Writings of a decaying

by Tom A SERIES of writings by theorists of the extreme right is being issued by Jonathan Cape under the general editorship of George Steiner.

Each volume consists of extracts, rather than whole works, making accessible to English readers texts which, in some cases, have not been translated before, or have been out of print for some time.

Whatever the literary merits of their authors, the subject matter, if nothing else, makes them tedious and unpleasant reading.

They are not addressed to the masses, but to highly literate people who believe that they belong to an élite.

Steiner calls the authors 'élitist, racist and totalitarian dreamers' who have offered an alternative to liberalism and bourgeois democracy. He says that their programme has come near 'to destroying our civilization and is so alive it must be studied'.

Actually these writings are a product of bourgeois society its decay. Certainly they provide an alternative programme-which the ruling class readily enough makes use of when the old compromises-upon which liberal democracy rest - break up under the pressure of economic crisis. They set out a programme for saving the established order. Their aim is to conserve, however barbarous the means which they condone or to which their doctrinés lead.

European rightists have generally been more articulate, more theoretical, than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. But there should be no mistake: the right in Britain and America rests philosophically on the same élitist and racialist foundations, however its spokesmen may disguise the fact in hypocritical lip-service to liberalism and democracy.

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{17.12 for 12 months (312 Issues) {8.56 for 6 months (156 issues) {4.29 for 3 months (78 issues) If you want to take Workers Press twice a week {1.32 for 3 months (24 issues) £5.28 for 12 months (96 issues Fill in the form below NOW and send to : CIrculation Depl., Workers Press, 186a Clapham London. SW4. I would like to take out a subscription to Workers Press. Days required MONDAY THURSDAY (Please tick) TUESDAY FRIDAY Or Full subscription (six days) for. Name Address Amount enclosed [ ALRUISKY ANTHOLOGY So, in taking up these works, we do so from a point of view which is directly opposed to that of Steiner and the other editors -who, by the way, are ignorant of, or hostile towards, Marxism.

They try to maintain a distinction between the sociology of fascism and the theory to be found in these writings.

Of course, they disagree with them and abhor the consequences which they believe that they have. But they do not begın trom a materialist standpoint.

That would mean taking sides. It would mean deciding by what means reaction and fascism can be fought. They are unable to do this. The whole question of rightist thought and fascist terror becomes an enigma to them : something terrible and scarcely explicable in rational terms.

Fascism can only be fought by the working class under the leadership of a revolutionary party based upon Marxist theory: that is the lesson of German and Italian history.

The answer to counter-revolution is revolution.

Steiner and his friends seek a third way, a way in which capitalism continues to exist and the bourgeoisie remains the ruling class.

But as long as capitalism exists the fascist programme does remain alive.

It cannot be demolished by rational arguments, by science, by education, but only in a conflict of living forces, that is, in the course of the class struggle which leads to the victory of the working class.

The three books in the series are: 'Alfred Rosenberg: Selected Writings • Writings'" and The 'Gobineau: Selected French Right (from de Maistre to Maurras' send to NATIONAL LABOUR LEAGUE, LONDON, SW4.

The dally paper that leads the fight against the Tories.

WEDNESDAY SATURDAY months. )TSK GERMANY able. to power'.

Racial ALFRED ROSENBERG was the leading philosopher of the Nazi movement and had a big influence on the thinking of Hilter. When the Nazis took power, he was put in charge of the party's ideological office, and in July, 1941, became Minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories. Tried at Nuremberg with other Nazi leaders, he was hanged in As Pois points out in the introduction, Rosenberg, who fled from Russia during the Revolution, first learnt his anti-Semitism from right-wing Russian circles who believed that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish plot.

Already, in 1919, a former Tsarist colonel called Vinburg had called for the extermination of the Jewish people.

Rosenberg and Hitler never put such a demand on paper -they simply proceeded to carry it into practice. when they were Rosenberg also drew on various strands in German 19th century thought-the nationalism of the Romantic movement and its hatred for the city (and thus love for the 'soil'); the 'scientific' racial theories of writers like Gobineau and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, which he combined with popular anti-Semitism; and the theories of Nietzsche regarding the 'superman' and the 'will theories His guiding theme is the racial superiority of the blond, blueeyed master race which originated in N Europe, or perhaps in some lost Atlantis.

From there they began to spread out in the early Stone Age, to léave traces in various parts of the world. In this respect Rosenberg is a supporter of the largely discredited diffusionist school.

At the other end of the racial scale is the jew, who is depicted as a sinister and evil figure who 'had no feeling for a homeland' and thus wandered the earth using usury and fraud to establish the economic power of his race.

The Nazi party could not have come to power unless it was able to capture the support of millions of Germans. Its main appeal was to the middle class, crushed between the big monopolies and the working-class movement and looking for an' ideology in which it could assert itself when the old world seemed to be crumbling.

Rosénberg came from this class and he fashioned such a theory.

Its elements were diverse. It was consciously anti-materialist. It rejected class analysis in favour of the race and the nation. It despised the liberal creed which the bourgeoisie had developed in its period as a progressive class. It abounds in terms like "race', 'blood', 'will'. It gave the appearance of being very erudite.