"He had many heroes during his boyhood and youth . . . Lenin, Hitler, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera . . . Mussolini . . . Peron . . . He knew the speeches of Jose Antonio by memory ... He knew Mein Kampf and also Lenin’s What is to be Done?"
"There are two great and authentic revolutionaries in the world: Mussolini and Hitler. But Mussolini's past shows that the Duce has always been against plutocracy and against democracies, which paralyze the life of nations."
We must accept that the elements of strength in Fascism do not lie only in violence and in the apparat. This dictatorship has done something – not just by means of violence. It has done something even for the workers and the young. We cannot deny that the introduction of social security is a fact.
"Marxism and nationalism coexisted peacefully in the German countries and it was perhaps only a question of time and circumstances when these two ideologies with their fervent admiration for State and Society would merge into one, and National Socialism would arise as a bastard child of Marx and Wagner-Treitschke."
Although communist symbols are still visible in Russia, understanding and dedication to true Marxist ideology ARE NOT widespread in modern Russia. The Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) tends to draw on Soviet-era sentiments rather than strictly adhering to Marxist doctrines. Their political stance generally promotes a form of socialism that advocates welfare, pro-family and policies for the impoverished. In today's Russia, the symbols of communism reflect more nostalgia for Soviet achievements and national pride in the USSR's power, space achievements and key role in winning the Second World War, rather than a strict adherence to Marxist theory or atheism. Reverence for Stalin, for example, is often linked to his wartime leadership rather than his communist policies [...]
Regarding my attitude towards homosexuality, I have long taken the view on basic ground of liberty that adults should be free to do what they wish in private, provided they do not interfere with others.
"The Jew is a dog, son of a dog, which spreads his fleas in every land. It is he who has done the most to inoculate us with the plague of civilization, and who would like to give us his morality also, the morality of money, of capital."
Regarding my attitude towards homosexuality, I have long taken the view on basic ground of liberty that adults should be free to do what they wish in private, provided they do not interfere with others.
"The Jew is a dog, son of a dog, which spreads his fleas in every land. It is he who has done the most to inoculate us with the plague of civilization, and who would like to give us his morality also, the morality of money, of capital."
“Drawing out the implications of some of the concepts of classical Marxism, Ludwig Woltmann fashioned the “political anthropology” that was to inspire some of the leaders of National Socialism.”
In our own time, Woltmann’s intimate association with Marxism is rarely, if ever, cited—and one of the principal sources of the revolutionary racism of the twentieth century thereby obscured. It was the decay of classical Marxism that contributed racism to the mix of revolutionary ideas that were to torment our time. Neither Moses Hess nor Ludwig Woltmann can be dismissed as anomalies. As the subsequent history of revolutionary Marxism was to reveal, racist and reactive nationalist variants of Marxism were to inspire revolutions throughout the doleful history of our most recent past.
Woltmann’s position was that human volition, the product of human thought and moral judgment, was not determined, although it might be conditioned, by economic factors. He argued that it could not be shown with any degree of empirical plausibility that human thought submissively followed socioeconomic “laws of motion.” He insisted that every piece of evidence available indicated that human thought and human will were governed by processes peculiar to themselves. Human thought was governed by epistemological criteria of its own —and the truth that emerged informed the will—and while human beings possessed of truth certainly did not always prevail in history, they did, on occasion, and under certain circumstances, significantly influence its passage.
Woltmann contended that complex human thought could not reasonably be understood to be a simple “reflection” of anything—neither as reflections of anything going on in the processes of biological, nor anything transpiring within the domain of social, evolution. That was true for at least one reason: all Marxists recognized that throughout human history, there have been those who articulate “premature” moral concepts. That is to say, the Stoics of antiquity, the first Jews and Christians, and some thinkers of the earliest societies, advanced notions of fundamental human equality, unqualified brotherhood, universal compassion, and world peace, long before there existed any “mature economic base” to which any of that might “correspond.”
It was at that point that Woltmann insisted that whatever the laws governing evolution, such laws could not be projected over social evolution without recognizing the possibility of grievous error.13 He dismissed the attempt on the part of “bourgeois Darwinists” to see the direct operation of Darwinian laws in human behavior. When Social Darwinists attempted to apply the laws of organic evolution to society, by conceiving laissez faire business practices, for example, the economic equivalent of the “struggle for existence” that typified the animal world, Woltmann argued that they made the same mistake made by those who seek to impose social “laws” on the “laws” of thought. It was at that point that Woltmann introduced a major modification in the Marxist system as it had been inherited.
Woltmann maintained that once some collection of higher primates were no longer content with the spontaneous groupings in which they found themselves in nature—and created the first human societies, there was a qualitative change in the processes governing their association. Social evolution in organized human communities, he insisted, does not follow the same identifiable regularities as general biological evolution. Animal societies may follow the laws of biological evolution, but social evolution among human beings was, in his judgment, qualitatively different. Social evolution among humans proceeds with considerable independence of the laws of biological development— following regularities peculiar to itself.
“Taking all that into account, Woltmann argued that with respect to the founders’ theory of the nature, origin, and evolution of moral judgment and ethical principles, Marxism was incomplete. Not only were there significant gaps in its account of the historical, social, economic, and psychological processes involved—but it left fundamental philosophical issues unexplored. All of that prompted others to sometimes attempt rescue.
Woltmann specifically held that neither Marx nor Engels entertained a sufficiently nuanced conception of the psychological dynamics implied in their conception of the relationship between the ideational products of human beings and socioeconomic change and development. He held, for example, that the founders of Marxism made far too easy transit from physical, material, and class-specific needs to the psychological expressions in which those needs were presumably “reflected.” As a consequence there were those, like Dietzgen, who attempted to supply plausibility of various sorts in the effort to provide more”
