, by thus insisting on self-respect therefore mutual respect for beings of our kind, inoculate the human race against the recurrence of another massive episode of the suicidal murder he witnessed in his youth.

Now the corporate world may remember Peter Drucker the social thinker best as the author of the saga of the business world’s Moby Dick, Concept of the Corporation (1946), but we appreciate our teacher first of all for his first book, a tome that caught the eye of American policymakers as the war approached and landed its immigrant author a teaching job at Sarah Lawrence College – The End of Economic Man, a Study of the New Totalitarianism (1939). It was this study of the nature of fascistic corporatism, a study motivated by the Austrian author’s experience as a reporter during Hitler’s rise to power, that laid the groundwork for his implantation and cultivation of higher principles. His discussion therein, of the collapse of democracy and the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany antecedent to the outbreak of the Second World War, exposes the nature of the latest effort to save the world by bringing it under yet another new world order, an order subconsciously symbolized by the ancient Roman fasces borne by the current super-powerful leader of world civilization; to wit: This Great Nation of Ours, as the politicians religiously pronounce it, upon whom an attack is an attack on civilization itself – as if there is or should be only one civilization.

And now that the neoconservative corporate order is threatened in the world-power advance of economic imperialism championed behind the scenes by the interlocking power elite, it would differentiate itself from fascism and drum up popular support by resorting to neoliberal economic recitations, pounding out hackneyed political phrases such as "making the world safe for democracy." That democracy exists only at the highest social stratum, in gated compounds, luxurious resorts, yachts and private jets; it is not the borderless, universal democracy frustrated citizens of the world would have, where a free movement of goods would be accompanied by the free movement of labor. The legislative lords and the kingly executives speak of national democracy simply because it is easier for them to drum up patriotic public sentiment for the People and the Nation than it is for the Private Profit of the vested interests that fund their campaigns.

Naturally the leading nation is the United States of America, the sole superpower whose virtual imperium is now said to be unrivaled by that of the Roman Empire in its day. Since its duty is to make the world safe for freedom and democracy, it must bomb, maim and kill those who do not want to be made in its image and who challenge the composition of its violent polity. As U.S. generals play out the line of the Prussian generals of yesteryear, proclaiming that war is necessary and that its necessity is "beyond immediate moral considerations," we wonder at the similarity between "national democracy" and "national socialism." The name Freedom is taken in vain because is just a name, the name of a war machine. In fact the nation is put ahead of democracy, that those who may not want to be freed be sanctioned, imprisoned, and killed.

Yes, a few of us wonder if the United States has in a sense become the epitome or perfection of top-down national socialism, a modern fascist state or Caesarian democracy. As far as the libertarian is concerned, the welfare state, financed and controlled by private capitalism, is a form of top-down state socialism or national socialism entrenched in bureaucracy. The rank-and-file bourgeoisie may have title to the bulk of it, but they have little control over the great mechanical whales who set the pace and in whose wake small businesses must negotiate for their lives, taking care not to be smashed by the tail end of the artificial creatures they are beholden to. The tiny interlocking minority that owns the monopoly on violence that protects its vested interest is enabled by its executives and its right legislative wing to nickel and dime its own people to death and to trample the weak of other countries with impunity – the power elite would further evade the cost of the political and economic democracy they extol by going offshore to evade the cost of social responsibility in their Great Nation, hence routinely participate in massive abuse of theoretically  inalienable human rights for the sake of profit, including the enslavement of little children.

Of course there are great charitable exceptions taken to the underlying principle of business, which is to do whatever it takes to enhance the bottom line and accumulated untold fortune. That is why modern religion teaches us to hate neither rich nor poor – may the poor cooperate with the rich in hopes of a future payoff, if not in this world, then in the next. To blame the secretive secular gods of business is unjust, in a sense, because common stockholders and political voters are made in their image, and, with few exceptions, voters continue to vote for the same boards and to fund the same projects; projects which more of them might, heaven forbid, protest against if it would do them any good. But capital gains and dividends are wanted, and protest is unprofitable, so we go along with business as usual; we expect elected leaders to remember their biggest donors and to betray the run-of-the-mill voters once they swear the hypocritical oath of office to belay their ideology and campaign promises in order to do as they are bid by their backers, all in the name of the unknown god, The People.  

Nevertheless, it would be absurd to claim that the citizens of the United States live in a historical fascist state such as Fascist Italy or Nazi Germany. Such an attitude would be comparable to the quixotic delusion of the man who fancies he is being whipped in chains because his taxes are 37% of his gross income and the lady with four brats across the street is on welfare. We are not in fact truly "democratic", but we are a relatively free people, and many of us would not trade our kind of freedom for the romance of a holy war or crusade for international democracy – yet we perversely do so when we fund the bloodshed with our tax dollars. We recall the birth of the modern nation in the cauldron of the French Revolution. The Revolutionary government promised to defend all people who rose up against their masters. But many of those people did not want the French freedom, and they resisted accordingly, with their own nations. And the International Communists promised freedom to all as well, and called upon the workers of the world to unite and rise up against their capitalist masters; they did not get the freedom dreamed of: they got brutal repression instead. And the wars went on.

President Woodrow Wilson wanted the Great War to end all wars; he wanted to make the world safe for democracy, and to do so in accord with the will of a world league of nations. The Bush Administration claimed the Wilsonian order as its own; but its "New World Order” differed from the Wilsonian democratic political order: the Bush regime loved big business and despised the assembly of nations:  having decided to wage pre-emptive war on Iraq, the United States virtually spit on the international community coming and going, then fought to impose its order over the sovereign state of Iraq’s dead body, and wound up with a chaotic quagmire on its hands. Of course we still hope for a good outcome from the folly of America’s credulous electorate. We do not want to cut and run; that would especially dishonor the men and women who fought so valiantly there with their chief’s noble words in mind – there is always another hill to be taken and relinquished in order to take another one. Sadly, such a "democratic" military campaign can in fact engender the most repressive new world order of all. We might call it a fascist order. How did such seemingly good intentions pave the way to hell on earth? Perhaps the intentions were not as good as we imagined. Perhaps there was no creed at the top but to exploit, in the legendary fashion of the Venetians, every weakness of the mixed up government in order to further enrich and safeguard the power elite.

Peter Drucker had considerable insight into the mental disposition or spiritual poverty that renders people vulnerable to totalitarian movements such as fascism. He claimed historical fascism was a pathological attitude without a creed. Of course he is correct: neither Nazism nor Italian Fascism had a rational philosophy. Mussolini announced the death of liberalism, the rational humanist consensus developed over centuries of civilization, with such declarations as, "Fascism, which did not fear to call itself reactionary when many liberals of today were prone before the triumphant beast (Democracy), has not today any impediment against declaring itself illiberal and anti-liberal.... Fascism knows no idol, worships no faith; it has once passed, and if needful, will turn to pass again over the more or less decomposed body of the Goddess of Liberty." (Gerarchia, March 1923)

Fascism was indeed anti-intellectual, opposed to abstract rationale, to the reasoning liberalism inherited from the Enlightenment. Fascism was pragmatic, concerned only with "What works", with “action” and the "facts." Whatever works is the right thing to do. But the right thing to do for whom? In 1933, the Comintern defined fascism as "the openly terroristic dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialistic elements of finance capital."

In Fascism in Italy, ‘Sawdust Caesar’. George Seldes wrote: "Liberalism is dead and the Goddess of Liberty is a rotten carcass: the ruling class can no longer make their profits and afford to grant democracy and social reforms. The various imperialisms which have divided the world have left no new markets to conquer, no inferior people to make into slaves and serfs and to produce wealth and absorb the production of superior people. In this world emergency Fascism arose to perpetuate the system of exploitation of its own people as well as those which it would conquer. The Authoritarian State is also the Helot State, the Serf State, for the vast majority outside the reigning hierarchy. Year by year Italy has been returning to the time of serfdom and the feudal overlords."

In Facts and Fascism, (1943), Mr. Seldes laid out the background for the crucial difference between Fascism and Communism at the time; Mussolini, the pragmatic opportunist, failed to recruit unions to Communism, and abruptly veered from Left to Right: "When the factories of Milan and Turin were occupied by the workers, Mussolini held a conference with Bruno Buozzi, who held a place equivalent to that of Sam Gompers in our American Federal of Labor. He proposed using the factory occupation as the beginning of a military movement to seize Rome and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Buozzi indignantly kicked Mussolini out - labor believed in the democratic political processes, and the main proof was that not an act of violence marked the factory seizures, although the press of the world for a month ran daily lies of bloodshed and terrorism. Within a few days Mussolini had sold the same idea to the owners of the occupied factories - only this time the same Blackshirts were to be used to create a dictatorship of Big Business, rather than of workers.... Ollivetti and company put up the money, Mussolini took Rome. And in payment to the subsidizers his first important act was the abolition of all labor unions.... From the day he became dictator Mussolini began paying back the men who paid him in 1920. He abolished the tax on inheritance, for example.... His chief opponent was the Socialist deputy Matteotti. The reason Matteotti had to die was because he committed the one unforgivable crime in a Fascist nation: he exposed the profits in Fascism. There is no program, no policy, no ideology and certainly no philosophy back of Fascism.... It is nothing but a spoils system.... Fascism is a system whereby a handful of ruling families get the entire nation...."

In 2004, military historian and economist Lawrance Lux noted that: “Contemporary fascism is initially funded by wealthy vested interests. Slogans are coined to appeal to middle class values, but are quickly dropped when perceived as conflicting with the desires of the wealthy class. Inheritance taxes are abolished, ostensibly to help out small businesses. Middle class values are touted as superior while the economic base of this same class is deliberately undermined. In a relatively prosperous country, wages are bound to drop and prices and profits will rise as fascism takes its toll; the standard of living shall decline accordingly, as the percentage of wealth held by the few rises. The nation will be incited to war for the aggrandizement of big corporations and their fascist leaders, distracting the populace from the exploitation at home by uniting them in fear and hate – naturally unionism and worker unrest will naturally be condemned as unpatriotic.”

Since fascism has no creed it is difficult to define. At least one should know what it is not. Professor Drucker sought to dispel certain anti-fascist illusions, that racism, violence, and use of mass propaganda and so on are symptoms of fascism, when, as a matter of fact, the same factors can be found effectively employed elsewhere in other social movements, most egregiously in wars and revolutions. After eliminating the aspects that are common to other movements, he was left with what he believed were the three novel differentiating symptoms of fascism:

"1) Fascist totalitarianism has no positive ideology, but confines itself to refuting, fighting, and denying all traditional ideas and ideologies; 2) Fascism not only refuses all old ideas but denies, for the first time in European history, the foundation on which all former political and social systems had been built: the justification of the social and political system and of the authority constituted under it as the only means to further the true well-being of the individual subjected to it; 3) The masses joined fascism not because they believe in its promises, which take the place of a positive creed, but because they do not believe in them" – that is, when enough people despair because of the failure of any rational system to meet their expectations, as a mass they become irrational and expect miracles. People no longer really believe that anything will work, but out of desperation they will follow a charismatic leader anyway, no matter how absurd his statements might be.

Mr. Drucker’s observations are similar to the Catholic and Humanist observations on the effect of the Enlightenment, particularly the empiricism, pragmatism, positivism, and scientism of its later stage just precedent to the romantic reaction, the militant wing of which was led by charismatic Napoleon, Adolph Hitler’s idol, who strove to impose an imperial order to renewed ringing of Catholic church bells. But his singular exercise of force with one end in mind was tainted by the irrational, hence his order would fail. Empiricism, with its faith in experience or what can be “seen” as the only basis of real knowledge, is inherently skeptical of intuitive claims about the Unseen; empiricism’s focus on the particular effects of certain causes is “irrational” in contrast to the romantic line of thinking or moral rationale.  Pragmatism, with its emphasis on “whatever works”, regardless of the rationalization of causes, is also contrary to the continuous pondering associated with metaphysics.

Martin Luther, another charismatic figure idolized by Adolph Hitler, had some time prior set the stage when he threw out the baby with the bathwater; upsetting the carefully contrived, Catholic balance between reason and faith; he claimed that salvation is in faith alone, and then only for a select few, regardless of what they might do; thus did faith eventually become a feel-good religion as people went about their works. Yet Martin Luther was moved by the possibility of irrational chaos to reverse his former antinomian repudiation of the old law, and he called upon the prince to fulfill the law, to “stab and kill” hundreds of thousands of the unruly peasants who had enthusiastically taken up his clamor for reform and converted it into pitchfork protest marches under the biblical rainbow emblem. Thus did the Enlightenment and the Reformation go hand in hand to the dissolution of tradition and the setting up of a new world order according a logic or theory of chaos of its own, an order tending to totalitarian organization.  The poles of the dialectic between collectivism and anarchy, or communism and individualism, meet at the same over-socialized end, and in synthesis differ in name or mental attitude only: in reality all the familiar bonds between organs are severed and nothing stands between the alienated, classless individual and the Total. In total democracy everyone but the power elite shall be gray-faced and earning the minimum living wage, just enough to maintain the power plant.

The notions associated with fascism and its most virulent form, the neo-barbaric socialism called Nazism, were not originally conceived by Mssrs Mussolini and Hitler. Nor is there anything conceptually unique to the non-profit totalitarianism of Stalin. The Italian Fascists and German Nazis are given far too much credit for conducting big corporate business for its essential end – the end of the very competition it professes to love, and the private possession and the total control of “free” markets – an aggrandizement augmented by modern technological means. More than one economist described the goal of the alleged opposition to fascism – capitalism – as the perfection of fascism. No, Mssrs. Mussolini and Hitler did not invent totalitarianism, which despite the profession of freedom by its liberal economic wing is really anti-individualism led, ironically, by an arbitrary individual and facsimiles thereof. Of course it was Carl Schmitt – doctor of jurisprudence and a father to a form of the German “New Conservatism” later embraced by so-called neoconservatives in the United States – who philosophically sanctioned Hitler’s virtual and indefinite suspension of the Weimar Constitution by means of a law ((March 3, 1933 Enabling Act)  enacted for “Removing the Distress of People and Reich.” Wherefore the laws might “deviate from the Constitution.” But not to worry, for the powers of the President would be “undisturbed” and the deviations would not “effect the position of the Reichstag.” To bring the revolution to an end, socialists including unionists would be betrayed and bloodily purged in 1934; yet, in concord with Hitler’s dictum of July 6, 1933, good businessmen would not be dismissed even if they were not National Socialists. Hitler ran amok with the bureaucracy behind him, doing whatever he deemed to be the “right thing to do”, invoking the silence of tyranny by killing naysayers; but every Nazi, many of whom were formerly unemployed, would have something to do; and women were sent home to “do the right thing” as well: to breed more supermen and mothers to run the world rightly. Total control would be necessary “to do the right thing” – “I did the right thing” is a phrase oft repeated by contemporary authoritarian neoconservatives to justify their actions and summarily dismiss objections thereto.

Hitler pointed out on April 11, 1942 that “If man were given complete liberty of action, they would immediately behave like apes…. The eternal mouthings about the communal spirit which brings people together make me smile…. The idea of human solidarity was imposed on men by force, and can be maintained only by the same means.” As for the quibbling lawyers, “Lawyers cannot understand that in exceptional times new laws become valid,” he declared on April 14, 1941. Of course a total war would have to be waged against terrorism – we quote from his December 1, 1942 speech at a conference: “This has to be hammered into everyone’s head, whatever leads to success is right in the conduct of anti-guerilla operations. That’s the point of departure. If someone does something not exactly in accordance with the regulations, but achieves complete success, or if someone is faced by an emergency he can deal with in the most brutal way, he’s entitled to use any measure that promises success. The goal must be the annihilation of these gangs and the restoration of order.”  And more to the point, on July 25, 1943: “Terror can only be broken by terror. One has to counterattack, everything else is nonsense.”

Carl Schmitt elaborated at length on the concept so-called ‘Total.’ The label ‘Total’ took hold; however, the craving for total control was nothing new. Frustrated men have long dreamed of the instantiation of Totalitaria on Earth in one form or other, necessarily ruled by a despot or dictator for the sake of convenience, at least until the divisive resistance to absolute truth is destroyed and the people are ready to embrace true monarchy or democracy. Of course a regime is at its best when its leadership is threatened by challengers; and then it is best led by a single supreme leader, an arbiter of good and evil, a father or fuehrer whose hands are not tied by the law, an imperial presiding officer and commander-in-chief who is willing to tell the necessary lies to unify the factions who would otherwise squander the national energy on productive domestic activities instead of wasting vital resources on wars. Wherefore this decisive leader, as a matter of national honor, must admit to ignoring the polls in the interest of obedience to a higher power than his worldly father, and profess to doing whatever it takes to obtain victorious salvation for the people of the world whether they like it or not. He knows there are objections to his wars, but he “must do the right thing.” That irrational leadership principle was not invented by the leading thinkers of the three German Reichs, but is stated as a principle in the earliest texts – and the principle stated therein is a prehistoric principle. However that might be, Carl Schmitt, who begat Leo Strauss, who begat Paul Wolfowitz, and whose doctrine is embraced by Richard Cheney, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Condaleeza Rice, and other Germanophiles who long for a Holy American Empire or Pax Americanum, attached an “ism” to the decisive arbitrary power, “Decisionism,” – as if the overarching notion were a rational “ideology” instead of the perverse identification of the archon with authoritarian anarchy.

In any case, or so the argument goes, conflict produces higher goods. War is the father of all things including superior moral fiber and academic ethical textiles. The purpose of politics is to identify your enemies and destroy them. Wherefore, America’s neoconservatives would collusively restore the supreme power of the elected emperor of the United States of America, and by the institution of imperial presidency overthrow the revolution within the revolution that spawned the nation. Wherefore let us not presume that fascism is passé, limited to a few hateful skinheads simply because we do not hear the German version of the Roman victory salute (Sieg Heil!) resounding from the White House, aircraft carrier decks, and mess halls; or because our concentration camps, wherein we confine Muslim Semites instead of Jewish Semites, are smaller and much more humane; or because our suspects do not have political states, flags and uniforms, and are therefore called terrorists instead of freedom fighters. No, we must keep history in mind because we are that history, and until we understand that history and thus know ourselves better and fulfill our better selves that we may really become somebody more worthy of knowing, we risk the repeated degradation of our kind, albeit by a more subtle process, until the grinding wheel becomes so overbearing that the race would rather destroy itself in a paroxysm of massive suicide-murder rather than march quietly off to the trenches. 

It is with that tragic possibility in mind and our desire to belay it that we picked up Professor Drucker’s 1939 tome on fascism. Our teacher refuted the idea that fascism was due to the aftermath of the havoc, panic and chaos of the Great War. He points out that democracy survived in France despite its internal disorganization, a disorganization made most evident by the French mutiny of 1918. It would seem that France possessed a power of resistance against a fascistic reaction to the devastating effects of the Great War, a power that Italy did not own. And Mr. Drucker dismissed the standard proposition, that the democratic movement's fall in Germany was the inevitable reaction to the onerous Versailles treaty; quite to the contrary, he argued, a reaction to any such burden would have strengthened bourgeois confidence in the quasi-socialist creed of industrial democracy and democratic self-determination. A vanquished people can pick up the pieces and fashion a liberal democratic state. He said as much in The Frontiers of Management (1986): “The world, especially the developed world, had recovered from repeated catastrophe because ‘ordinary people, people running the everyday concerns of business and institutions, took responsibility and kept on building tomorrow while around them the world came crashing down.’” Well, ordinary people rebuilt Germany into a mighty military machine, but ordinary people did not run it; the most powerful bourgeois eschewed democracy and embraced right-wing authoritarianism. Of course the more democratic victors were reluctant to relinquish the advantages of the centralized authoritarian system that won power over their enemies and the fortunes of war, thus to this day are the freest people in the world subjugated to the interests of the corporate military-industrial-energy complex spawned by world war.

Thanks to Adolph Hitler, many people view fascists as homicidal racists; and they reason wrongly that racism is a main motive for fascistic warmongering. True, some of our modern fascist leaders were blatant racists a few years ago, when they catered to vulgar tastes to get votes even though their mothers had washed their mouths out with soap for their bad taste. But vote-getting required further compromises as the composition of the electorate became more mixed and active. The Encyclopedia Britannica claimed there is no such thing as race, at least not judging from mere color of skin and physiognomy. And now we find, for example, black WASPS in high offices.  Mr. Drucker rejected racism as a necessary attribute of fascism. After all, the persecution of Jews or any other so-called race is not unique to fascism. We might add that primitive wars among humankind were race wars. When the races became hopelessly confused through the intercourse of war, emblems were created to take the place of uniform physical features – flags are more reliable standards than noses. Adolph Hitler invented a race to fight for, and for the sake of war he wound up believing in his lie, and heads were measured with calipers in the corners as the more intelligent Nazis guffawed in private over such nonsense.

“I know perfectly well,” Hitler affirmed in a speech, “that in the scientific sense there is no such thing as race. But you, as a farmer, cannot get your breeding right without the conception of race. And I, as a politician, need a conception which enables the order that has hitherto existed on a historical basis to be abolished, and an entirely new and anti-historic order enforced and given an entirely new and anti-historic order and given an intellectual basis… and for this purpose the conception of race serves me well…. France carried her great revolution beyond her borders with the conception of the nation. With the conception of race, National Socialism will carry its revolution abroad and recast the world!” (Hitler Speaks, Rauschning)

The “pragmatism” and “anti-ideological” stance of our twenty-first century American neoconservatives, supported by the traditional so-called Venetian political conspiracy, to seem to be all things to all people while exploiting everyone’s weaknesses, was nearly perfected by fascists who laid claim to several ideologies while in the next breath declaiming them. And since the public grew accustomed to such contradictions, a speaker did not always have to contradict himself, for his public would automatically assume that he was saying the opposite: for instance, Mussolini publicly denounced liberalism repeatedly, yet a number of liberal intellectuals, much to their eventually embarrassment, declared that he was the most liberal leader the world had ever seen.

Since the Nazis placed might over right and were willing to seize power by any means possible, including regularly contradicting themselves in order to please the crowd, they had plenty of nonsense to laugh about. Mr. Drucker gave several examples from his own experience. Zealous Nazis laughed privately over Hitler's absurd propositions; they even guffawed at his prediction of a Nazi state. During one speech, Goebbels promised that the following would occur simultaneously: the farmer would receive more for his grain; the consumer would pay less for his bread; the baker and grocer would have a higher wholesale and retail margin. And during a speech supporting the metal-workers' strike, Hitler also promised the manufacturers that his pro-labor approach would make them masters of their industry. Although few people actually believed these promises would be kept, enough people from all sides signed up with the Nazis to give Adolph Hitler power over their lives.

Perspicacious people might notice similar widespread contradictions in our society today, with the difference that people today actually believe in both sides of the contradictions at the same time – and it is difficult if not impossible to convince them that a contradiction even exists. It is as if people believe that yes is no and no is yes at once. There is a culture of mass confusion. Still there is a certain intolerance of for ambiguity in Fascist-type persons, and they would rather fight than switch prejudices. Antagonists fight without a traditional platform. They profess inconsistent and self-contradictory ideologies that not only overlap but are meaningless and absurd in themselves, excuses for fighting where there should be no reason to fight. The ideological tags become abstract flags to make war under. And during the battles we observe irrational people praising irrational people as 'perfectly rational' or 'quite logical' as Chaos runs amok and infrastructure is converted to rubble by 500-lb bombs and tank to save people for ground-down individualism.

Today we witness civilization organizing itself into hate-based, self-love groups and hate-based group-mind groups whose alienated integers inwardly loath and despise even the mention of universal love or brotherhood because they have no standard of value besides the magnitude of money accumulated in the economic war of all against all. Nonetheless, the disintegrative culture is spiritually bored with luxury, hence people revert to racial, ethnic, and ideological 'flags' to represent and rally their hate-based love. That is a similar unwholesome state of paranoia, with its delusions of grandeur and persecution, which led to the complete break with history and the embracing of the "beyond good and evil" irrationality culminating in international anarchy and world chaos in 1914. Material poverty was not the cause. The major powers at the time were prospering - Germany was even feeling guilty about its prosperity and fearful for it, and soon got rid of it. That was the prelude to poverty and to the perfection of fascism in national psychosis. And that should be a lesson to those of us who blame the loser for it all and think it could never happen to us. 

Peter Drucker attributed the weakness of democracy and the rise of fascism in Italy and German to the fact that socialism in those countries was introduced from the top down rather than from the bottom up as in a social revolution. Together the leaders of Italy and German would rise up against the effete liberal world; and that was altogether fitting observed Adolph Hitler on July 22, 1941: “It’s remarkable to observe the resemblance between the evolution of Germany and Italy. The creators of the language, Dante and Luther, rose against the ecumenical desire of the papacy. Each of the two nations was led to unity, by one man. They achieved this unity against the will of the Pope. I must say, I always enjoy meeting the Duce.” 

The Weimar Constitution was not a popular creation of a unified, democratically inclined German people. Max Weber, perhaps the most highly respected sociologist in the world today, a German nationalist to his dying day and the very professor who inspired the German youth to wage world war for the aggrandizement of the German nation, nodded approvingly at one leader’s definition of ideal German democracy during the Weimar period; to paraphrase: Elect a leader, shut up and get out of the way. Even Hitler, when it suited his purpose, used the glittering catchword, “democracy.” In  any event, indignant Germans remained a proud and militant people despite the terrible humiliation of the unified German states by the great powers. And as an authoritarian people they were an obedient people long accustomed to the leadership principle; the people wanted a father; the leaders wanted the fatherland back; the socialists and democrats must go; the only form of acceptable socialism would be the Nazi version of national socialism. The offices of President and Chancellor were combined on August 1, 1934, the day before President Hindenburg died. Hitler would be called Fuehrer and Reich Chancellor when he assumed office; a new oath of allegiance would be taken by the nation’s servicemen:

”I swear by God this sacred oath, that I will render unconditional obedience to Adolph Hitler, the Fuehrer of the German Reich and people, Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces, and will be ready as a brave soldier to risk my life at any time for this oath.”

Adolph Hitler thought the bourgeois were stupid for thinking intelligent people like himself should yield to the logic of organized greed. Everybody, especially the bourgeoisie, hated the bourgeoisie in those days. “The bourgeois parties carried their stupidity so far as to claim that it’s the more intelligent who should yield,” noted Mr. Hitler. And, “One may well exclaim: Cowardice, thy name is bourgeoisie!” So much for the money-grubbing middle-class! Yet fascist nations do not repudiate the profit principle and private property, although they do tend to put the national business before the people’s business, or “This Great Nation of Ours” before “Our Democracy,” thus big business is moved to provide massive support for the war aims of the power elite who rally around the dictator and flag of the apotheosized nation.  Mr. Drucker noted that the so-called proletariat or working people who support the parasitic elite never gained key positions at the helms of the fascist states. The socialists and democrats were not all boot-lickers. We recall that Bismarck implemented socialist programs to avert revolution; soon thereafter, the militarists, with industrialists in tow, turned Germany outward in a paranoid reaction to encirclement, hence socialism was for the nation, not the other way around, thus under national socialism the Germanic society was conceived as an individual, a national person whose end was to conquer the world for its own good and further turn it to his almighty aggrandizement; to that imperial end a Teutonic prince of war, or, in Italy, a Roman prince, would have to embody the national person. Hence it was with good reason that Mr. Drucker observed that national-socialist unity had a romantic, mythical appeal, whereas the abstract bourgeois promises of economic progress did not.

"The great experience in the nineteenth century in Italy and Germany which attracted the emotional and sentimental attachment of the masses was not the victory of the bourgeois order but national unification. The revolutionary movements were primarily accepted as a means toward national unification. The wars were fought and the sacrifices of blood were made for national unity. The bourgeois order was primarily accepted as a means toward national unification. The bourgeois order had no sentimental appeal; their strength lay in their social promise and substance."

Indeed, we may attribute the rise of the fascist spirit to widespread disappointment with the bourgeois promises of liberal capitalism, attended by demon war and demon depression, and to disappointment with the remedy prescribed to cure those very ills, international communism, a fiercely moral stance also fixated on mundane objectives but which is greedy for a more equitable distribution of the product. Man may be an economic animal, yet materialism smacks of the grave; he would avoid that fate by exalting mind over matter and spirit over mind if reason be failing him. Even during times of relative prosperity, economic determinism, whether loosely guided by the invisible hand of atheism or forcibly directed by the supreme dictator's hand, has little sentimental appeal in the long run. Therefore matter must go: It is as if humankind had some sort of built-in death wish to tear its house down, to destroy its foundation and start from scratch that the race might thrive on its own compost. Of course liberal thinkers do not believe in instincts, particularly the death instinct, and attribute human misbehavior to conditioning. For instance, Alice Miller attributes Adolph Hitler’s sociopathic conduct to child abuse; he got even for his father’s alleged abuse and lived up to his father’s standard by beating up his young German nation – like father like son.

The Second World War buried the alleged virtues of nationalism – the exalted patriotic virtues of the political apotheoses were seen to be vices when realized. But yet again and more recently the microeconomic application of the dismal science to winning one’s daily bread had became too boring to withstand: the divisive members of the United States Congress, widely viewed by U.S. voters as a sort of national whorehouse run by the Mob, set aside their differences and in fearful unison welcomed a pretext for war to relieve the anxiety of the internal economic war of all against all. As the bombs burst in the air under the rockets’ red glare, patriots cried with joy that the nation had been made whole again; indeed, the nation rejoiced as its awesome shock troops went forth in a great blitzkrieg, a lighting-strike offensive invented by Frederick the Great – he  lost quite a few battles but was fortunate in the end. The United States Commander-in-Chief said he answered only to his Heavenly Father as he led the Holy Crusade, from his high office in the rear, to save the world for American-style democracy and American-style corporate business. Protesters in his own country were kept out of sight as he invoked the Führerprinzip or leadership principle of “doing the right thing”, whether the recalcitrant world likes it or not – therefore never mind the protest banner carried by the veiled Muslim woman: “Democracy Go To Hell!”

We wished the Teutonic chief cared more for Mom and Apple Pie.

Our great leader is all too human; to be a homo sapiens or generic wise man one must also be more or less of a moron, in the old sense of being a fool. But are we the People really that excited by the spirit of heavenly freedom over worldly matter that we would destroy the world? Do we really place national unity first today, ahead of the bourgeois order? Does the economy really follow the flag, perchance to the decline and fall of both? What about the proletariat, once known in its imagined unity as Labor? Well, the proletariat is really a mythical class, although the myth is conveniently employed at times. The myth of the proletariat has been largely replaced by the myth of the entrepreneur and the myth of the professional team player; everyone is advised to think like entrepreneurs if not like winning team players. In any case, welcome to the reign of organized greed – alas for the bulging-belly bourgeoisie, who eventually will be squeezed out of their bottom dollars and shall have to start all over again, as the liberals they should have remained when threatened with liberal programs.

In any event a higher cause is needed, a spiritual cause in which one can fulfill the want of personal glory and justification for professional piracy abroad as in the days of yore; a fulfillment even more direly needed now that domestic laws prohibit the beating of wives and children at home. But does the holy flag really take priority over the economic interest simply because it is held aloft? How can any sane person pledge allegiance to a mere flag? Flags take on a fascistic hue when flown over the rubble of the military workplaces, the battlefields – the minimalist Star of David and the Swastika evoke a similar feeling, of revulsion, as if the Jews, who now wage mechanical war on ghettos, have become their own worst enemies. Americans can thank their lucky stars for the more complex Stars and Stripes, but have the Christians become their own worst enemies, Romans? In any case, the flag of the United States, the most religious apotheosized country in the world, must be placed under the invisible almighty god, and the name of the deity must be pronounced even more often in political congress than in church. Clever references to the invisible god and contradictory scripture can justify any course of action; the absurdities are so-called God’s mysteries. A first cause or uncaused cause is inexplicable and may be effectively employed to justify a priori any course of action and condone any effects whatsoever. Absent authoritarian religion, ignorant people might misbehave, thus did atheists enthusiastically recall religion to Revolutionary France, for reasoning flew over the heads of the illiterate majority – in Paris, illiterate marchers had waved copies of Rousseau’s Social Contract over their head.

It appears that the power elite of "advanced" nations place the top-heavy financial order above the national interest which they exploit for capital accumulation and the compound growth in value of their tremendous holdings, not to mention multimillion-dollar annual incomes and vast fringe benefits. Above all, “the business of the nation is business.” Of course compromises had to be made along the way, so that the privileged elite might run herd over the order established largely for their benefit. The principle doctrine, or rather anti-doctrine, is sociopathic competition rather than social cooperation. We might say, at the risk of committing the mortal sin of offending the wrong people, that our country has fallen prey to corporate board tribalism presided over by the forces of darkness. But we shall not say that; instead, we shall say something to the effect that our system is sick, that many of its owners and operators are mentally ill and in need of therapy appropriate to their condition. The symptom of course is fascism. Again, Mr. Drucker, our professor of human dignity in the workplace, defined fascism as a pathological socio-psychological attitude.  He calls for the restoration of personal dignity, for putting labor over capital or man over matter. So did the late pope, John Paul, who was a devout personalist, and to whom both communism and capitalism was anathema. And we certainly believe remedial action should be taken to recover the social consensus destroyed by the neobarbarians during the so-called Reign of Greed. We espouse welfare capitalism because when capital is responsible for the welfare of its human resource, both capital and labor shall thrive on our national treasury, the land.  For that we are called “liberals” in the derogatory sense, and further defamed from time to time by narrow application of the tag “socialists.”

During periods of relative prosperity, socialism is hardly a danger to a mutually exploitative system, a demoralizing system based on the distracting war of all against all. Still there is a good deal of cooperation and democratic socialism among the elite at the top of the heap, where corporate board tribalism would fain collude with forces of darkness shadowing the congressional, judicial and executive departments. When the Animal Kingdom’s Suidae faction is threatened, the alarms are sounded to frighten herd and flock and troop; the Nation is pressed forward, and the representatives of the privileged elite stand up and with lowered heads give thanks for the "unity" of the Nation - is it not wonderful to be united in hate? –instead of United States of America we have the United Hates of America. Instead of unadulterated love we have hate-based-love, or group-love based on hatred of other groups – of course we do not hate the collaterally damaged persons we terrorize, maim and kill: we hate the regime or life style we would save them from in order that our lifestyle might prevail throughout the world.  We have recently heard many rapturous speeches in Congress about this hate-based unity.

Both fascism and so-called democracy put the concept of the nation before the economic label in war because that mental idol is convenient to the profitable conduct of war. Ironically, the greatest and most broadly distributed war profits are to be had in peace; thus do we believe that real war might be deferred indefinitely when this lesson is learned.  Notwithstanding the supposed improvement in moral fiber by havoc and panic, everyone concerned loses in times of war regardless of who is victorious on the battlefields. The war is lost when it is begun. No general true to his science would want to actually wage a war: he would rather have the other side back off and stand down. Yet maintaining a constant threat of war between wars is very profitable for the parasites who feed off the military-industrial-energy complex. Instead of rattling sabers, the generals of a mighty nation might dissuade the generals of a potentially belligerent nation from war by giving them a tour of their mighty arsenal, and while doing so strike up a friendly alliance. Eventually we might hope for a reversion to the mock wars of Africa and Italy, military exercises with few or no casualties. We would have more political-economic democracy to boot. True, the mock war system of the Africans and the mercenary war system of the Italians left them weak and vulnerable – arsenals of cruise missiles with nuclear warheads would have come in handy in those days, just in case. 

In any case, very little democracy is found in the nation constantly preparing for war, although the distractions of consumption might divert the producer from his subservience to the machine and thus provide him with an alienated or anxious sense of freedom; the anxiety to be temporarily relieved in his freedom of choice – to buy (this) or to buy (that). There is some truth in the maxim that war is the father of all things – many of our technological advances including the structure of the political system were conceived in wartime. Gigantic military organization as well as its colossal creature, the bourgeois corporate organization, is in fact a totalitarian command-structure whose commanders have little genuine respect for the ideally rational, autonomous, and free human being as an end in self. Thus do we hear people oppressed by the indignities of the corporate workplace complaining about the "corporate fascists." We also may not like the corporate work environment, but we might believe it is a necessary evil because there is no alternative, hence we believe that the clamoring anti-corporatists and so-called anarchists are immature or hysterical; as for fascism, they do not have the faintest idea of what “fascism” is, for we, who have lost our loved ones and who have dug up the trenches, normally associate fascism with the horrors of war, with racist death camps and so on.

The greatest danger to the very freedom people believe they fight for is in fact war. The requirements of modern warfare impose a hostile yet productive organization on civilian society that is maintained during times of peace by victors and is often established among the vanquished during highly profitable reconstruction. The undemocratic, top-down authoritarian, for-profit corporate structure may be called, loosely speaking, a “fascist” type of organization, since fascism refers to right-wing authoritarian systems. Fascism as a political phenomenon gives precedence to anti-individualist totalitarian politics over economics, but we see little difference when business is on top of politics in the marriage, when so many people must prostitute their souls and spend the most of their lives as zombies, obeying the dictates of business, in order to survive. Mr. Drucker was alarmed by the centralized government and burgeoning bureaucratic ineptitude. And in its more democratic effort to be all things to all people, the government had become much too big by the Fifties. Therefore he recommended that some government functions be outsourced. But government regulation should not be abandoned, for the rise of global businesses required stronger governments and strong social institutions, including more powerful unions, as a counterbalance, to keep them from neglected and subverting social interests.

Professor Drucker had high hopes for a brighter future for business corporations. After all, a business corporation does not have to be a fascist establishment: it can be a democratic organization, one that advances the self-development of the worker as a relatively autonomous, free, and rational human being instead of an obedient goal-driven drone. If the economic motive or drive is a main cause of war, as is suspected, corporations may serve to sublimate that drive and harness its energy to more useful ends. The process might not be a thrilling as organized mass terrorism and suicide-murder, but peaceful work in accord with personal dignity has its joys. Democratic corporate leaders lead by following: they reach an agreement with followers on mutual goals and then get out of the way or help them to achieve their goals. The popular Drucker Management Theory, an alternative to the fascist attitude, addresses the whole person in the context of the workplace as a community center or social mode of action. Thus he espoused a more democratic approach, one that respects and empowers the person and allows for the bottom-up flow of information. Naturally, the Drucker approach is still manipulative, but the worker is both means and end, hence this treatment is certainly more conducive to the personal welfare of everyone concerned. In his opinion, management could achieve sustainable profits only by treating employees like valuable resources instead of costly means. That, he argued, required decentralizing the power to make decisions, including giving hourly workers more control over factory life, and guaranteed wages.

Despite its popularity among progressive business bureaucrats and welfare capitalists, Mr. Drucker's method is not widely practiced in the United States. It enjoyed broad popularity in Japan, where it was roundly denounced by Western political-economists who have convinced Japanese leaders to dismantle it, to disband humane welfare capitalism for strictly economic motives; of course the economic doctrinaires pay "long-term advantage" lip-service to the social welfare, enjoining the Japanese to make some immediate painful adjustments for the sake of same, because the Other World, New World Order made to the order of the power elite United States of America, is presumably the Better Place to be. We disagree with the approach of these dismal economic ideologues. We call for a renascence of the true bottom line of humane being. The list of moral actions to be taken to that end is long and well worth performing. For example, we can sell more Girl Scout cookies. Professor Drucker took a great interest in the non-profit sector towards the end. He urged the Girl Scouts to think of the bottom line in terms of “changed lives” instead of profits.