Is a Permanent Revolution Occurring? Part 1
By [post_author] –
Posted on Freedom Advocates on April 23rd 2008
Professor Steven Yates summarizes his several year assessment of Terry Hayfield’s provocative and well annotated political assessment of the philosophy, methodology and participants behind an American commitment to implement Trotsky’s description of “Permanent Revolution.” Is Hayfield onto the core analysis of contemporary political economics? Several relevant radio interviews with Hayfield or Yates are also in our radio archive.
Greenville, South Carolina
As I’ve mentioned a time or two, back in December of 2004 (a few weeks before I moved to Greenville) my first NewsWithViews.com publication appeared: “The Real Matrix,” in seven parts. The series created a bit of a stir on the Internet, leading to several speaking invitations, one of them as far away as Reno, Nev. (Freedom 21’s 6th annual meeting on the dangers of UN-sponsored Sustainable Development).
The series also garnered hundreds of emails. Replying to each individually was hopeless, and I had to abandon even trying. There are only so many hours in a day. Now I understood why I couldn’t get timely responses from writers far more visible than I!
A few emails stood out, however. One in particular came from an Ohio resident, Terry L. Hayfield. His credentials were unusual, but unusually impressive. Hayfield had attended Bowling Green State University, worked as a union organizer and had also been active in the John Birch Society (interesting combination!) but had left the latter disillusioned. He had signed on to be presidential campaign advisor to Larry McDonald, prior to McDonald’s ill-fated flight on KAL007. An article in International Currency Review had praised him as this country’s leading authority on the sovietization of the American work force. He had co-authored, with Joan Veon (an authority on the UN’s rise to global power) an article entitled “Understanding the Real Threat to the American Republic” for the July-August 2004 UN Watch. Hayfield was clearly no amateur, and he wasn’t a dilettante.
Hayfield’s was an offer to share research. He described himself as “a student of the Permanent Revolution.” He correctly observed, “a false premise supported by valid data results in a false conclusion.” My thesis in “The Real Matrix,” he believed, rested on a false premise: it did not recognize the existence of the Permanent Revolution.
While nobody is exactly comfortable being told their position rests on a false premise, Hayfield had my attention. I quickly searched the Web, located, and read everything of his I could lay my hands on: articles with names like “Radio Encounters of the Third Kind” which showed that Ann Coulter and David Horowitz are not what they seem, “The Road to a United Soviets of America” in three parts (all of these are on NewsWithViews.com) and “The Permanent Revolution” (the clearest statement of his thesis which appeared in The Idaho Observer in 2003). His offer to share his research was sincere. At his own expense he sent me five ring binders of material he had collected and annotated over a period of 30 years. They sit next to my desk in easy reach. I consult them fairly often. One contains the crucial 1980 Forbes article “What’s a Trilateral Commission?” This is the first (to my knowledge) admission by a ‘reputable’ (i.e., establishment) publication that the organization David Rockefeller and Zbigniew Brzezinski had formed almost a decade earlier really exists.
What is the Permanent Revolution? The phrase was used by Marx and Engels, and later by Trotsky, but I’ll let Hayfield state his updated account in his own words: “The Permanent Revolution is the continual process of war, revolution, and terror intended to facilitate the global proliferation of a specific and unified Anglo/British capitalism based on the precepts of the Fabian Society …” (from “The Permanent Revolution”).
What a minute! Weren’t the Fabians socialists, not capitalists? Yes, but listen: “The Permanent Revolution … is an ongoing evolution of capitalism into socialism, which will eventually lead to the implementation of a self-regulating, classless society. In essence, capitalism, socialism and communism are integral parts of the same perpetual procedure.”
In other words, if Hayfield is correct, then capitalism and socialism—rightly understood—are not and have never been opposites the way they are usually depicted. Nor have capitalism and communism. They are different stages of the same extended process.
One of the surprising results—surprising to those who haven’t done their homework—is that communism is not dead, because genuine communism hasn’t happened yet! Marx believed that history went through stages. Feudalism gave rise to a capitalist class (the bourgeoisie). Capitalism would in turn give rise to socialism, which would in turn evolve into communism.
Capitalism could not fully give rise to socialism until it was a global phenomenon. Hence the necessity (which classical Marxists overlooked) of building up global capitalism. Capitalism in just a few nations wouldn’t do. Only then, at the height of its development, could it evolve into global socialism, and then into communism. Near the end of his life, Marx realized: socialism is impossible without capitalism. The Fabians also figured it out, along with the realization that violent revolution wasn’t necessary. Hence the Fabians’ methodology of penetrate and permeate, changing first specific organizations and then entire societies from within, including manipulating non-Fabians into furthering Fabian goals.
This is Hayfield’s answer to the befuddled query above: if the Fabians are socialists, then how can they be involved in promoting Anglo/American capitalism? Again: socialism cannot come to pass without capitalism getting there first.
Thus the most disturbing finding: if communism is considered dead, no one will notice if its conditions are being instituted in twenty-first century America.
Now allow me to clarify. Hayfield is using capitalism for what I have previously called corporatism. If capitalism and socialism are not really opposed but parts of the same process, there seem to be two forms of economic arrangement both of which have been called capitalist by different authors. These are laissez-faire or free enterprise capitalism, and corporatist capitalism. The two, ironically, are bitter foes, probably unable to coexist peaceably in the same society. The latter will attack and attempt to obliterate the former.
Under laissez-faire or free enterprise capitalism—the system championed by, for example, Frederic Bastiat—everyone pulls his own weight. Both business and politics are local, for major decisions are made locally, not by men headquartered hundreds of miles away. The system is decentralized, because central government is indeed limited to a few specified functions such as punishing lawbreakers and securing borders. It otherwise stays out of everyone’s hair. It does not subsidize a small business into a large business, nor regulate businesses into near-extinction. Under this kind of system one will find family farms, craftsmen, doctors who actually have bedside manner, shopkeepers with local clientele, and other small endeavors. The economy is never far from an agrarian base—from the realization that the first principle of economy is the necessity of feeding oneself and one’s own. Change will occur, but slowly; growth happens, but kept on a leash. Neither is seen as an end in itself; neither is allowed to disrupt community systems that have passed the test of time, e.g., extended families.
Corporatist capitalism is a different animal altogether. One of my disagreements with Hayfield was over his determination to use the term capitalism for this system, but it does involve something essential to any form of capitalism: private ownership of the means of production. Corporatist capitalism, however, does not trust free enterprise. Government is brought in via support for politicians to ensure the production and distribution of desired goods; hence under corporatist capitalism government and large business enterprises end up in close protective partnerships. If you need an example, look at pharmaceuticals, the food industry, and their essential control over the FDA which, e.g., got aspartame into diet drinks. Corporatist capitalism seeks monopoly and control, e.g., the attempt to undermine and destroy the competing diet supplements industry.
Corporatists aren’t opposed to government regulation, because smaller competitors, unable to afford the cost of compliance, are driven out of the market. To the corporatist, bigger is better. Growth is God. Revolutionary change is inevitable. This part of the process was identified by economist Joseph Schumpeter as creative destruction (see his treatise Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy) and, more recently, by none other than Alan Greenspan (see The Age of Turbulence). According to corporatist capitalism, if change disrupts people’s lives and communities, then so be it. If stable careers are destroyed and extended families are scattered all over the country and family members isolated by the continual need to seek new employment, those are the breaks.
By the mid-1800s, corporatist capitalism had appeared in America bankrolled by the European Rothschild dynasty. By the late 1800s, it was pushing out laissez-faire. (“Competition,” John D. Rockefeller Sr. had declared, “is a sin.”) By the early 20th century, laissez-faire’s defeat in the centers of power and influence was complete (it continued to exist out in the boonies, of course, and in the “underground economy”).
By this time, the Fabian Society had been created in England (early 1880s). Fabians created the London School of Economics in 1895. The LSE became a center for the spread of Fabian ideas. Hayfield believes—in my view correctly—that the Fabians were the real motive force behind the Rhodes / Round Table groups Carroll Quigley discusses in Tragedy and Hope. Their networking brought Cecil Rhodes and, e.g., Alfred Milner together.
Oddly, Quigley never mentioned the Fabians. According to Hayfield, this is a red flag—an indication that Quigley was not entirely forthright, for he cannot possibly have not known about them. Hayfield believes Quigley wrote Tragedy and Hope to provide an account of modern history that is power-elite conscious (as many in his intended audience had become, even then) but with the intent to divert attention from the Permanent Revolution, within which the Fabians played a central role.
The Fabians had come to America, obviously. Both they and the international banking cartel got behind Woodrow Wilson, essentially engineering his election in 1912. Then, near the end of 1913, Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act—signing over control of the U.S. economy to corporatist capitalists whose financial power lay with huge European banks and whose intellectual and activist wing was the Fabian Society. Although globalist bankers were putting up the money, Fabians permeated their institutions. David Rockefeller wrote a senior thesis entitled “Destitution Through Fabian Eyes” (1935) and then studied at the LSE (after having studied economics at Harvard under Schumpeter). President John F. Kennedy would also study at the LSE.
Hayfield’s term for the power elite is the Radical Capitalist Class (RCC), which seeks to remove all global barriers to its brand of British-American corporate capitalism. This is not just another “conspiracy theory.” There are thousands of “conspiracy theories.” All, according to Hayfield, are false. What makes them false is not that they are “conspiracy theories” but that they fail to acknowledge the Permanent Revolution and so leave us with a false view of recent history and our present reality.
A major disagreement Hayfield has with me is over why the power elite does what it does. The position I’d expressed (and have reiterated in this column numerous times): there is in any population or society a minority that is fascinated by power, measures all value in terms of power, and will do whatever it takes to seek and maximize its power in some cases simply because it can.
Hayfield’s view: the power elite does what it does not because it can but because it must. Following Schumpeter, he argues that British-American capitalism is never static; its own internal dynamic compels those at its helm to constantly seek new markets for what it produces. Otherwise, it falls into crisis and must resort to some sort of fascism. Hayfield calls this the flaw of capitalism: over-production and under-consumption. I have to admit: these days when I deep-six the three or more (on the average) credit card offers I get in the mail per week, or note the constant advertisements we are all bombarded with on a daily basis, I hear Hayfield’s phrase the flaw of capitalism in my head. There are people out there who desperately want to persuade me to part company with my hard-earned money (consume), perhaps because they have produced more than they can sell (over-produced). And think of the (Greenspan-induced) housing bubble, the subprime lending mess, and the crisis situation our financial system faces. The idea isn’t crazy, not by a long shot. But is it correct?
To be continued next week in Part Two.
Dr. Steven Yates, Ph.D., philosophy. Authored two books, Civil Wrongs: What Went Wrong With Affirmative Action (1994) and Worldviews: Christian Theism versus Modern Materialism (2005), roughly two dozen articles and reviews in refereed professional journals, and hundreds of opinion columns both online and in news periodicals. He writes a column for the Greenville-SC weekly The Times Examiner.
He was involved in the struggles against CAFTA and the FTAA, participated in a successful citizens’ effort to have legislation passed declining to implement the Real ID Act of 2005 in South Carolina, and was active in the Ron Paul campaign. He has spoken to local, state-level and national groups including the Patriot Network, the Georgia Eagle Forum, Freedom 21, and the John Birch Society. He lives in the Greenville, South Carolina area, commutes between two colleges teaching philosophy and is pondering the fate of his latest almost-completed book The Real Matrix: Fabricated Reality in the Emerging New World Order in light of the fact that for all practical purposes the New World Order is here and he doesn’t want to end up a political prisoner.
