The Crisis of the 1930s and the Current Crisis

 

To understand what is happening to us, it is advisable to look to history for similar situations that can help us orient ourselves toward what may come by comparing them with what occurred then. It is therefore not only a matter of seeing the similarities, but also of grasping the differences, because history, as Hegel maintained, advances in a spiral, and the functional parallels that can be observed must be adjusted to new parameters that mark the difference in historical level. The currently dominant trend in the media is the danger of a return, in Western countries, to an extreme right-wing totalitarianism similar to the fascist and Nazi totalitarianism of the 1930s. In this way, the left presents itself as the true defender of democracy against this perceived threat in new anti-system parties, such as Vox in Spain, which it demonizes as fascist.

But this can be done from a biased and false interpretation of history, which can be exposed with a deeper analysis of what happened in the 1930s. The contradiction that ignited political polarization was that of capitalism/socialism, whose political and ideological origins lie in the 19th century. The victorious Russian Revolution of 1917 provoked a confrontation between capitalism and communism that culminated in World War II and the division of the world into the so-called Cold War. Likewise, within the Western world, a division arose between liberalism and fascism in an attempt to halt the seemingly unstoppable advance of communism. In Italy and Germany, faced with the middle classes' panic over worker-led communism, the extreme reaction of the fascist and Nazi parties emerged, destroying their fragile liberal democracies and establishing right-wing totalitarian regimes as a reaction to the perceived threat of a dictatorship of the proletariat like the one established in Russia.

However, in England, then the world's leading power, and in the USA, both established liberal democracies, neither communism nor fascism gained much traction. Nevertheless, both countries were forced to abandon the dogmas of classical liberalism, which prohibited state intervention in the economy, by promoting Roosevelt's New Deal and Keynesian economics to win the war and overcome the Great Depression of 1929. Ultimately, after the defeat of Nazi Germany, the economic rivalry between the USA and the USSR was resolved with the collapse of the Soviet model of economic interventionism. The USA, with its state intervention, did not eliminate the market or private investment, which allowed it to create a welfare state, especially in Europe after the Marshall Plan, which integrated the working class into the system and prevented its predicted impoverishment.

The current crisis is very different in its origin, stemming from the technological globalization that has occurred in recent decades following the Cold War, and from the emergence of new globalist ideologies that aim not merely to destroy capitalism, but to make it completely global, for which the existence of borders established by nation-states is an obstacle. The contradiction now lies between Globalism and Nationalism. However, certain functional similarities are reappearing with this different parameter. The main one is the political polarization we are witnessing with the rise of new radical political forces with opposing views. The emergence of the movement to globally save the planet, along with the woke movement that advocates for the promotion of multicultural societies that allow for the equal coexistence of all cultures, is disrupting the traditional, standardized liberal democracies of the West. The introduction of “political correctness” stemming from such dogmas increasingly resembles a “dictatorship of minorities,” formerly persecuted or stigmatized, equivalent to what the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was during the Great Depression. This woke movement, which began in American universities, derived from Foucault’s post-structuralist French philosophy—just as Marxism derived from the so-called “Young Hegelians” of the University of Berlin—has taken hold in the USA through the Democratic Party led by Obama, and has spread throughout Europe, seriously transforming the original project of the European Union into one subordinated to globalist policies. The Republican Party under Trump has emerged as a counter-reaction.

In Spain, the traditional Socialist Party has mutated, starting with former President Zapatero and continuing with the current President Sánchez, becoming a globalist party and a proponent of woke ideology. The fundamental problem, we believe, lies in whether the destruction of nation-states is possible or desirable, just as communism believed it could destroy capitalism and replace it with a better system.

Manuel F. Lorenzo