image file: barrel1

Cartoon depicting fascism as the iron hoop around the
collapsing barrel of capitalism. Scanned from the SLP 
pamphlet, Eric Hass, _The Reactionary Right: Incipient 
Fascism_, 1963, second printing 1966,page 10.

The following excerpt from the text explains the context
of the cartoon.

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The following is an excerpt from the SLP pamphlet, Eric Hass, _The
Reactionary Right: Incipient Fascism_, 1963, second printing
1966, pages 11-12

___________________________________________

The step from capitalist dictatorship in industry to political
dictatorship is a logical one.	"Despotism in economics," as the
American theologian, Jonathan Edwards, put it, "naturally leads to
despotism in politics."

Here is the root cause of the danger of which the reactionary
right is a manifestation.  As we said on another occasion:

[In the following paragraph, Eric Hass quotes from his previous
pamphlet, "Fascism is Still a Menace", 1848 -- comment by
deleonism.org web site editor.]

"..  We have been encouraged to stare with fascinated horror at
the spectacle of whole nations reduced through bodily torture and
systematic intellectual stultification to the abjuration of moral
conscience and to the worship of force.  These distractions have
served to conceal the inner essence of fascism, which, as we shall
show, is really nothing more nor less than an attempt to prolong
and strengthen the rule of the predominant capitalist element
through the medium of an all-powerful State.  Its aim is, on the
one hand, to arrest the contradictions which threaten to undermine
capitalism, and, on the other, to break the back of working-class
resistance.  Fascism, as the Russian anti-Stalinist publicist Karl
Radek put it, is the iron hoop around the collapsing barrel of
capitalism."