councilor.org
| Source | Jim Devine |
| Date | 09/04/14/07:14 |
| Of course, fascism can come again! Almost anything is possible, while
no-one on pen-l has denied the possibility of future fascism as far as I know. The main problem is the bandying about of the word "fascist" in an indiscriminate way, almost becoming equivalent to "bad." Of course, anyone can use any word any way they want to, but I hope for more coherence, to promote communication if nothing else. The key issue is "do we have fascism now?" since some people (including CB, if I remember correctly) have asserted that we do. The answer is no, since fascism (at least as I define the term) involves not just an authoritarian and usually "puritanical" government under capitalism, but a system of "corporate" bodies that unite capital and the state, with labor as a nominal but powerless partner, along with a mass movement (usually of the middle classes and the lumpen) to push and pull that government toward fascism. It's not a local affair but something that involves an entire nation-state or a larger political unit. (It's horrible but significantly milder than Nazism, a type of system that seems _sui generis_ in many ways..) As I understand the common usage on the left, Pinochet's regime after 1973 was extremely authoritarian ("fascistic," if you will, but that's stretching) but not fascist. Instead of being based on a corporate system, the whole point was to atomize society -- especially the working class -- by imposing the "free" market. It was more a predecessor of the neoliberalism of the 1980s than a return to the fascism of the 1930s. Of course, we _always_ see "fascism" in the sense that some people have fascist personalities (scoring high on the F Scale) and engage in fascist acts. But the political-economic definition seems much more useful if we want to put the present in an historical context (the "present as history," to use the late Paul Baran's phrase) and to understand it. A fascist system attracts and encourages those with fascist personalities, while encouraging those without them to act as if they had them. It's also possible to go down the road toward fascism, just as it's possible to go up the road away from it. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho