Re: AUT: Fascism

["cwright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> >>> cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/21/02 09:03AM >>>
>  Fascism may certainly respond to mass workers'
> movements, but it is a specific response, not just of the bourgeoisie, of
> the capitalists.  It also took place in the era of the transition from
> professional to mass worker.  What might this have to do with fascism as
we
> knew it?  Would it also be connected to statification as a way of
> reorganizing the class composition, hence the tendency towards state
> capitalism?
>
> Tahir: But isn't state capitalism inherently connected with nationalism in
some or other way, as I was suggesting? All the examples I can think of
suggest this.

Chris:
I'm not suggesting that nationalism is not a part of state capitalism.
Nationalism is a part of every capitalist state.  I don't see nationalism as
unique in that sense to fascism or state capitalism.  Maybe I missed
something in the earlier part of your discussion.  I will go back and review
it.

> If so, maybe we would have to reverse the relation of fascism
> and state capitalism, with fascism being one means of bringing about
greater
> integration with the state of all aspects of social life for the working
> class?
>
> Tahir: This is a bit too telelogical, isn't it? For example, how does this
explain WHY the bourgeoisie, or a section thereof, would suddenly favour the
state cap option at a particular moment?

Chris:
I am not proposing that the bourgeoisie would 'favor the state cap option',
but that they got pushed into it sort of willy nilly.  The tendency towards
state capitalism in Germany clearly went back to the 1880's.  In the
process, I think that the fascist movement enforced a certain statization of
previously 'private' relations and added new obligations upon the state.
Remember, the fascist movement (not the leadership, mostly) also saw
themselves as anti-big business.  That's why Roemer and the Brown Shirts had
to be destroyed.  A similar reckoning with the mobilized fascist masses
happens in every example I can think of, though to greater or lesser
degrees.

This element, while it gets smashed after its own victory, can nonetheless
be a part of forcing (in concert with the need of the state to integrate the
atomized workers in some ways) the state to expand its control over
'private' capital in a number of ways.  As such, I am simply sceptical of
the idea that some people have raised in the past that fascism is simply
part of the logic of the 'state capitalist epoch'.  That reeks of
structuralist and capital-logic approach.  Fascism is not simply a
'capital-logic' or a state form.  Fascism is a mass movement similar to what
appeared in 1848, a mass reactionary movement of the middle class against
both capital and labr, but having no basis for opposing the capital-labor
relation as such, that movement becomes a bludgeon against the working
class, one that also, in the process, autonomizes the state apparatus
relative to the capitalist class, in order to defend capital as a whole.

> If this is reasonable, then might the end of the professional worker and a
> mass petty bourgeoisie have meant the end of classical fascism?  After
all,
> even if I argue that the PB still exists as a class, it is certainly much
> tinier than it was in the 1930's, prolly less than 20% of the total
> population.  Might this also not explain the emergence of fascist or
> fascist-like regimes in countries with the professional worker class
> composition?  (Harald's comments on Iraq and the Baathists come to mind,
but
> others as well, such as Argentina, Greece, etc.)  As such, it would also
> explain why fascism has ceased to appear in the developed countries.
>
> Tahir: You mean to become dominant at the level of the state in recent
times? You surely don't believe that fascist movements don't exist and have
any appeal right now? It is certainly not accurate to say that fascism has
ceased to appear.

Chris:
note: 'Classical fascism'.  Certainly fascism as an ideology has appeal
still in the most developed countries, although I have not seen it take
state power in any of the most advanced capitalist powers since the 1930's.

commie00, the idea that Dauve has that capital has found better mechanisms
is problematic.  It assumes that capital can pick and choose.  Capital could
not pick what weapons it had available in the 1920's and 30's.  At a certain
point, this mass middle class movement which hated the working class, but
which made the capitalist class nervous exactly because it was a big
movement, became the only available option for decomposing the working
class, for breaking the working class.  Since capital is a social relation
and NOT a consciousness, how capital is defended happens through the
multitude of contradictory responses that the people caught up in the
capital-labor relation have, through a multitude of forms, especially, but
not only, the state form.  each form is open to and comprised of class
struggle, of the antagonistism of labor within and against capital.  As
such, the state is not a unitary institution with a single mind, but a
single apparatus composed of multifarious parts which comes to resolution
often only by its own internal power struggles over different responses and
solution to problems raised by insurgent labor in different specific ways.
Hence, the appearance of 'sectional' conflicts for capital between light
industry, heavy industry, hi-tech, agriculture, etc.  A sectoral analysis
reifies the structural appearance, failing to grasp those sectoral patterns
as connected to different capitals and capitalists responding to different
pressures from different sections of the working class, or responding
differntly to the same struggles of the working class.  Fascism only makes
sense in this way, as a state apparatus, because this allows it to be a
normal representatation of the state form as the outcome of actual class
struggle, and not simply a structural logic of power.

> Also, fascism is not an aberration of the state form (as Poulantzas
> thought), but one of the actual representations of its form.
>
> Tahir: Why not the purest of all its forms?

Chris:  That might be a pointless discussion.  However, I tend to think that
democracy is prolly the most natural form because the one person-one vote
model corresponds most directly to the market and the appearance of the
market as the realm of freedom, choice, etc.  That however, is an opinion
and one I am not bent on.

>   If in thinking
> of the discussion of form and essence raised a while back, we might want
to
> concretize it in the Hegelian idea of Universal, Particular and Unique, in
> which essence and form play the role of Universal and Particular, while
any
> actual state is not a form (the Particular), but the Unique, since each
> state apparatus is a unique happening of the state form as the
> particularization of the political as Universal.  Of course, I could also
be
> stretching the Hell out of this and mixing my categories.  ;)
>
> Tahir: I would like you to expand on "each state apparatus is a unique
happening ..." I find this uniqueness very hard to see.

Chris:
Well the idea is prolly too simplistic.  I am thinking here of the fallout
from the state derivation debate.  On the one hand, we have 'the state' as
described in Marxist literature.  On the other hand, we have a multiplicity
of actually existing states.  The essence of the state, one could say,
derives from the capital-labor relation.  The Essence of 'the state'
involves what unites all states as capitalist states, which is
particularized in the state as a specific 'form' or mode of existence or
mediation of the capital-labor relation, the mediation of the separation of
the realm of production from the realm of exchange, embodied in the
separation of production from social control.  The particularity of the
capitalist state therefore involves it as a specific mediation of the
capital-labor relation.  The Unique comes into play in historically
grappling with each individual instance of the capitalist state as
mediation.  The German state has a unique history, grounded in specific
struggles, histories, and outcomes unlike any other.  The same can be said
for every state.  This allows for a conception of the state as having a
common grounding as a similar social relation across the whole world, making
'the state' a totality (the Universal) which fragments into captalist states
(Particular) represented as specific states with their own histories
(Unique), rather than bourgeois political science's assumption of a
multitude of individual states coming together to form an 'international
community' of states.

As such, each individual capitalist state is the Unique representation of
the working out of the Universal and the Particular.  Of course, this also
allows for the idea that 'national' is a contested idea and what forms a
'national state' at any given moment involves seeing that Unique state as a
moment of the Universal and Particular.

Again, please don't make too much of this beyond me trying to work out an
idea.  I am just trying to figure out if this makes sense or if I am off in
LA-LA Land.

Cheers,
Chris



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