Comment on the discourse about fascism

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Eli wrote:

"While we've been discussing here the appropriate and inappropriate use of
the term "fascism," it appears that the right has now taken over this word
to describe the left."

Yeah, the right likes to indulge in namecalling just as much as the left,
that is to be expected. The real thing to notice is the incapacity of the
right to understand the meaning of fascism as a social phenomenon. That is
not surprising, because according to neoliberalism, the market is supposed
to provide freedom, justice and democracy for all, and fascism is an
impediment to free markets. But they completely ignore that fascism might
be, historically, a way to cope with market failure, to smash impediments to
market economy, or alternatively, to create market economy where it did not
exist (primitive accumulation).

The US government has supported fascist regimes all over the place, in
Europe, in Latin America, in Africa, in Asia, in the Middle East and so on.
American business did very well out of this often, although sometimes the
local polity got out of hand, in which case you have to smash them again.
The difference between neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism is essentially
that neo-conservatives are better aware that the market doesn't generate any
specific morality of its own, and therefore that you need additional
institutions and religion etc. for a stable investment climate. In other
words, the neoliberals are too optimistic and too "wet".  It was the US
Government which aided Saddam Hussein to come to power and supplied him for
many years, he was just a prop in their geostrategic designs, and this
follows a veru consistent pattern going back over a hundred years.

Geoffrey Nunberg describes "classical fascism" as "the militaristic
nationalism, a secular religion of the state and a government by
secret-police terror -- not to mention grandiose public monuments and those
silly high-peaked caps like the ones that German and Italian officers wore."

This is just totally banale and superficial, and any bona fide historian
would make mincemeat of such an idea, and it just shows you the total
confusion of rightwing ideology, which can only respond to facts with
verbiage and apologetic interpretations. One could just as well describe
patriotic fervour in the USA itself in this way. What these people
concentrate on, is the outward appearance of fascism, the paraphernalia of
it, images which can capture public attention from gullible people, who just
see fascism in cultural terms, as a form of human degeneracy
(dehumanisation).

Underlying this type of definition is the desire to create a crude amalgam
of fascism, communism, military dictatorship and socialism in the eyes of
ordinary people, by focusing on common characteristics, rather than engage
in any specific analysis. This is what ideology is all about: one projects
one's own pathologies onto all those other people and societies whom one
doesn't happen to like, because those people and societies do not do the
things consistent with the expansion of the private accumulation of capital,
of business operations. Well, of course if you deny the very possibility of
a scientific study of history and society, then we can invent any old
metaphor to make a story.

In reality, the essence of fascism is about the smashing of all workingclass
opposition and of labour movements (military, secret police, censorship,
etc.), and the close cooperation between private enterprise and the
repressive state apparatus to restore or expand the accumulation of capital.
And this is precisely what Hitler and Mussolini did upon gaining political
power. Just exactly what form that takes really depends on local traditions,
and on the balance of class forces. If there is a dramatic stalemate in
class conflict, or if a capitalist crisis results in severe social
disintegration, or if you are incapable of getting the capital accumulation
process going in another way, then fascism is a strategy. And there might be
intermediate forms you might try out, it just depends on what's necessary
and how much resistance there is to what you want to do.

Why did Chile get Pinochet, while New Zealand got David Lange and Roger
Douglas ? Essentially, this was determined by the level of class
consciousness, the local culture, the intensity of workingclass opposition
and the strength of workingclass organisation, and the intelligence or
farsightedness of the leading strata of the bourgeoisie. In New Zealand,
economic liberalisation did not require a fascist strategy, whereas in Chile
it did. In Chile, you had one of the oldest working classes in latin
America, they were militant, and had a strong socialist tradition, electing
Allende and so on. In New Zealand, the labour movement was must weaker,
suffered embourgoisement, and the leftwing intelligentsia was just very
weak.

I don't think it is appropriate to say that the US government is "fascist",
but there are processes of fascisation. One of the best indicators of this,
apart from the new legislation, is just the fact that the elites push
forward more and more politicians with a military background. That is just
to say, that because market economy will not ensure social stability, moral
behaviour, and real, sustained economic growth by itself, they realise you
have to regiment people, and then the discussion is just how much you need
to do that, to what extent you can make co-optation strategies work, to what
extent you can negotiate things.

If you actually look at neoconservative discussions, you will see that one
theme in it is, just "where democracy is appropriate and where it is not
appropriate". It is really a very crude, arbitrary discourse which searches
out different interests and tries to justify them, but it expresses a
concern already voiced long ago by various thinktanks, namely that democracy
may be counterproductive to business expansion. But you cannot say that out
loud, and, in order to justify taking away democratic and civil rights, you
need a credible enemy, a credible threat. They could be "gooks",
"terrorists", "communists", "degenerates", "criminals", "child abusers",
"people ripping off the system", "minorities" or anything like that, just as
long as there is a credible threat, which focuses the discomfort and unease
of the bourgeoisie about the inefficiency of their own economic system, and
which is credible among gullible workingclass people and the middleclass
opinion makers.

The poverty of the discourse on fascism is really that, while people try to
make erudite historical analogies with the past, they miss the essence of
fascism (see above) and they are incapable of understanding what the new
tendencies and developments for mass repression really are. The discourse is
always about searching for a blame, rather than an analysis of real causes
and real history, but this in itself is often conducive to the fascist
project, which is always about blaming some weaker group. The ideologues of
the American bourgeoisie will scream about Iraq, Zimbabwe, or whatever, as
long as it is outside the USA, and they refuse to see the trends, which the
US government has traditionally promoted overseas, appearing in their own
society. As if you could engage in murder and torture overseas, but keep
your own slate clean at home.

These ideologues may even subscribe to a theory of the "progressive role" of
imperialism (sic.), but imperialism is seen just as a foreign policy, and
they have no awareness, that imperialism shapes the culture and economy of
the imperialist country itself just as much. This is even reflected
statistically, since, as I have said, for example, data on foreign asset
holdings are much more comprehensive and precise, than data on what the
bourgeoisie actually owns qua assets in its own country. And of course we do
not want people to poke their noses in that because they live there and they
could do something about it.  In other words, a classic strategem of
imperialist ideology is to project domestic problems onto situations
somewhere overseas. And they are able to do this, because a very large
portion of Americans don't have a clue about what the American government
and business actually does overseas, and if the president says Saddam
Hussein was tied up with Al Queada, then they will believe that, probably
they couldn't even pinpoint Baghdad on a map prior to March this year, or
whatever.

The chief use of the fascist theme in bourgeois ideology is really to
explore the question of how we can promote "civilised exploitation" and
social stability, warding off too much problems of social disintegration, in
trying to maintain market economy and private enterprise.  In other words,
what extra-economic mechanisms are really required, to keep capitalism going
? What do we need to do, to change people's behaviour in a way which is
consistent with business ? Where do the boundaries of what is currently
acceptable actually reside ?

Jurriaan







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