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Sunday, December 01, 2024

The Fascist Counter-revolution



Karl Korsch

 1940

First Published: in Living Marxism, Volume 5, Number 2, Fall 1940, pp. 29-37
Source: Class Against Class;
Transcribed: by Zdravko Saveski, for marxists.org 2009;

What hope have we revolutionary Marxists, remnants of a past epoch, inheritors of its most advanced theories, illusions, ideologies-what hope have we left for a revolutionary turn of the sweeping counterrevolutionary movement of victorious fascism? The fate of France has finally proved that the old Marxist slogan of "world revolution" has in our epoch assumed a new meaning. We find ourselves today in the midst not of a socialist and proletarian but of an ultra-imperialistic and fascist world revolution. Just as in the preceding epoch every major defeat-the defeat of France in 1871, that of Russia, Germany, Hungary in 1905, 1917, 1918-resulted in a genuine revolution, so in our time each defeated country resorts to a fascist counterrevolution. Moreover, present-day war itself has become a revolutionary process, a civil war with an unmistakably predominant counterrevolutionary tendency. Just as in a horse race we do not know which horse will win but we do know that it will be a horse, so in the present war the victory of either party will result in a further gigantic step toward the fascization of Europe, if not of the whole European, American, Asiatic world of tomorrow.

I

There seem to be two easy ways for the "orthodox" Marxist of today to handle this difficult problem. Well-trained in Hegelian philosophical thought, he might say that all that is, is reasonable, and that, by one of those dialectical shifts in which history rejoices, socialism has been fulfilled by the social revolution implied in the victory of fascism. Thus Hegel himself at first followed the rising star of the French Revolution, later embraced the cause of Napoleon, and ended by acclaiming the Prussian state that emerged from the anti-Napoleonic wars of 1812-1815 as the fulfilment of the philosophical "idea" and as the "state of reason" corresponding to the given stage of its historical development.

Or, for that matter, our orthodox Marxist might not be willing, for the present, to go so far as to acknowledge the fascist allies of Stalin as the genuine promoters of socialism in our time. He would then content himself with feeling that the victory of fascism, planned economy, state capitalism, and the weeding out of all ideas and institutions of traditional "bourgeois democracy" will bring us to the very threshold of the genuine social revolution and proletarian dictatorship - just as, according to the teachings of the early church, the ultimate coming of Christ will be immediately preceded by the coming of the Anti-Christ who will be so much like Christ in his appearance and in his actions that the faithful will have considerable difficulty in seeing the difference.

In so reasoning, our orthodox Marxist would not only conform with the church but would also keep well in line with the precedents set by the earlier socialists and "revolutionary" Marxists themselves. It was not only the moderately progressive bourgeois ex-minister Guizot who was deceived by the revolutionary trimmings of Louis Napoleon's coup d'etat of 1851 and, when he heard the news burst out into the alarmed cry, "This is the complete and final triumph of socialism." Even the leading representative of French socialism, P. J. Proudhon, was taken in by the violently anti-bourgeois attitude displayed by the revolutionary imperialist, and he devoted a famous pamphlet to the thesis that the coup d'etat of the Second of December did in fact "demonstrate the social revolution."[1]

Indeed, in many ways that counterrevolutionary aftermath of 1848 is comparable to the infinitely more serious and more extended counterrevolutionary movement through which European society is passing today after the experience of the Russian, the German, and the other European revolutions which followed in the wake of the First World War. Every party and every political tendency had to go through a certain period of bewilderment until it had adapted itself to a totally changed situation. Marx himself, although he utterly despised the imperialist adventurer because of his personal inadequacy, was inclined to believe in the revolutionary significance of the counterrevolutionary coup. He described the historical outcome of the two years of revolutionary defeat from 1848 to 1849 by the paradoxical statement that "this time the advance of the revolutionary movement did not effect itself through its immediate tragicomic achievements but, the other way round, through the creation of a united and powerful counterrevolution, through the creation of an antagonist by opposing whom the party of revolt will reach its real revolutionary maturity." And even after the fateful event he most emphatically restated his conviction that "the destruction of the parliamentary republic contains the germs of the triumph of the proletarian revolution." This is exactly what the German Communists and their Russian masters said 80 years later when they welcomed the advent of Nazism in Germany as a "victory of revolutionary communism."

This ambiguous attitude of Proudhon and Marx toward counterrevolution was repeated ten years later by Ferdinand Lassalle, a close theoretical disciple of Marx and at that time the foremost leader of the growing socialist movement in Germany. He was prepared to cooperate with Bismarck at the time when that unscrupulous statesman was toying with the idea of bribing the workers into acceptance of his imperialistic plans by an apparent adoption of the universal franchise and some other ideas borrowed from the 1848 revolution and the Second Empire. Lasalle did not live to see Bismarck at the end of the 70's, when he had subdued the liberals and the ultra-montane Catholic party, revert to his old dream of enforcing a kind of "tory-socialism" based on a ruthless persecution and suppression of all genuine socialist workers' movements.

There is no need to discuss the wholesale conversion of internationalists into nationalists and proletarian Social Democrats into bourgeois democratic parliamentarians during and after the First World War. Even such former Marxists as Paul Lensch accepted the war of the Kaiser as a realistic fulfilment of the dreams of a socialist revolution, and the about-face of the socialists they themselves glorified as a "revolutionization of the revolutionaries." There was a "national-bolshevist" fraction of the German Communist party long before there was a Hitlerian National Socialist Party. Nor does the military alliance that was concluded "seriously and for a long time" between Stalin and Hitler in August 1939, contain any novelty for those who have followed the historical development of the relations between Soviet Russia and imperial, republican, and Hitlerian Germany throughout the last twenty years. The Moscow treaty of 1939 had been preceded by the treaties of Rapallo in 1920 and of Berlin in 1926. Mussolini had already for several years openly proclaimed his new fascist credo when Lenin was scolding the Italian Communists for their failure to enlist that invaluable dynamic personality in the service of their revolutionary cause. As early as 1917, during the peace negotiations in Brest Litovsk, Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht had been aware of the dreadful danger that was threatening the proletarian revolution from that side. They had said in so many words that "Russian socialism based on reactionary Prussian bayonets would be the worst that still could happen to the revolutionary workers' movement."

It appears from this historical record that there is indeed something basically wrong with the traditional Marxian theory of the social revolution and with its practical application. There is no doubt, today less than at any former time in history, that the Marxian analysis of the working of the capitalist mode of production and of its historical development is fundamentally correct. Yet it seems that the Marxian theory in its hitherto accepted form is unable to deal with the new problems that arise in the course of a not merely occasional and temporary but deep-rooted, comprehensive, and enduring counterrevolutionary development.

II

The main deficiency of the Marxian concept of the counterrevolution is that Marx did not, and from the viewpoint of his historical experience could not, conceive of the counterrevolution as a normal phase of social development. Like the bourgeois liberals he thought of the counterrevolution as an "abnormal" temporary disturbance of a normally progressive development. (In the same manner, pacifists to the present day think of war as an abnormal interruption of the normal state of peace, and physicians and psychiatrists until recently thought of disease and more especially the diseases of the mind as an abnormal state of the organism.) There is, however, between the Marxian approach and that of the typical bourgeois liberal this important difference: they start from a totally different idea about just what is a normal condition. The bourgeois liberal regards existing conditions or at least their basic features as the normal state of things, and any radical change as its abnormal interruption. It does not matter to him whether that disturbance of existing normal conditions results from a genuinely progressive movement or from a reactionary attempt to borrow revolution's thunder for the purpose of a counterrevolutionary aggression. He is afraid of the counterrevolution just as much as of the revolution and just because of its resemblance to a genuine revolution. That is why Guizot called the coup d'etat "the complete and final triumph of the socialist revolution" and why, for that matter, Hermann Rauschning today describes the advent of Hitlerism as a "revolt of nihilism."

As against the bourgeois concept, the Marxian theory has a distinct superiority. It understands revolution as a completely normal process. Some of the best Marxists, including Marx himself and Lenin, even said on occasion that revolution is the only normal state of society. So it is, indeed, under those objective historical conditions which are soberly stated by Marx in his preface to the "Critique of Political Economy."

Marx did not, however, apply the same objective and historical principle to the process of counterrevolution, which was known to him only in an undeveloped form. Thus, he did not see, and most people do not see today, that such important counterrevolutionary developments as those of present-day fascism and nazism have, in spite of their violent revolutionary methods, much more in common with evolution than they have with a genuine revolutionary process. It is true that in their talk and propaganda both Hitler and Mussolini have directed their attack mostly against revolutionary Marxism and communism. It is also true that before and after their seizure of state power they made a most violent attempt to weed out every Marxist and Communist tendency in the working classes. Yet this was not the main content of the fascist counterrevolution. In its actual results the fascist attempt to renovate and transform the traditional state of society does not offer an alternative to the radical solution aimed at by the revolutionary Communists. The fascist counterrevolution rather tried to replace the reformist socialist parties and trade unions, and in this it succeeded to a great extent.

The underlying historical law, the law of the fully developed fascist counterrevolution of our time, can be formulated in the following manner: After the complete exhaustion and defeat of the revolutionary forces, the fascist counterrevolution attempts to fulfil, by new revolutionary methods and in widely different form, those social and political tasks which the so-called reformistic parties and trade unions had promised to achieve but in which they could no longer succeed under the given historical conditions.

A revolution does not occur at some arbitrary point of social development but only at a definite stage. "At a certain stage of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing production-relations (or property-relations) within which they hitherto moved. From being forms of development, those relations turn into fetters upon the forces of production. Then a period of social revolution sets in." And again Marx emphasized, and even to a certain extent exaggerated, the objectivistic principle of his materialist theory of revolution according to which "a formation of society never perishes until all the forces of production for which it is wide enough have been developed." All this is true enough as far as it goes. We have all seen how evolutionary socialism reached the end of its rope. We have seen how the old capitalistic system based on free competition and the whole of its vast political and ideological superstructure was faced by chronic depression and decay. There seemed no way open except a wholesale transition to another, more highly developed form of society, to be effected by the social revolution of the proletarian class.

The new historical development during the last twenty years showed, however, that there was yet another course open. The transition to a new type of capitalistic society, that could no longer be achieved by the democratic and peaceful means of traditional socialism and trade unionism, was performed by a counterrevolutionary and anti-proletarian yet objectively progressive and ideologically anti-capitalistic and plebeian movement that had learned to apply to its restricted evolutionary aims the unrestricted methods developed during the preceding revolution. (More particularly, both Hitler and Mussolini had learned much in the school of Russian Bolshevism.) Thus, it appeared that the evolution of capitalistic society had not reached its utter historical limit when the ruling classes and the reformistic socialists-those self-appointed "doctors at the sickbed of capitalism" -reached the limits of their evolutionary possibilities. The phase of peaceful democratic reforms was followed by another evolutionary phase of development-that of the fascist transformation, revolutionary in its political form but evolutionary in its objective social contents.

The decisive reason that the capitalistic formation of society did not perish after the collapse of the First World War is that the workers did not make their revolution. "Fascism," said its closest enemy, "is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never took place." Capitalistic society did not perish, but instead entered a new revolutionary phase under the counterrevolutionary regime of fascism, because it was not destroyed by a successful workers' revolution, and because it had not, in fact, developed all the forces of production. The objective and the subjective premises are equally important for the counterrevolutionary conclusion.

From this viewpoint all those comfortable illusions about a hidden revolutionary significance in the temporary victory of the counterrevolution, in which the earlier Marxists so frequently indulged, must be entirely abandoned. If counterrevolution is only extremely and superficially connected with a social revolution by its procedures, but in its actual content is much more closely related to the further evolution of a given social system, and is in fact a particular historical phase of that social evolution, then it can no longer be regarded as a revolution in disguise. There is no reason to hail it either as an immediate prelude to the genuine revolution, or as an intrinsic phase of the revolutionary process itself. It appears as a particular phase of the whole developmental process, not inevitable like revolution yet becoming an inevitable step within the development of a given society under certain historical conditions. It has reached its up-to-now most comprehensive and important form in the present day fascist renovation and transformation of Europe, which in its basic economic aspect appears as a transition from the private and anarchic form of competitive capitalism to a system of planned and organized monopoly capitalism or state capitalism.

III

It would be the greatest folly and, for people even slightly imbued with the great discoveries of Marx in the field of the social sciences, a total relapse into a pre-materialist and pre-scientific manner of thought if one were to expect that the historical progress from competitive capitalism to planned economy and state capitalism could be repealed by any power in the world. Least of all can fascism be defeated by those people who, after a hundred years of shameless acquiescence in the total abandonment of their original ideals, now hasten to conjure up the infancy of the capitalist age with its belief in liberty, equity, fraternity, and free trade, while at the same time they surreptitiously and inefficiently try to imitate as far as possible fascism's abolition of the last remnants of those early capitalist ideas. They feel a sudden and unexpected urge to celebrate the French Revolution's fourteenth of July and at the same time dream of destroying fascism by adopting fascist methods.

In opposition to the artisan and petty-bourgeois spirit of early utopian socialism, the first word of scientific and proletarian socialism stated that big industry and the machine age had come to stay, that modern industrial workers had to find a cure for the evils of the industrial age on the basis of a further development of the new industrial forces themselves. In the same manner the scientific and proletarian socialists of our time must try to find remedies for the wrongs of monopoly capitalism and fascist dictatorship on the basis of monopoly and state capitalism itself. Neither free trade (that was not so free for the workers after all) nor the other aspects of traditional bourgeois democracy - free discussion and free press and free radio - will ever be restored. They have never existed for the suppressed and exploited class. As far as the workers are concerned, they have only exchanged one form of serfdom for another.

There is no essential difference between the way the New York Times and the Nazi press publish daily "all the news that's fit to print"-under existing conditions of privilege and coercion and hypocrisy. There is no difference in principle between the eighty-odd voices of capitalist mammoth corporations-which, over the American radio, recommend to legions of silent listeners the use of Ex-Lax, Camels, and neighbourhood groceries, along with music, war, baseball and domestic news, and dramatic sketches-and one suave voice of Mr. Goebbels who recommends armaments, race-purity, and worship of the Fuehrer. He too is quite willing to let them have music along with it-plenty of music, sporting news, and all the unpolitical stuff they can take.

This criticism of the inept and sentimental methods of present-day anti-fascism does not imply by any means that the workers should do openly what the bourgeoisie does under the disguise of a so-called antifascist fight: acquiesce in the victory of fascism. The point is to fight fascism not by fascist means but on its own ground. This seems to the present writer to be the rational meaning of what was somewhat mystically described by Alpha in the spring issue of Living Marxism as the specific task of "shock-troops" in the anti-fascist fight. Alpha anticipated that even if the localized war-of-siege waged during the first seven months of the present conflict were to extend into a general fascist world war, this would not be a "total war" and an unrestricted release of the existing powers of production for the purpose of destruction. Rather, it would still remain a monopolistic war in which the existing powers of production (destruction) would be fettered in many ways for the benefit of the monopolistic interests of privileged groups and classes. It would remain that kind of war from fear of the emancipatory effect that a total mobilization of the productive forces, even restricted to the purpose of destruction, would be bound to have for the workers or, under the present-day conditions of totally mechanized warfare, for the shocktroopers who perform the real work of that totally mechanized war.

This argument of Alpha’s can be applied more widely and much more convincingly. First of all we can disregard for the moment (although we shall have to return to it at a later stage) the peculiar restriction of the argument to the "shock-troops" and to the conditions of war. The whole traditional distinction between peace and war, production and destruction, has lost in recent times much of that semblance of truth that it had in an earlier period of modern capitalistic society. The history of the last ten years has shown that ever since, in a world drunk with apparent prosperity, the American Kellogg Pact outlawed war, peace has been abolished. From the outset Marxism was comparatively free from that simple-mindedness which believed in an immediate and clear-cut difference between production-for-use and production-for-profit. The only form of production-for-use under existing capitalistic conditions is just the production-for-profit. Productive labor for Marx, as for Smith and Ricardo, is that labor which produces a profit for the capitalist and, incidentally, a thing which may also be useful for human needs. There is no possibility of establishing a further distinction between a "good" and a "bad," a constructive and a destructive usefulness. The Goebbelian defense of the "productivity" of the labor spent on armaments in Germany by referring to the amount of "useful" labor spent in the United States for cosmetics had no novelty for the Marxist. Marx, who described the working class in its revolutionary fight as "the greatest of all productive forces" would not have been afraid to recognize war itself as an act of production, and the destructive forces of modern mechanized warfare as part of the productive forces of modern capitalistic society, such as it is. He, like Alpha, would have recognized the "shock-troops" in their "destructive" activity in war as well as in their productive activity in industry (armament and other industries-war industries all!) as real workers, a revolutionary vanguard of the modern working class. Historically it is a well-established fact that the soldier (the hired mercenary) was the first modern wage-laborer.

Thus, the old Marxian contradiction between the productive forces and the given production relations reappears in the warlike as well as in the peaceful activities of modern fascism. With it there appear again the old contrast between the workers, who as a class are interested in the full application and development of the productive forces, and the privileged classes, the monopolists of the material means of production. More than at any previous time the monopoly of political power reveals itself as the power to rule and control the social process of production. At the same time this means, under present conditions, the power to restrict production-both the production of industry in peace and destructive production in time of war-and to regulate it in the interest of the monopolist class. Even the "national" interest that was supposed to underly the present-day fascist war waged by Hitler and Mussolini is revealed by the war itself and will be revealed much more clearly by the coming peace as being ultimately an interest of the international capitalist and monopolist class. Much more clearly than at the end of the First World War it will appear that this war is waged by both parties-by the attacking fascists as well as by the defending "democrats"-as a united counterrevolutionary struggle against the workers and the soldiers who by their labor in peace and war prepared and fought the truly suicidal war.

What, then, is the hope left for the anti-fascists who are opposing the present European war and who will oppose the coming war of the hemisphere? The answer is that, just as life itself does not stop at the entrance of war, neither does the material work of modern industrial production. Fascists today quite correctly conceive the whole of their economy-that substitute for a genuine socialist economy-in terms of a "war economy" (Wehrwirtschaft). Thus, it is the task of the workers and the soldier to see to it that this job is no longer done within the restrictive rules imposed upon human labor in present-day capitalist, monopolist, and oppressive society. It has to be done in the manner prescribed by the particular instruments used; that is, in the manner prescribed by the productive forces available at the present stage of industrial development. In this manner both the productive and the destructive forces of present-day society-as every worker, every soldier knows-can be used only if they are used against their present monopolistic rulers. Total mobilization of the productive forces presupposes total mobilization of that greatest productive force which is the revolutionary working class itself.

Notes

[1] Oeuvres Completes de Proudhon, vol. VIII, Paris, 1868.

[2] First article on Class Struggles in France, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, January, 1850.

[3] The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, February, 1852.

[4] Ignazio Silone, School of Dictators, 1938.

[5] Living Marxism, vol. V, no. I, pp. 44-58.

Karl Korsch Archive

 

Anarchism and Law

Comment, Dec 30th

The recently published brochure Anarchistisch Recht explores ‘anarchist law’ as a collective term for furthering critiques of the social and legal order

~ Thom Holterman ~

Anarchism can offer an excellent framework for fundamental legal criticism. Since anarchists critique capitalist society, which relies on oppressive laws to maintain its existence, the addition of legal perspectives can allow for decisive criticisms of the present social order. The two approaches do not exclude each other; instead, anarchists can advance legal criticism without compromise.

This aligns with what is known as ‘positive anarchy’, a term borrowed from Proudhon. Fundamentally, it encompasses a view of society without oppressive power and refers to order, dynamism, and rationality, in addition to mutualism and federalism. Such views and ideas can also be found in Kropotkin and Bakunin. Here, I would like to emphasise Clara Meijer-Wichmann (1885-1922) in particular, as she was one of the first female jurists, challenging existing criminal law and the entire penitentiary system over a century ago.

What I call ‘anarchist law’ here should be understood as a collective term with plural meanings. ‘Anarchist’ refers both ideologically to ‘anti-capitalist’ and sociologically/politically to ‘without coercion’. Referring to ‘law’ as anarchist law thus places the term into a forward-looking perspective towards a libertarian society. This future-oriented focus does not imply that it is new, or without a past. Forms of anarchist law have always existed, but have remained largely unknown.

As is evident in my first contribution in the recently-published brochure Anarchistisch Recht, entitled ‘Law and Power in a Libertarian Perspective’, one of the sources of law is human co-operation. This is further elaborated in my second contribution, ‘George Gurvitch (1894-1965) and Social Law’, where his ideas of ‘social law’ and political pluralism are discussed.

The third contribution, entitled ‘State, Law, and Legitimacy’, addresses the foundations of that ‘other’, libertarian society, by French libertarian activist, anarcho-syndicalist, and historian René Berthier. The fourth contribution comes from French libertarian jurist Anne-Sophie Chambost, a university lecturer in legal history specializing in Proudhon. She demonstrates that anarchist law already has a history. Her text is titled ‘Anarchist Thoughts on Law in the 19th and 20th Centuries’.

In these first four contributions, anarchism and law are seen as converging. As already noted, this doesn’t preclude viewing the two phenomena in a divergent, mutually-opposed sense. Law that is used to maintain the existing capitalist society, which is precisely what anarchists are fighting against, is a main aspect of this opposition. The Armenian physician, activist anarchist, and author Alexander Atabekyan (1868-1933) makes clear to us that this has been the case for a long time. His contribution, the fifth, was sent to me in a German translation from Russian, published here under the title ‘Law and Supremacy’.

The apparent divergence between anarchism and law can be put into practice or worked around in various ways. In the sixth contribution, I listed some of these anarchists’ ways: ‘Apart from the Law – On Illegalists, Direct Action, Take and Eat movement’. Finally, the seventh contribution is by French libertarian jurist and anarcho-syndicalist Pierre Bance, who once again comprehensively examines the ‘question of law in anarchy’ and encourages recognising ‘anarchist law’ as a key issue.

Oligarchy XIV: Thoughts on the Anarchism of Dorothy Day

David S. D’Amato

 January 1, 2026

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Dorothy Day in 1934. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. Public Domain.

I have a few thoughts in response to what seems like an uptick in interest in Dorothy Day (1897-1980) in recent years. When I first read Dorothy Day, the first thing that stood out to me was her continuity with a long tradition of Christian anarchism in America. Yet as a Catholic, she seemed to represent a split from the main line of Christian anarchism in America, which is distinctly Protestant (though not exclusively so, and who knows how to classify Tolstoy’s religion). In any case, I kept running into her name after years of studying and steeping in the Christian anarchism and non-resistance of folks like Adin Ballou, William Lloyd Garrison, and Henry Clarke Wright, among others. Many of the individualist anarchists received theological instruction and were ordained ministers (for example, Joshua K. Ingalls, William B. Greene). Day resembled these Protestants of the American libertarian tradition in her deep personal commitment and her total rejection of political action, which, as we will discuss, entails explicit renunciation of core features of our political life, for example, voting, paying taxes, and obeying unjust laws. The historian Anne Klejment helps us understand Day’s ideas within this context:

The seedbed of her pacifism extended back into her Protestant young adulthood. Her familiarity with the Bible remained a significant part of her spirituality and informed her pacifism. Back then, the Catholic laity was discouraged from Bible reading. It would take a convert like Dorothy to advance biblical nonviolence as an essential Catholic teaching. She placed enormous emphasis on the commandment to love God and love neighbor. She understood it as the core teaching of Jesus and pondered over it from adolescence until her death.

Many of the American Christian anarchists/non-resistants follow in a long tradition of antinomians, arguably going back to the Antinomian Controversy in New England and before. These episodes left an established tradition of challenging authority and hierarchical power. Day’s Christian anarchism stands out in its delicate location within the Catholic tradition. Indeed, hers was a stance that angered many in both the Church hierarchy and in her old left-wing circles. She recalled at the end of her life that many of her radical friends had felt betrayed by her conversion:

One who had yearned to walk in the footsteps of a Mother Jones and an Emma Goldman seemingly had turned her back on the entire radical movement and sought shelter in that great, corrupt Holy Roman Catholic Church, right hand of the Oppressor, the State, rich and heartless, a traitor to her beginnings, her Founder, etc.

Just as she was a poor fit with the narrow-minded college socialists (more on that below), she was also an awkward fit in a movement defined by people like Proudhon, whom she frequently discussed, and Bakunin. Day’s personalism is another distinctive feature of her approach to anarchism. This is the idea, grounded in a basic belief in the dignity of every human being, that each person must take personal responsibility on every level: that there is a duty to one’s neighbors and coworkers, and we cannot look to others, including large institutions, which are themselves the key offenders and impediments to change. Day often talked about how she was changed after the experience of seeing neighbors come to each other’s aid in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. In an article in 1936, Day explained:

We are Personalists because we believe that man, a person, a creature of body and soul, is greater than the State, of which as an individual he is a part. We are Personalists because we oppose the vesting of all authority in the hands of the state instead of in the hands of Christ the King. We are Personalists because we believe in free will, and not in the economic determinism of the Communist philosophy.

Remarking on the 1927 murder of Italian immigrants and anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, Day noted that anarchism “is the word, or label, which confuses many of our readers (especially the bishops?)” Day saw anarchism, as a philosophy of mutual respect and voluntary cooperation, as a natural extension of Christian spiritual practice and fellowship. She argued that there is no human law applicable to those who love and follow Jesus, and that “anarchism means ‘Love God, and do as you will.’” From the moment it became aware of the Catholic Worker movement, the U.S. government has treated it with suspicion, targeting and spying on Day and the movement as supposedly subversive elements. Day’s activism drew the attention of the FBI, and she is said to have enjoyed reading her FBI files.

Day had joined the Socialist Party in Urbana, Illinois, as a teenage college student, but its “petty bourgeois” attitudes and lack of “the religious enthusiasm for the poor” left her cold. She was not one for posturing; her Christian anarchism was based on the idea that every person is “known and named,” and that the real movement for human freedom takes place where there is a human need to be satisfied. Day roundly rejected the value system and approach of rigid bureaucracies and hierarchies, either corporate or governmental, which treat people as case numbers within cold, detached systems of power. As Michael Kazin put it: “Like any good anarchist, Christian or not, Day had no faith whatsoever in the desire or ability of governing authorities to create a moral, egalitarian society.” Her political outlook was grounded in and expressed through the sharing of everyday acts of kindness, through up-close relationships rather than philosophical abstractions. Yet she was extremely well-read and capable of the most insightful and skillfully articulated engagements with advanced ideas. Day has a very particular way with words. There is a rare candor, which reflects her lack of pretenses and her vulnerability in sharing her full life in the most open and sincere way. Her columns go back and forth between the tragedy and the comedy of being human with real thought and skill. Some of the vignettes in her autobiography are as powerful and moving as anything written by any American, for my money. “In 2012, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops unanimously voiced its support for her sainthood,” and this cause is, as I understand it, pending. An anarchist Catholic saint would be something to see.

Rose Hill Catholic Worker farm, Tivoli, New York. Photo: National Park Service.

Day believed that we have the social and political question backwards, starting with abstractions, ideological camps, and grand plans, when what we should focus on what is personal and tangible, what can be done directly, immediately, and without “professional” intermediaries. I was drawn to Day’s writings first because her way of thinking about political and social questions is so categorically different from the one we get from both halves of the poisonous main currents of our discourse today. She rejected both versions of bloodthirsty twentieth century authoritarianism, capitalism and socialism, instead articulating a radical politics of the corporeal and close by. Nothing more complicated in policy terms than housing and feeding our neighbors, the most important work (we prefer conceptual complexity and institutional paralysis while oligarchs bleed the country). Her belief in the transformative power of community and hospitality at the most basic but most intimate scale led her to reject the way almost everyone of our age thinks about politics. Day’s politics were about love for and service to other people; her way of looking at the world, according to her granddaughter, focused on the idea that “what we can do is so little, but that is what we are given to do. That’s only what we can do, so let’s move forward and do what we each think that we can do.” She emphasized “the necessity of smallness,” encouraging a direct and hands-on approach to serving those in need. She could not accept any approach to activism or ministry that separated the theorizing from the doing. Contrast our culture of aloof contempt for the poor, workers, prisoners, migrants and refugees, etc. There is nothing lower than not having money in our anti-human culture and political system. It is thoroughly bipartisan and it will outlast every politician and political party. Rest assured that the state’s indifference toward the suffering of the poor will be there still when there is no more U.S. government.

In Day’s view, we are depriving ourselves of another political dimension in the notion that love is the only response to political moments like this one. Regardless of anyone’s opinions, if love and community are not reliable for us in the social and community context, then what are we talking about? If they aren’t starting with the people at the bottom, what are they building? Everyone seems to feel that the country is lost today. My suggestion is: do not try to find it. Dorothy Day’s example suggests that we find each other, face-to-face, and begin to relearn the lessons of solidarity and mutual aid. We do that and we don’t have to fuss with any of today’s counterfeit B.S. In the social reality that capital and the state are hawking, there is nothing for workers or the poor, nothing but getting shorted. Day saw the crises unfolding around her in terms of human suffering. She did not put herself in the position of judging or condemning; she did not hold out false solutions or panaceas. She asked people to follow her lead in taking personal responsibility and initiative. Among the goals of the House of Hospitality, she stated, was to “emphasize personal action, personal responsibility as opposed to political action and state responsibility.” As a social model, the House of Hospitality explicitly resists impersonal, bureaucratized forms of charity and deliberately puts givers and recipients on the same footing, creating genuine relationships and community life. Day lived a life of voluntary poverty and thought that one should try to “be close enough to people so that you are indifferent to the material.” Central to her thought was leading by example and in accordance with love for all people. Her life, her work, her politics, all inseparable, were based on the radical notion that Jesus meant what he said about loving each other, turning the other cheek, etc.

Day offers another way of thinking about what it means to be politically active within a broader network of movements for freedom, equality, and justice. We don’t need to play to the strengths of the ruling class by focusing our energies and resources back into the sources of hierarchy and domination. Day thought that we had things backwards when it came to political and social change: that is, she believed we are already where the action is, in that everything grows from the bottom up. The movement is where you are, and it exists within your power to take care of people in need. So this is obviously a way of thinking poles apart from the performative nonsense that is encouraged today. Her worldview was a wholesale rejection of today’s faux meritocracy and its ugly pretense that some people are worth more than others. She believed that there is a “a spirit of non-violence and brotherhood” in the Gospels that counsels anarchism in practice. She favored radical decentralization and recognized the principle of subsidiarity, or the idea that decision-making should take place at the most local possible level. In the United States, we have departed from this principle to our own peril, yet neither of our teams seem to understand the problem. Day did not mince words in providing a classically anarchist condemnation of government:

Eventually, there will be this withering away of the State. Why put it off in some far distant utopia? Why not begin right now and say that the state is the enemy. The state is the armed forces. The state is bound to be a tyrant, a dictatorship. A Dictatorship of the Proletariat becomes yet another dictatorship. (emphasis in original)

Day did not believe that we can effectively resist this system of poverty and social alienation by supporting politicians or by mimicking the coercive, bureaucratic style of elites. For her, it could not be a matter of voting, giving alms, or being a good member of some party. Day’s approach represents the opposite of the institutional distance and stuck-up elitism that characterize most of our systems. Day insisted on being there on the ground, sharing daily life in real human connections, resisting the state and consumerism through friendship and love rather than through government. This mode of politics can only be understood and practiced by one who is not interested in being there for others, not in her own opinions or in electing certain politicians, etc. This is the real revolution everyone has been talking about and waiting for, but Day’s isn’t a path most people are capable of walking. One of the mottos of the Catholic Worker movement is, “Conscience is supreme.” Day could not reconcile any politics of division or violence with her own conscience. Institutions that rely on violence – the state, for instance – could not help except by receding into the background; they are not there to help, but rather to create the conditions for widespread deprivation and poverty.

There may be no starker contrast to the hollow identitarian blather of our moment than the life and work of Dorothy Day. Today’s hideous and embarrassing elite-worship, its obsessions with maximums of speed and scale regardless of the social dangers or consequences, its institutional detachment and opacity, and its counterproductive GDPism all represent pervasive social decay and alienation within Day’s philosophy. They are not the visible signs of “progress.” By comparison, today’s PMC liberals appear to be deliberately authoritarian and parochial defenders of plutocracy. And our conservatives, particularly the churchgoing ones, seem to genuinely hate the people Day said we’re commanded to love. I think Professor Larry Chapp put it well, discussing the importance of Day’s politics of resistance to our current moment (now retired, Professor Chapp runs the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker Farm in Pennsylvania):

This is all modern Liberalism has to offer: blunt force and wealth. And what moral and spiritual weapons do we have that are not undermined by our own supreme hypocrisy? We all, rightly, recoil in horror at the sufferings inflicted by Putin’s insane military gambit to restore empire. But empire building is what Liberals do, and have done now for centuries, and so the moral condemnations of our political class rings hollow.

Day didn’t think it was all that difficult to see why our political culture and discourse continue to fail us, particularly those at the margins of our society. Political ideology totally abstracted from the real relations of ministering to the needs of the poor, from the real struggles of workers striving around the clock yet no further from the edges of social and economic oblivion. That is American liberalism today. The American right meanwhile offers an incoherent, unwholesome slop of racial and ethnic scapegoating, open thuggery and corruption, and in MAGA the treatment of the country as a cheap and trashy brand name for enriching the political mercenaries and shady billionaires around Donald Trump. But, fundamentally, the teams share a value system, and the poor are despised by that system. If they’re not blaming them for crime and social discord, politicians are trying desperately to ignore the poor and pretend they don’t exist. This is one of the bedrock values of our system, at least as it exists materially rather than in the purely imaginary fantasies of a PMC that proudly embeds itself in the military-industrial complex even as it scolds everyone.

Statists and imperialists of all kinds, including liberals, who try to appropriate Day should understand that she was not joking about anarchism and would not willingly cooperate with the government; her identity as an anarchist was inseparable from the rest of her life and work, which meant ignoring the law and living according to the law of conscience. Like many anarchists before and since, Day had run-ins with the law throughout her life. She was jailed several times, beginning in 1917, when she was arrested while picketing as part of the Silent Sentinels campaign. She was a fixture of the anti-war and anti-nuclear movements and was jailed several times in the 1950s for her refusal to take shelter during civil defense drills during that period (this protest seems to have been the brainchild of Ammon Hennacy, whom I discussed for the Cato Institute’s Libertarianism.org several years back). Responding to the nuclear mass murders in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, Day wrote with rare moral clarity against the death cult that still has our ruling class in its grip:

Jubilate Deo. We have killed 318,000 Japanese.

That is, we hope we have killed them, the Associated Press, on page one, column one of the Herald Tribune, says. The effect is hoped for, not known. It is to be hoped they are vaporized, our Japanese brothers – scattered, men, women and babies, to the four winds, over the seven seas. Perhaps we will breathe their dust into our nostrils, feel them in the fog of New York on our faces, feel them in the rain on the hills of Easton.

Jubilate Deo. President Truman was jubilant.

Day felt the truth in her bones. She understood that those dead families in Japan were our family – they were not evil foreigners. She protested through two world wars and saw firsthand every trick used by the state to stir up hatred and enthusiasm for war. Consider the attitudes of our putatively liberal elite on questions of war and empire today, and contrast them to those of Dorothy Day. Our corporate uniparty has two openly war-mongering and imperialistic wings, with differences only in emphases and vibes, and even there the degree of difference is smaller than is generally thought (respectable opinion in the District wants war, but with Russia and China, not Venezuela). Today, people who have made their entire careers pitching and overseeing disastrous wars of choice get in line for fancy fellowships and interviews on the supposedly progressive shows. Because the U.S. government manages a powerful empire, our political class is compelled by the agglomeration of interests around them to chaperone a politics of imperialism, with disagreement confined to the margins. Higher defense spending is popular with politicians of both parties, because war is the business the state is in. Violence is its key offering in economic terms, much as any lesser mafia. Virtually all members of Congress make their peace with it in one way or another, because this is what the overall system requires of them, and the system is very good at getting what it needs; whatever their reasons, both parties want and actively search for and recruit candidates that they know will be reliably pro-war, often those with connections to the Pentagon or the intelligence community, the major “defense” contractors of the federal government, or financial interests aligned with warfare and empire. Recall that the deepest and strongest connections between the two ways our ruling class shows itself, the state and capital, take place within the world of war. In our system, both always want war because they see it as a source of growth, but they were fused together even before the growth logic took over completely. That is the perversity of our system, which Day saw. She didn’t think one could escape complicity merely because they were positioned within bourgeois polite society; she called the scientists who worked on the bomb murderers, and she demanded accountability from the places of higher learning that allied themselves with “this colossal slaughter of the innocents.” To understand the perversity and degeneration of our politics and discourse, we just have to look at how quickly our simulacra of political participation set up a new enemy of the week, reincorporating the old enemies (e.g., the rehabilitation of George W. Bush) and using the energy and appearance of conflict to reaffirm the imperial system itself. Day understood that the state was a den of thieves and criminals regardless of who is in charge, and the source of positive social change has to be us, working together.

Dorothy Day was an amazing person and a true rarity. She relentlessly downplayed her own importance and contributions to the Catholic Worker movement. During an interview in 1971, a week before her 74th birthday, Day discussed the movement’s humble beginnings and reiterated the centrality of small, personal scale and the face-to-face community to the mission:

You start in with a table full of people and pretty soon you have a line and pretty soon you’re living with some of them in a house. You do what you can. God forbid we should have great institutions. The thing is to have many small centers. The ideal is community.

Not long after, reminiscing at the age of 75, she referred to herself as “the housekeeper of the Catholic Worker movement.” It wasn’t the fake humility of today’s political tabloid show. To her, that work is as worthwhile and honorable as any honest service to other people. She passed away in 1980 at the Catholic Worker’s Maryhouse on the Lower East Side. She was 83. If radicals today are looking for a normative model or a plan of action, the life of Dorothy Day, the first hippie, in Abbie Hoffman’s words, will at least provide inspiration. Growing interest in Dorothy Day must not obscure the central facts of her anarchist politics, that the work to which she dedicated her life can’t ever be carried out by the authoritarian, bureaucratic state or by the professional-managerial class administering it. Her commitments were not those of our political class, and she was explicit about that. They point to forms of personal responsibility and solidarity that are structurally incompatible with the state and capitalism. To take her political ethic seriously is to move in a direction directly opposed to the logic and practices of both mainstream and elite politics today.

David S. D’Amato is an attorney, businessman, and independent researcher. He is a Policy Advisor to the Future of Freedom Foundation and a regular opinion contributor to The Hill. His writing has appeared in Forbes, Newsweek, Investor’s Business Daily, RealClearPolitics, The Washington Examiner, and many other publications, both popular and scholarly. His work has been cited by the ACLU and Human Rights Watch, among others.