Sutton quotes: "primed Hegelianism" / "applied dialectics" as ahistorio

Another great Sutton work particularly for leftists wishing to avoid 
supporting a totalitarianism that simply wraps itself up in leftist 
discourses they admire. . .

Here's a quote from its opening, dealing with what I call "applied 
dialectics" or "primed Hegelianism", (for lack of anyone else I am aware of 
naming it first, I suppose) which was mentioned earlier last week in the post:

Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2003 23:27:19 -0700
From: Michael Pugliese <debsian@pacbell.net>
Subject: Re: WEB INTELLIGENCE # 2 - jULY 23, 2003 (fwd)

which read:
John Leonard says Anthony Sutton is worth reading. Look at this.
  http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_sutton.html
Found via,
http://www.centrexnews.com/
Antony Sutton on "Left" versus "Right" and the Hegelian dialectic in 
American politics



MORE ON PRIMED HEGELIANISM:


Below is the opening quote from his early 1970s book Wall Street and the 
Bolshevik Revolution.

Chapter I

THE ACTORS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY STAGE

[this is an opening chapter quote]
Dear Mr. President:

I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for 
the Russian people...

Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from William Lawrence 
Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp. [*Cheney's Halliburton bought 
49%/51% of this corp in 1998, IRC sold oil supplies to Saddam around 
American legal blockade (ed.)]; director, American International Corp.; and 
deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York


[picture as frontspiece: political cartoon showing 'capitalists' swooning 
around "communist agitator," Marx]

The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in 1911 
for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and writer who 
doubled as a Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in Russia in 
1915 for alleged subversion, and was later bank-rolled by prominent Wall 
Street financiers. Minor's cartoon portrays a bearded, beaming Karl Marx 
standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked under his arm and accepting 
the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P. Morgan, Morgan partner 
George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan of National 
City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt — prominently identified by his famous teeth 
— in the background. Wall Street is decorated by Red flags. The cheering 
crowd and the airborne hats suggest that Karl Marx must have been a fairly 
popular sort of fellow in the New York financial district.

Was Robert Minor dreaming?

On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was on firm ground in depicting an 
enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street and Marxist socialism. The characters 
in Minor's cartoon — Karl Marx (symbolizing the future revolutionaries 
Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller — and indeed Robert 
Minor himself, are also prominent characters in this book.

The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under the 
rug of history because they do not fit the accepted conceptual spectrum of 
political left and political right. Bolsheviks are at the left end of the 
political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; 
therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and 
any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat 
conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or 
unfortunate errors. Modern history possesses such a built-in duality and 
certainly if too many uncomfortable facts have been rejected and brushed 
under the rug, it is an inaccurate history.

On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the 
extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely 
collectivist.

The national socialist (for example, the fascist) and the international 
socialist (for example, the Communist) both recommend totalitarian 
politico-economic systems based on naked, unfettered political power and 
individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly control of society.

While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J. P. Morgan 
and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of 
Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged 
monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the 
monopolists — under the name of the public good and the public interest. 
This strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions 
of a Monopolist.1 Howe, by the way, is also a figure in the story of the 
Bolshevik Revolution.

Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and 
politico-economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of individual 
freedom versus the degree of centralized political control. Under such an 
ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at the same end of 
the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of society can 
have different labels while owning common features.

Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the 
notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all 
Marxists and socialists. This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and 
was undoubtedly useful to his purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. 
There has been a continuing, albeit concealed, [empirically reserachable, 
(ed.)] alliance between international political capitalists and 
international revolutionary socialists — to their mutual benefit. This 
alliance has gone unobserved largely because historians — with a few 
notable exceptions — have an unconscious Marxian bias [sic] and are thus 
locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The 
open-minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are 
the bitter enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the 
weaknesses of socialist central planning, the totalitarian socialist state 
is a perfect captive market for monopoly capitalists, if an alliance can be 
made with the socialist powerbrokers.

Suppose — and it is only hypothesis at this point — that American monopoly 
capitalists were able to reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of 
a captive technical colony? Would not this be the logical twentieth-century 
internationalist extension of the Morgan railroad monopolies and the 
Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?

Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard [O dear, (ed.)], and the 
revisionists, historians have not been alert for such a combination of 
events. Historical reporting, with rare exceptions, has been forced into a 
dichotomy of capitalists versus socialists.

George Kennan's monumental and readable study of the Russian Revolution 
consistently maintains this fiction of a Wall Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.2 
Russia Leaves the War has a single incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan 
firm and no reference at all to Guaranty Trust Company.
Yet both organizations are prominently mentioned in the State Department 
files, to which frequent reference is made in this book, and both are part 
of the core of the evidence presented here. Neither self-admitted 
"Bolshevik banker" Olof Aschberg nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is mentioned 
in Kennan yet both were central to Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in minor 
yet crucial circumstances, at least crucial for our argument, Kennan is 
factually in error. For example, Kennan cites Federal Reserve Bank director 
William Boyce Thompson as leaving Russia on November 27, 1917. This 
departure date would make it physically impossible for Thompson to be in 
Petrograd on December 2, 1917, to transmit a cable request for $1 million 
to Morgan in New York. Thompson in fact left Petrograd on December 4, 1918, 
two days after sending the cable to New York. Then again, Kennan states 
that on November 30, 1917, Trotsky delivered a speech before the Petrograd 
Soviet in which he observed, "Today I had here in the Smolny Institute two 
Americans closely connected with American Capitalist elements "According to 
Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who these two Americans "could have 
been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act Alexander Gumberg was 
Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in Russia on November 
30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were more than likely 
Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder, and Thompson, of the 
Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

The Bolshevization of Wall Street was known among well informed circles as 
early as 1919. The financial journalist Barron recorded a conversation with 
oil magnate E. H. Doheny in 1919 and specifically named three prominent 
financiers, William Boyce Thompson, Thomas Lamont and Charles R. Crane:

	Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.

	Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If you 
believe in 	democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is the 
poison that destroys 	democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all. 
Socialism holds out the hope that a 	man can quit work and be better off. 
Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if you will 	read the 
interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle of 
January 	that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German 
sympathizers, Socialists, 	and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of 
the college professors in the United States 	are teaching socialism and 
Bolshevism and that fifty-two college professors were on so-	called peace 
committees in 1914. President Eliot of Harvard is teaching Bolshevism. 
The 	worst Bolshevists in the United States are not only college 
professors, of whom President 	Wilson is one, but capitalists and the wives 
of capitalists and neither seem to know what 	they are talking about. 
William Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet 	convert 
Lamont of J.P. Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is Charles 
R. 	Crane. Many women are joining the movement and neither they, nor their 
husbands, know 	what it is, or what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and 
so are most of those one hundred 	historians Wilson took abroad with him in 
the foolish idea that history can teach youth 	proper demarcations of 
races, peoples, and nations geographically.3

In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, 
but a story that departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach of 
capitalists versus Communists. Our story postulates a partnership between 
international monopoly capitalism and international revolutionary socialism 
for their mutual benefit. The final human cost of this alliance has fallen 
upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and the individual American. 
Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the world has been 
propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of these 
monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.

This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution.

The tsars and their corrupt political system were ejected only to be 
replaced by the new powerbrokers of another corrupt political system. Where 
the United States could have exerted its dominant influence to bring about 
a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions of a few Wall Street financiers 
who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized tsarist Russia or a 
centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia. And the 
reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the underlying and, 
so far, untold history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.4



Footnotes:

1"These are the rules of big business. They have superseded the teachings 
of our parents and are reducible to a simple maxim: Get a monopoly; let 
Society work for you: and remember that the best of all business is 
politics, for a legislative grant, franchise, subsidy or tax exemption is 
worth more than a Kimberly or Comstock lode, since it does not require any 
labor, either mental or physical, lot its exploitation" (Chicago: Public 
Publishing, 1906), p. 157.

2George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (New York: Atheneum, 1967); and 
Decision to Intervene.. Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920 (Princeton, 
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1958).

3Arthur Pound and Samuel Taylor Moore, They Told Barron (New York: Harper & 
Brothers, 1930), pp. 13-14.

4There is a parallel, and also unknown, history with respect to the 
Makhanovite movement that fought both the "Whites" and the "Reds" in the 
Civil War of 1919-20 (see Voline, The Unknown Revolution [New York: 
Libertarian Book Club, 1953]). There was also the "Green" movement, which 
fought both Whites and Reds. The author has never seen even one isolated 
mention of the Greens in any history of the Bolshevik Revolution. Yet the 
Green Army was at least 700,000 strong!

[see web address: "don't shoot the messenger" ;-) They only posted it, 
anyone of any stripe can read it, including me. When you are looking for 
empirical information, web addresses should be read with absolute value 
signs around them, removing positive or negative intent, without any 
normative intent, though be aware of it as simply another bit of 
information. ;-) ]
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/chapter_01.htm

MORE INFORMATION ON SUTTON FROM WHAT I HAVE GATHERED

British born, Sutton was edcuated in Germany (Gottigen); PhD., professor of 
Economics at Stanford; fellow of Hoover Institute; He wrote a three volume 
history of Soviet Technology in the late 1960s and came to "conclusions" 
that upset the right-wing Hoover Institute: his fellowship was withdrawn 
and he was blacklisted from American academia for life. What did he find? 
Well, that the whole Soviet Union was a US corporate colony, following 
ideas of "primed Hegelianism" and simple desires for a secure captive 
market to administrate without local or global competition. He wrote a 
short summary of this very empirical three volume set, _Best Enemy Money 
Can Buy_. The three volume set of the late 1960s is still considered the 
definitive treatment of Soviet technology in the present.

MORE SUTTON BOOKS ON THE WEB

Several Sutton books are available on the web, for free:

Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/index.html

Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/wall_street/index.html

Best Enemy Money Can Buy
http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/best_enemy/index.html



Regards,


Mark Whitaker
University of Wisconsin-Madison