On the economic roots of imperialism, Hilferding and 'the stability of capitalism'

NEWS & LETTERS, JULY 2003 From the Writings of Raya Dunayevskaya: Marxist-Humanist Archives EDITOR'S NOTE After the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq this year, revolutionaries are discussing imperialism in the age of state-capitalism and ways to challenge it. It is a central topic in the Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives (see "II. State-capitalism and imperialism"). For that reason, we reprint part of a letter from Raya Dunayevskaya to C.L.R. James, of March 2, 1951. In it Dunayevskaya discusses, critically, the Marxist theories of imperialism in the first generation after Marx. The letter has been edited for publication and the title and notes are the editors'. The original is in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, 9291-98. * * * We must now tie up the intelligentsia and the labor bureaucracy with the Plan. Thus far we have not done so concretely enough. We spoke of the Plan as the enemy, but we did not split the category of planners into a strict relation to the specific epoch for which they planned. We spoke of the labor bureaucracy as the same nature as Stalinism, both resulting from the stage of state-capitalism, but no internal connection flowed from all of this. Not in any truly concrete sense. So I will now split up that category [of] planners and see whether we can get closer to the internal logic. With the end of classical political economy we have the first planner appearing in Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi. He tried to stop the march of industry, of constant capital outdistancing variable capital. Thus the doubts of bourgeois classicism got embodied in a bourgeois representative.(1) The doubts grow with the “unconscious” development of capitalist production, and petty-bourgeois socialism appears--first in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with his BANK aid program, and then with Ferdinand Lassalle, with his demand for STATE aid to “cooperative production societies.” The opposite of their intentions is thus clearly seen in their program, for in truth each tries to be a better bourgeois than the bourgeoisie itself--one by “abolishing” money but all wrapped up in the fetishism of commodities [Proudhon], the other by “extending” cooperation and all wrapped up with the fetishism of the state as some sort of classless arbiter [Lassalle].(2) Proudhon is the last of the representatives of the epoch of competitive capitalism.  Lassalle is the anticipator of monopoly capitalism (that’s really what HIS cooperative form of labor is), or more precisely yet, the statification of industry AND of life. Both are rejected by the further development of capitalism. With the transformation of competitive into monopoly capitalism, the BOURGEOISIE itself becomes the planners and the results of their planning are: trusts, international cartels, IMPERIALISM. The new petty-bourgeoisie strata--which has also been transformed into its opposite, from the laisse-faire small grocery man into the ADMINISTRATIVE CLERK of the trusts--begins to ask for a saner “policy.” But these are much [less] dangerous than the Proudhons and Lassalles, for the very development of capitalism so engulfs them, they do not even know the “vocabulary” of the proletariat, and the latter does not listen to them at all. The real danger comes from WITHIN scientific socialism--Rudolf Hilferding(3), the orthodox [Marxist], not Eduard Bernstein(4), the revisionist. Hilferding sees the new stage of capitalism in its financial razzle-dazzle appearance and becomes enamored of its capacity to “unify” commercial, industrial, and financial interests [instead of being] concretely aware of the greater contradictions and antagonisms of the new monopoly stage of capitalism. I wish to stress the seeming orthodoxy of Hilferding. No one, absolutely no one--not the firebrand Rosa Luxemburg, nor the strict realist V.I. Lenin, and I dare say not Hilferding himself--knew that what he was doing with his theory of finance capitalism was bringing in the first theory of retrogressionism [into Marxism]....Even with over four decades of hindsight, and much, hard thinking on the subject, I have first now realized that what Hilferding was SEEING and analyzing (and it took Nikolai Bukharin’s theory of the transition period to bring it home to me)(5) was the STABILITY OF CAPITALISM. Watch the orthodoxy though: Hilferding is proposing no revisionism. The automatic fall of capitalism is still expected and the inevitability of socialism in a mechanistic sort of way is also held to tightly. BUT rather than seeing monopoly as a transition into opposite of a previous stage, monopoly is treated more like simple large-scale production. THAT IS THE KEY. For if it is not a transition into opposite of a fundamental attribute of capitalism, then CAPITALISM’S ORGANIZATION and centralization, monopolization’s appearance as the “emergence of SOCIAL control”...is in fact superseded socialism. Or more precisely, [Hilferding] retrogresses back to home base: the equilibrium of capitalist production. By viewing the whole development of trusts and cartels not from within the factory, but from “society,” that is, the market, Marx’s general law of capitalist accumulation--the DEGRADATION of the proletariat along with capitalist accumulation--has no meaning for Hilferding. Neither does Marx’s postulate “private production without the control of private property” make any imprint on Hilferding.(6) And of course labor remains a unity; there is not any inkling of an aristocracy of labor arising out of the monopolization and degradation and imperialism. You must remember that even with the outbreak of World War I, but before Lenin did his own analysis [of imperialism in 1915], he introduced Bukharin’s WORLD ECONOMY AND IMPERIALISM which said pretty much the same thing as Hilferding. All this I want to repeat again and again in order to emphasize the orthodoxy, in order to show that [even when] all the formulae are adhered to the loss of revolutionary perspective not yet in a positive way but in the negative of awe before the EXISTENT, continued capitalism can be very, very deceiving. If it was [deceiving] to Lenin we better watch it all the time. What in truth emerges from a close study of Hilferding...is that the new generation of Marxists following Engels’ death [in 1895], placed within growing, centralized production, SAW MONOPOLY NOT AS A FETER BUT RATHER AS AN ORGANIZING FORCE OF PRODUCTION. So that the Second International, which had openly rejected Bernsteinism and gradualness, accepted Hilferdingism. That meant tacit acceptance of the capacity of capital to gain a certain “stability,” to modify its anarchism as a “constant” feature. They saw in [this] new stage not a TRANSITION to a higher form, but something in itself already higher, although “bad.” Now the person who made this all clear to me was Bukharin, that logical extension of Hilferding, blown into the THEORY of counter-revolution right within the first workers’ state. It is to him that we must turn. Here too for our generation it is correct to view him with hindsight, precisely because his is “only” theory that will become full-blown actual counter-revolution with Stalin supplying it an objective base. Keep in mind therefore the three actual stages of capitalist production for the three decades since the publication of Bukharin’s ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD: l) 1920-30: Taylorism plus Fordism, that is, the discovery of the [assembly] belt line and with it the necessity for a fascistic order in the factory. It may be “vulgar” to call gangsters part of the intelligentsia, but that is the genuine face of “social control” when the masses themselves do not control [production]. Marx’s view of the planned despotism plus the industrial ARMY of managers, foreman, etc. has moved from theory to such EVERYDAY practice that every worker knows it in his bones; he needs no ghost come from the grave to tell him THAT.... 2) 1930-40: General crisis; New Dealism where “everybody” allegedly administers, and fascism where openly only the elite do, both in mortal combat with the CIO and the general sit-down strikes (which made a true joke of private property) for “social control.” Plan, plan, plans: National Five-Year Plans in Russia, Germany, Japan; John Maynard Keynes, the New Deal, technocracy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, public works. 3) 1940-50: Monopolization has been transformed into its opposite, statification. (What greater scope for a modern Moliere, to take those weighty volumes of the Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC)(7) proving monopolization and how strangling it is, and then on the eve of World War II they are finally published in full, prefaced by a call for full mobilization which shows that monopolization plus Hitlerism is child’s play as compared to American statification.) End of World War II, “end” of fascism and state-private-monopoly rule. Complete state-capitalism reaching its tentacles from Russia into Eastern Europe, engulfing Britain, seeping into Western Europe and peering out of the U.S. TOTAL, GLOBAL PLANS: Marshall, Molotov, Monnet, Schumann, Truman’s Point 4.(8) Keynes is dead; long live the state plan. The intelligentsia in Russia, the Social Democratic labor bureaucracy elsewhere, all in mortal combat with the Resistance, with the Warsaw [uprising](9), with general strikes and colonial revolutions. One strangles the revolution “for” the masses’ own good, and the other for “democracy’s” shadow. NOTES 1. Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi (1773-1842) was an early critic of industrialism. His NEW PRINCIPLES OF POLICTICAL ECONOMY (1819) proposed state regulation of the economy in order to create a balance between production and consumption. Karl Marx made critical notes on Sismondi in 1844. 2. For more on Proudhon (1809-65), a founder of anarchism, and on Lassalle (1825-69), whom Marx called a future worker’s dictator, and several others noted here, see Dunayevskaya’s MARXISM AND FREEDOM, FROM 1776 UNTIL TODAY. 3. Rudolf Hilferding (1877-1941) was a leading theoretician of the “orthodox Marxist” Second International. He is best known for FINANCE CAPITAL, which argued that the influence of banks over industry led to monopolies and consequently to imperialism. He opposed the German Social-Democrats’ vote for war credits in 1914, though he took a centrist position as a leader of the Independent Social-Democratic Party. In 1923 and 1928 he served as Finance Minister in two German Social-Democratic governments. He was murdered by the Nazis in Paris in 1941. 4. Eduard Bernstein (1850-1932) was the founder of revisionist Marxism who rejected the notion of the inevitable collapse of capitalism and the seizure of power by the proletariat. 5. Nikolai Bukharin (1888-1938) was a leading theoretician of the Russian Bolsheviks. He wrote ECONOMICS OF THE TRANSITIONAL PERIOD in 1920. Though Stalin utilized some of ideas in his rise to power, Bukharin was executed on Stalin’s orders in 1938. 6. This is probably a paraphrase of Marx’s comment that the concentration and centralization of capital leads to “the abolition of the capitalist mode of production within the mode of capitalism itself....It is private production unchecked by private ownership” See CAPITAL, Vol. III, trans. by David Fernbach (New York: Vintage, 1981), p. 569. 7. The Temporary National Economic Committee (TNEC) reports were a series of studies commissioned by Congress which studied the concentration of economic power in the U.S. economy. 8. General George Marshall was the U.S. Secretary of State under Truman who devised the Marshall Plan for the recovery of Europe after World War II. V. M. Molotov (1890-1986) was Soviet Foreign Minister from 1939-49 and 1953-56.  Jean Monnet (1888-1979) headed French economic planning after World War II and was a guiding force in the creation of the European Common Market, the precursor of the European Union. Robert Schumann (1886-1963), French Foreign Minister during the late 1940s and early 1950s, devised the Schumann Plan in 1950 to place French and German coal and steel production under a single joint authority. This later became the foundation of the Common Market. Truman’s Point 4, unveiled in 1949, was an effort to “combat Communism” by promising aid to underdeveloped nations. 9. This refers to the Polish uprising against the Nazis in Warsaw in 1944. Though the Russian army was outside Warsaw at the time, Stalin refused to extend any aid to the uprising and allowed the Nazis to crush it.

Raya Dunayevskaya

The Decline in the Rate of Profi
and The Theory of Crises

(1947)

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Editor’s Note: This discussion by Raya Dunayevskaya of Marx’s critique of capitalist production consists of excerpts from the first draft of what became her first book, MARXISM AND FREEDOM – a manuscript entitled State-Capitalism and Marxism, written in 1947. The original can be found in THE RAYA DUNAYEVSKAYA COLLECTION, microfilm no. 472.
Proofed & corrected: Dawn Gaitis, 2006.

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Volume III [of Capital], which deals with the phenomena of capitalism in their concrete movements, is the one which is preferred by present-day academic economists. These tell us that it is only from this vantage point, where Marx deals with prices and profits, that one can understand Volume I where he deals only in abstractions: value and surplus value. MARX’S POINT WAS THE EXACT OPPOSITE. He maintained that once you understand the law of surplus value, the law of profit would present no difficulty; if you reversed the process, you could understand neither the one nor the other.

It is true that Volume III is Marx’s nearest approximation to the real world. Commodities are seen to exchange not at value, but at prices of production, that is, cost of production plus average rate of profit. Furthermore, surplus value does not remain an abstract mass of congealed unpaid labor, but assumes the palpable shape of profit, interest and rent – all in the form of liquid capital. The merchant and his middleman’s profit and the financier and his transactions and credit manipulations all come to life. What, however, is lost sight of by those who think that this shows that in Volume III common sense has triumphed over the Hegelian mysticism of Volume I, is that none of the laws enunciated in the latter is abrogated in the former. The laws, modified in their actual operation, may not, through the intervention of counteracting tendencies, ever reach their ultimate limit, but none of these laws is controverted.
Surplus value remains a GIVEN magnitude, the congelation of so many unpaid hours of labor, which serves as the straitjacket of capitalists, which they cannot get out of by any market manipulations. All that competition can accomplish is to effect a general rate of profit, a sort of “capitalist communism” which assures that all capitals of given magnitudes receive corresponding shares of the total surplus value.
The transformation of the rate of surplus value into the rate of profit is merely the expression of the ratio of surplus value to total, instead of only to variable, capital. But this in no way changes the law of surplus value, which is that only living labor is creative of surplus value. Individual prices oscillate above or below value, but, in their totality, all prices are equal to all values. Monopoly also brings a modification into the operation of the average rate of profit, but that is not the dominant law of capitalist production.
The dominant law of capitalist production – and the heart of Volume III – is the Law of the Falling Tendency of the Rate of Profit. Marx considered the theory of the declining rate of profit the “PONS ASINI” of the whole of political economy, that which divides one theoretic system from another.
The constant revolutions in production and the constant expansion of constant capital necessitate, of course, an extension of the market. But the enlargement of the market in a capitalist nation has very precise limits. The consumption goods of a capitalist nation are limited by the luxuries of the capitalists and the necessities of the workers when paid at value. The market for consumption goods is just sufficient to allow the capitalist to continue his search for greater value. IT CANNOT BE LARGER.
This is the supreme manifestation of Marx’s simplifying assumption that the worker is paid at value. The innermost cause of crises, according to Marx, is that labor power IN THE PROCESS OF PRODUCTION AND NOT IN THE MARKET, creates a value greater than it itself is. The worker is a producer of overproduction. It cannot be otherwise in a value-producing society where the means of consumption, being but a moment in the reproduction of labor power, cannot be bigger than the needs of capital for labor power. This is the fatal defect of capitalist production. On the one hand, the capitalist must increase his market. On the other hand, it cannot be larger. This is what Marx calls THE GENERAL LAW OF CAPITALISM which cannot be overcome other than by the abrogation of the law of value.
The only “market” that enlarges beyond the limits of the working population paid at value is the capital market. But there too the constant technological revolutions make the time necessary to REPRODUCE a product tomorrow less than the time to PRODUCE it today. Hence there comes a time when all commodities, including labor power, are “overpaid.”
The crisis that follows is not caused by a shortage of “effective demand.” On the contrary, it is the crisis that causes a shortage of “effective demand.” The worker employed yesterday has become unemployed today. A crisis occurs not because there has been a scarcity of markets – the market is largest just before the crisis – but because FROM THE CAPITALIST VIEWPOINT there is occurring an unsatisfactory distribution of “income” between recipients of wages and those of surplus value or profits. The capitalist decreases his investments and the resulting stagnation of production appears as overproduction. Of course, there is a contradiction between production and consumption. Of course there is the “inability to sell.” But that “inability to sell” manifests itself as such BECAUSE OF THE FUNDAMENTAL ANTECEDENT DECLINE IN THE RATE OF PROFIT WHICH HAS NOTHING WHATEVER TO DO WITH THE INABILITY TO SELL. The decline in the rate of profit, which proves that capitalist production creates a barrier to its own further development, is what causes competition, not vice versa.
The law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit is the expression of the law of value under the most advanced conditions of capitalist production. Under these conditions the ever greater preponderance of dead over living labor brings about such a falling relation of surplus value to total capital that a day might come when, even if the capitalist could appropriate all 24 hours of labor of the EMPLOYED army, and the laborers lived on air, the capitalist could not get SUFFICIENT surplus value to run the mammoth capitalist machine on an ever-expanding scale. The general contradiction of capitalism thus reaffirms the three principal facts of capitalist production: (1) decline in the rate of profit, (2) deeper and deeper crises, and (3) a greater and greater unemployed army.
Today, when we see the fruition of the most abstract postulates of Marx – the concentration of capital in the hands of one single capitalist or one single capitalist corporation – we can see that the absolute limit of development of the law of centralization and concentration of capital has in no way been able to solve the problem of crises and the declining rate of profit. The given single capitalist society remains dominated by the law of value, the law of the world market, having its origin in technological revolutions no matter where they originate. Atomic energy may be the secret discovery of the United States. But Russia must follow suit or perish ...
One section of Theories of Surplus Value, entitled Accumulation of Capital and Crises ... is of particular pertinence to today’s discussion. ... Marx’s critique of Malthus, for example, is also the answer to the underconsumptionists of today.

“The only merit of Malthus,” wrote Marx in 1865, “is that he emphasized the uneven exchange between capital and labor. This merit is negated thanks to his confusion between the determination of value (VERWERTUNG) of money or commodity AS CAPITAL with the value (WERT) of the commodity as such ...

“The condition of overproduction is the general law of production of capital: production proceeds in accordance with the productive forces...and disregards the existing limits of the market, effective demand...besides, the mass of producers is limited and, because of the nature of capitalist production, must always remain limited ...”

In contrasting classical political economy with “vulgar” economics, Marx comes to conclusions which cannot be overestimated for our day. He contends that finance capital theorists are so far removed from the direct process of production, live so fully in the fetishistic realm of interest, that they have produced theories of money and credit which are nothing short of “a fiction without fantasy.”
The fact that this very important work has been wholly neglected in the United States by Marxists and non-Marxists alike does not lessen, but heightens, the interest in it by scholars and the public alike.

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Dunayevskaya Archive

Last updated on 10 June 2017

Marx @ 200: Debating Capitalism & Perspectives for the Future of Radical Theory

Lara Monticelli

Christian Fuchs

The special issue features a debate between David Harvey & Michael Hardt/Toni Negri on the relevance of Marx today, contributions by Silvia Federici on feminism and Marxism, Slavoj Žižek on the future of radical change, Erik Olin Wright on the necessity to transcend capitalism, Lara Monticelli on alternatives to capitalism and prefigurative social movements, Christian Fuchs on Marxian theory of communication and many other excellent contributions  as well as the first English translation of a text by Rosa Luxemburg on Karl Marx and a review of Sven-Eric Liedman's new Marx-biography.

All articles are freely downloadable, and you can also download a single PDF file containing all the contributions from the link above.

With contributions by : David Harvey, Michael Hardt/Toni Negri, Christian Fuchs, Silvia Federici, Slavoj Žižek, Erik Olin Wright, Lara Monticelli, Friederike Beier, Wayne Hope, Todd Wolfson & Peter Funke, Joss Hands, Peter McLaren & Petar Jandrić, Ingo Schmidt, Bahar Kayıhan, Joff P.N. Bradley & Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, Paul O'Connell, Chihab El Khachab, Franklin Dmitryev & Eugene Gogol, Bryant William Sculos, Leila Salim Leal, Paul Reynolds, Ben Whitham, Rosa Luxemburg.

To what extent did the Abwehr contribute to the downfall of the National Socialist regime?

https://www.academia.edu/33590686/Fighting_to_Lose_The_German_Intelligence_Service_i

"To what extent did the Abwehr contribute to the downfall of the National Socialist regime?"

Juliet Armstrong

This paper explores the various ways in which the Abwehr, led by Admiral Canaris during  the years 1935-44, may have contributed to the fall of the National Socialist regime in Germany.

The conspiracy against the National Socialists varied throughout the extent of the regime's control over Germany and the Third Reich, but it has often been thought that the Abwehr provided a vital and constant role during the war years as a shield for the military conspiracy against the regime, yet were inefficient and ineffectual as regards their role within the resistance movement.

From a re-evaluation of the available sources and historiography, this paper concludes that, although the Abwehr was useful as a shield and may indirectly have led to the assassination of Heydrich, its primary contribution to the resistance and hence to the compromising of the regime was to staff its ranks with anti-Nazis, legally designated 'undesirables' and incompetents, in addition to not being totally efficient as a result of disloyalty to the regime. This deprived the National Socialist war effort of an extremely valuable tool for the waging of war. In comparison with the role the British intelligence services played for the Allied war effort during the war, the Abwehr did the National Socialist regime a great disservice by acting in this way and thus did contribute to the downfall of the regime, even though the conspiracy in which they were involved failed to do so directly itself.

Although there is a lack of available documentation due to the nature of conspiracy, the arrest of key figures and circumstance at the end of the war, evaluations have been drawn from the information available to provide the afore-mentioned conclusions.

Forgotten lives: the role of Anna, Ol'ga and Mariia Ul'ianova in the Russian revolution 1864-1937. 

PhD thesis. Turton, Katy (2004) 

ABSTRACT
Anna, Ol'ga and Mariia Ul'ianova hold a place in history as Lenin's
sisters, his supporters and helpers, but they played a far greater role in the
Russian revolution and the Soviet regime as revolutionaries and Bolsheviks in
their own right. However, this aspect of their lives has been consistently
overlooked by English-language historians for decades. This thesis aims to
redress this imbalanced portrayal of the UI'ianov women. Although not solely
biographical in nature, it traces Anna, Ol'ga and Mariia's lives from their
childhood and education, through their work in the underground revolutionary
movement to their careers in the Soviet regime. It also investigates the
personality cults that arose around the UI'ianov women and their portrayal in
history since their deaths to the present day. The thesis uses extensive
unpublished primary documents from the RGASPI and GARF archives in
Moscow and contemporary publications such as Pravda and Proletarskaia
revoliutsiia to build a picture of Anna, Ol'ga and Mariia's lives and to interrogate
secondary sources about the sisters.
The thesis draws various conclusions about the Ul'ianov women. 01' ga
died when she was twenty, so she features only in two chapters of the thesis.
Nonetheless it is clear that like Anna and Mariia she was an intelligent and
 welleducated young woman, who devoted herself to the study of revolutionary ideas.
Anna and Mariia joined the underground movement in the early 1890s and,
alongside Lenin, established themselves as competent, dedicated social
democrats. Although the sisters have been portrayed as little more than Lenin's
helpers, this thesis shows that Anna and Mariia had independent revolutionary
careers before 1917, acting as party correspondents, newspaper workers and
agitators. It is also apparent that during the underground years the UI'ianov
family as a whole acted as a mutual support network, exchanging political
information, advice and instructions.
After the revolution, this thesis shows that Anna and Mariia pursued
political careers which reflected their long-held political beliefs. Anna headed
the Department for the Protection of Children, while Mariia spent ten years
leading the Rabsel 'kor movement. Both women had to negotiate the changing 
political times after their brother Lenin's death. While Anna retreated into work
for Istpart, Mariia participated in the power struggles between party fractions,
first supporting Stalin and Bukharin against the oppositionists and then
attempting to defend Bukharin against Stalin's attacks. This thesis investigates
Anna and Mariia' s prolific biographical works on Lenin, finding them to be a
means both of protecting the sisters from Stalin by raising their public profile and
of educating Soviet citizens. Finally this thesis shows how Anna and Mariia's
portrayal while they were alive and after their deaths shifted and changed
according to the political situation, the development of the cult of personality
around Lenin and even the current Soviet model of the ideal woman.
Although focused on the sisters' lives, this thesis also sheds light on the
revolutionary underground, showing how issues that were of crucial importance
to the party's leadership in Europe often appeared insignificant or at odds with
the situation in Russia. The thesis also provides an insight into the working of
the Soviet government and how political relationships from before 1917 had a
great impact on the interactions between government departments and
individuals. Above all, however, this thesis gives Anna, Ol'ga and Mariia their

due place in Bolshevik and revolutionary history. 

Some Unknown History of the United States --

The FDR years 1933 to Apr. 1945, 2nd edition

2019

Richard L . McManus

This book is 260 pages long and I include a table of organization of the US military intelligence and the OSS and its behind the lines commando operations.  I focus some on the developing of US signals intelligence and military history that has been declassified, but I think is still censored in our high school history books regarding US war crimes and etc.  I have been adding to this book over the years since the last time I published in on Academia.edu and this is edition as of Nov. 2019.  research.

ALSO SEE Some Unpopular History of the United States --1610 to 1933 2nd edition

In 1941 Henry L. Stimson selected McCloy to become assistant secretary of war.In December, 1941, Stimson put McCloy in charge of dealing with what he called the "West Coast (Japanese American alleged) security problem". This had been brought to Stimson's attention by Congressman Leland M. Ford of Los Angeles who had called for "all Japanese,whether citizens or not, be placed in inland concentration camps". McCloy held a meeting with J.Edgar Hoover and Attorney General Francis Biddle on February, 1, 1942 about this issue. Biddle argued that the Justice Department would have nothing to do with any interference with citizens,"whether they are Japanese or not". McCloy replied, "the Constitution is just a scrap of paper tome."In July 1933, members of a US fascist conspiracy contacted Major General Smedley D. Butler,

(USMC-retired), and tried to recruit him to lead a coup to take over the US government. Major General Smedley Butler had been twice decorated with the Congressional Medal of Honor. He served for two years on special assignment as police commissioner of Philadelphia in 1920s, where he fought the rackets while respecting constitutionally guaranteed rights, only to be hamstrung by partisan politics.The fascist asked him to recruit an army of 500,000 World War One veterans, to march on Washington and force Roosevelt's resignation. In September 1934, the plotters established the American Liberty League, with Al Smith, John Jakob Raskob, and J.P.Morgan  lawyer John W.Davis, joining the ranks of the Grayson Mallet-Prevost Murphy, Pew, Pitcairn, Rockefeller, and Lamont interests.Butler had been repeatedly approached to lead the coup by one of the J.P Morgan operatives,Gerald MacGuire. Hesitant to signal Butler that the Morgan gang was plotting a Hitler-Mussolini-style takeover of America, MacGuire told Butler that the new movement was out to save America from FDR. Butler pretended to go along with the plan at first, secretly deciding to betray it to Congress at the right moment. MacGuire did not tell Butler that their organization was a hard-core pro-Fascist, pro-Nazi apparatus, but instead claimed that they believed Roosevelt was a ``Jew Communist,'' and he would destroy the United States through New Deal hyperinflation.

(THIS REMAINS THE CORE BELIEF OF REPUBLICANS AND THE AMERICAN RIGHT EVER SINCE) https://www.academia.edu/29011560/Barnespwpp-Perpetual_War_for_Perpetual_Peace_-_Vho.pdf


 Butler next told the McCormack-Dickstein Committee of the House of Representatives that this group was conspiring to organize a military coup d'etat against FDR.
http://larouchepac.com/news/2008/03/29/lessons-denver-fdrs-1932-victory-over-londons-wall-street-fa.html

The following people were the coup plotters.John Jakob Raskob went to work for Pierre du Pont in 1900, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the J.P Morgan-financed chemical and arms combine. By 1914, Raskob was treasurer of the DuPont Corporation. Four years later, after DuPont took control of 43 percent of the stock in General Motors (GM), Raskob was named vice president for finance of both GM and DuPont.By the early 1920s, Morgan had bought a $35 million stake in GM, making it a joint DuPont-Morgan venture. Raskob remained vice president of GM until 1928 and amassed a very large personal fortune. Throughout the 1920s, Raskob was on Morgan's list of ``preferred customers,''who were beneficiaries of insider trading, and privileged stock purchases.


* Irenee Du Pont - Right-wing chemical industrialist and founder of the
 American Liberty League

, the organization assigned to execute the plot.* Grayson Murphy - Director of Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel and a group of J.P. Morgan banks.* William Doyle - Former state commander of the American Legion and a central plotter of the coup.* John Davis – was a former Democratic presidential candidate and a senior attorney for J.P.Morgan.* Al Smith - Roosevelt's bitter political foe from New York. Smith was a former governor of New York and a co-director of the American Liberty League.* Robert Clark - One of Wall Street's richest bankers and stockbrokers.* Gerald MacGuire – Was a bond salesman for Clark, and a former commander of the Connecticut American Legion. MacGuire was the key recruiter to Maj. Gen. Butler.The plot fell apart when Butler went public. In the last few weeks of the McCormack-Dickstein committee, it received evidence showing that certain persons had attempted to establish a fascist organization in this country. The Committee however, failed to call in any of the coup plotters for questioning, other than MacGuire. In fact, the Committee whitewashed the public version of its final report, deleting the names of powerful businessmen whose reputations they sought to protect. At the start of 1934,
 the coup plotters were making contacts with leading fascists in Italy,France, and Germany.Even more alarming, the news media failed to pick up on the story, and even today the incident remains little known. The elite managed to spin the story as nothing more than the rumors and hearsay of Butler. Butler, appalled by the cover-up, went on national radio to denounce it, outwith little success. Butler was not vindicated until 1967, when journalist John Spivak uncovered the Committee's internal, secret report that clearly confirmed Butler's story.In 1933 retired Major General Smedley Butler gave a speech to Congress wherein he told them about the coup to overthrow President Roosevelt by the Wall Street bankers.The Congressional record of his speech showed that the Congress did not investigate and arrest those coup plotters for treason. MG Butler next told President Roosevelt, who was also not in a position to arrest them, because they threatened to crash the US economy that was in the midst of the Great Depression. 



(Sources:
The 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time by Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen,
Secaucus, N.J.: Carol Publishing Group, 1997)

The Plot to Seize the White House byJules Archer, New York: Hawthorn Books, 1973)

 Even the Gods Can't Change History by  George Seldes 
Secaucus, N.J.: Lyle Stuart, Inc., 1976),

 A Man in His Time by John Spivak, New York: Horizon Press, 1967

Major General Smedley Butler | Americans Who Tell The Truth

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I served in all commissioned ranks from second lieutenant to Major General. And during that period I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for ...

War Is A Racket, by Major General Smedley Butler, 1935

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Distinguished service medal, 1919; Major General - United States Marine Corps; Retired Oct. 1, 1931; On leave of absence to act as director of Dept. of Safety, ...

Smedley Butler on Interventionism - FAS.org

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Excerpt from a speech delivered in 1933, by Major General Smedley Butler, ... I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General.

Smedley Butler - Recipient - - Hall of Valor

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Smedley Butler is one of TWO Marines who received TWO Medals of Honor for ... He retired as a Major General in 1939, but failed in his subsequent efforts to be ...



Smedley Butler and the 1930s Plot to Overthrow the President

In 1934, a colossal claim reached the American news media: There had been a plot to overthrow President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in favor of a fascist government. Supposedly in the works since 1933, the claims of the conspiracy came from a very conspicuous and reliable source: Major General Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated war heroes of his time. Even more unbelievable were his claims of who was involved in the plot – respected names like Robert Sterling Clark, Grayson M.P. Murphy, and Prescott Bush. While news media at the time mocked Butler’s story, recently discovered archives have revealed the truth behind Major General Butler’s claims.

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Who was Smedley Butler?

Born in 1881, Major General Smedley Butler was the eldest son of a Quaker family from West Chester, Pennsylvania. Butler came from a line of civil-serviceman: his father, Thomas Butler, was a representative for the state of Pennsylvania in Congress, and his maternal grandfather, Smedley Darlington, was also a Republican congressman.

Butler served in several major world conflicts, including the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, the Boxer Rebellion, and World War I. During his time in service, Butler became known for his bravery and relentless leadership in battle, and he was rewarded with several distinctions, including multiple Medals of Honor, an Army Distinguished Service Medal, the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, and a Navy Distinguished Service Medal.
[Major General Smedley Butler. Image reprinted from Philadelphia’s Organized Crime of the 1920 and 1930s by Anne Margaret Anderson with John J. Binder courtesy of the Library of Congress (pg. 11, Arcadia Publishing, 2014).]

In total, Butler served for 34 years in the Marine Corps, and earned 16 medals for his time in service. He is currently the most decorated Marine veteran of all time. He died in 1940 at the age of 58.

The Business Plot

After leaving the service, Butler held many roles, but became best-known for his activism. Butler’s various accolades made him a household name following World War I, and he was well-known among veteran circles as a champion of veterans’ rights. This included supporting the so-called Bonus Army, a large group of veterans and veteran supporters who lobbied Congress for payments of bonds issued to veterans prior to the war.

This positive public image, and demonstrated ability to rally people under his leadership, were perhaps the reason why Butler was approached by Gerald C. MacGuire and Bob Doyle in 1933. MacGuire, a bond salesman, and Doyle were members of the American Legion, an organization meant to support veteran rights and opportunities.

During their first meeting with Butler, MacGuire and Doyle asked the Major General to speak at a Legion convention in Chicago, claiming they wanted to point out the various problems with the Legion’s leadership. Butler was at first open to this idea, knowing that the Legion had several administrative issues that ultimately compromised veteran benefits.

[Prescott Bush, one of the men implicated in the Business Plot. Public Domain image via Wikimedia Commons.]
 

However, over subsequent meetings with the two men, Butler quickly began to suspect that something was amiss – during their second meeting, MacGuire showed Butler bank statements amounting to over $100,000 USD (valued at nearly $2 million today), which he hoped Butler would use to bring veteran supporters to the convention. The Major General was stunned: there was very little chance that a group of veterans had been able to gather such a vast amount of funds. Even worse was the speech that MacGuire asked Butler to deliver – a speech which had little to do with veteran affairs, and instead was more critical of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s recent move away from the gold standard.

The abandonment of the gold standard was a major sticking point for many high-ranking officials and bankers in the country during 1933. Although there were several recognized issues with money backed by gold (such as dependency on gold production, and short-term price instabilities), many bankers were fearful that their gold-backed loans would not be paid back in full by the President’s new policies.

The departure from the gold standard just added to other concerns about FDR’s policies, particularly his plans to provide subsidizations and jobs for the poor, which businessmen and conservative politicians alike took as an indication of Roosevelt's socialist leanings, or (even worse) a communist. Butler could sense this disgruntlement when he asked to meet with MacGuire’s superior, and found himself speaking with Robert Sterling Clark, an heir to the Singer Sewing fortune. Clark was much more upfront than MacGuire, telling Butler that his real interest was in preserving the gold standard, even claiming that he “had $30 million, and was willing to spend half of the $30 million to save the other half.”

Butler, true to his patriotic form, flatly refused the offer to deliver the speech at the convention in Chicago. After parting ways with MacGuire and Clark, he heard little from the men until MacGuire began travelling through Europe on a trip funded by Clark. MacGuire began sending postcards to Butler from various European locations, including Italy, Germany, and France. 

[A portrait of Robert Sterling Clark. Public Domain image via Wikimedia Commons.]
 

Upon returning to the States, MacGuire called another meeting with Butler, where he was much more transparent about his plans: Admitting that the money he had gathered came mostly from captains of industry, MacGuire told Butler that he had travelled Europe to see how veterans operated within foreign governments. After discounting the governments of Germany and Italy, he described a facet of French government which was run quite well by veterans.

These various observations led MacGuire to believe that the only way to save the country from FDR’s “ill-fated” policies was to create a military state run by former servicemen, with Roosevelt serving as a figurehead, rather than a true leader. Butler asked what MacGuire wanted from him, and was told he would be the ideal leader of these veterans, promising him an army of 500,000 men and financial backing from an assortment of rich businessmen, so long as he would be willing to lead a peaceful march on the White House to displace Roosevelt.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee Investigation

Astonished by MacGuire’s plans, Butler knew he would need someone to corroborate his story if he was going to stop the intended coup. Having previously worked as the police captain of Philadelphia, Butler reached out to Philadelphia Record writer Paul Comly French, who agreed to meet with MacGuire as well. During this meeting, MacGuire told French that he believed a fascist state was the only answer for America, and that Smedley was the “ideal leader” because he “could organize one million men overnight.”

Armed with French’s mutual testimony, Butler appeared before the McCormack-Dickstein congressional committee, also known as the Special Committee on Un-American Activities, to reveal what he knew about the plot to seize the presidency in November 1934. The committee at first discounted a large part of Butler’s testimony (even writing in their initial report that they saw no reason to subpoena men like John W. Davis, a former presidential hopeful, or Thomas W. Lamont, a partner with J.P. Morgan & Company).

However, with the testimony of French, and the erratic testimony of MacGuire, the committee began to further investigate the plot. The final reports of the committee sang a different tune, finding that all of Butler’s claims could be corroborated as factual. However, they also stressed that the plot was far from being enacted, and it was not clear if the plans would have ever truly come to fruition.

Quickly becoming known as the “White House Coup” and “Wall Street Putsch,” many major news sources derided Butler’s claims, as the committee’s final report was not made available publicly. Those implicated, ranging from the DuPont family to Prescott Bush, the grandfather of future President George W. Bush, laughed off Butler’s claims. Evidence of the validity of Butler’s testimony was not released until the 21st century, when the committee’s papers were published in the Public Domain. No one was ever prosecuted in connection to the plot.

Butler, for his part, went on to continue advocating for veterans. He also became a staunch opponent of capitalism, which he felt fed war efforts. His views were published in his well-known short book War is a Racket, which was published in 1935. There’s no telling how far the plot to overthrow the President may have gone without Butler’s intervention, but one thing is certain: its failure was the work of one patriotic Major General, and his life-long love of democracy.
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