Dear Unknown Friends: 

ere is part 5 of There Are Two Freedoms, the important and beautiful lecture by Eli Siegel we've been serializing.

     On May 22, 1970, Mr. Siegel began his Goodbye Profit System lectures, of which this, of June 5, is one. There had been a massive drop in the stock market; investors lost huge sums of money, and many people were scared. Mr. Siegel was the historian who explained what was really happening-and what has been happening ever since, regardless of the Dow Jones average. He explained that by the end of the 20th century, economics based on the motive of personal profit was no longer able to thrive. It was becoming harder and harder to reap large profits from the labor of one's fellow humans and from the world's resources, which should be everyone's. While profit economics might creak on for some time, its inefficiency was clearer. And throughout America, people resented being seen as instruments for someone else's financial self-enhancement. The resentment is even greater today.

     In his lectures, using history, culture, immediate events, Mr. Siegel described the various reasons why this economic weakening was occurring now. But, he showed, the underlying reason is: profit economics has been based on contempt. And the only way an economy can now succeed is for it to be based on ethics, which is the same as aesthetics-the oneness of opposites.

     In the present lecture, he speaks about crucial opposites, which he calls the "two freedoms": the freedom to express ourselves, assert ourselves; and the freedom (which hasn't been seen as freedom) to be accurate, just. These freedoms need to be one in economics, and haven't yet been, anywhere. They also need to be one in our personal lives. In the lecture Mr. Siegel describes that requisite oneness of the untrammeled and the exact as he looks at diverse texts, from a poem by Wallace Stevens to a stockbroker's newsletter.

The Two Freedoms & Fascism

am going to comment on something Mr. Siegel speaks of swiftly here. It is something of enormous importance, which has not been understood: the relation of what he calls "the financial structure" of Nazi Germany, to the Nazi brutality; and the relation of both to the most hurtful purpose in every person. All three involve a rift between the two freedoms. That is, all three are contempt, the feeling one expresses oneself, increases oneself, not through justice to other things and persons but through lessening them.

     The Columbia Encyclopedia (2nd ed.) has the following in its entry on fascism:

There can be no doubt that...the capitalist and land-owning classes were protected by the fascist system and favored it.

     The encyclopedia's entry on Hitler points out that he received "the financial support of such great industrialists as Fritz Thyssen and the banking house of Schroeder." Winston Churchill, in The Gathering Storm, affirms that the Nazi Party had "so strong a hold...among industrialists." And the noted journalist and press critic George Seldes, in his 1943 book Facts and Fascism, documents the fact that profit economics is fundamental to fascism. Writing during the war, he makes it clear that fascism has been consistently financed, brought into being and sustained, by persons powerful in business. In his second chapter, "Profits in Fascism: Germany," there are statements such as these:

    Hitler was made the Fuehrer of Germany by the biggest industrialists of his country....

    [A] main objective...[was] to crush the workers and abolish the trade unions....The trade unions have been destroyed....

    [In 1932] Big Business and the Junkers [the large landowners]...,worried by the possibility of a swing to the Left through a coalition of [General] Schleicher and the Trade Unions...,[gave Hitler] his much-needed cash for his Party and his own appointment as Chancellor....

    The big American and other banking houses floated their great loans for Hitler-and other fascist dictators in many lands....

    The decree establishing price ceilings was eliminated so that Big Business under Hitler was able to raise prices on numerous occasions....

    Magnates in the banking, industrial and chemical world had taken hold of the entire economic apparatus...and are making unprecedented profits.

The Reason

he reason so many who saw themselves as benefiting from the profit system backed Hitler, is that fascism is, centrally, the profit system untrammeled by such constraints as workers' rights. It is the government fully supporting corporate profit-making, and smashing anything that interferes. Some of the first persons sent to concentration camps were union activists; they preceded the Jews. "Fascism," Mr. Siegel explained, "is the profit system defending itself without any scruples."

     The seeing of human beings, not as persons to understand and be just to, but as material for your self-aggrandizement, is in the profit motive. And it is contempt. Not being clear about the contempt and therefore not seeing what it could take in, made for something Seldes mentions: in the early days, some Jews also "invested in Hitler." Hitler seemed good for business-better than the alternatives.

     The contempt of seeing people in terms of profit has ever so many non-economic, ordinary forms. Take a person-we'll call her Liz-at a social gathering. She does not see it as a chance to understand people, and know and care more deeply for the world. Instead she sees the people there in terms of how much she can impress them, conquer them, and also outshine them. She has social victories but feels empty and more unsure later. She is like various persons in business who act confident but are deeply unsure, because using one's mind to beat out others day after day is not what the human mind was made for.

     A person like Seldes did not see, as Churchill didn't, what relates the fiscal aspect of Nazism to the Gestapo, "Aryan supremacy," gas chambers. What relates them is contempt, and Eli Siegel is the educator who explained it. He defined contempt as "the addition to self through the lessening of something else," and, in his James and the Children, he described it as "a way that says: 'A person made by God exists for me to have glory.'"

     The lessening of another person to glorify oneself is, as I've been pointing out, in the going after profits. It's also in Liz as she gets a thrill feeling another woman at the party is far inferior to her. And it is in the terrible Nazi seeing of other peoples as inferior-with all that came to take in. The attraction of Hitler won't be understood until the human thirst to have contempt is understood. Mr. Siegel explained in issue 142 of this journal:

There was in 1930 a collective desire, caused by bitterness and the feeling of injustice, in many German persons, to see themselves as "superior." This is contempt taking the world as stage and causing...much death, much suffering.

What Isn't Contempt

o we come to that most needed thing in the world-needed in economics, and for human decency and happiness: what isn't contempt. What isn't contempt is the oneness of the two freedoms: the flourishing of our individuality through the just seeing of the world different from us.

     Mr. Siegel gives many instances of it in this lecture. But for now, since we are looking some at World War II, I'll quote from a poem about freedom written in 1942 in Nazi-occupied France: Paul Eluard's "Liberté." Eluard is speaking to Liberty, and says:

On the notebooks I had as a schoolboy,
On my desk and the trees,
On the sand, on the snow,
I write your name.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
On the foam of the clouds,
On the sweatings of the storm,
On the rain thick and dull,
I write your name
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
On my dog, fierce and tender,
On his trained ears,
On his awkward paw,
I write your name.
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
I was born to know you,
To name you:
Liberty.

     The lines of Paul Eluard are reverberating and taut. He says he wants to know liberty-be exact about it. The liberty he fervently honors is the authentic freedom: freedom that is also justice, freedom that is respect.

— ELLEN REISS, Class Chairman of Aesthetic Realism