Chomsky on democracy and fascism

This is a brief discussion on the validity of using "fascism" to describe modern society. From FaceBook where S posted the following image of Chomsky and its quotation:








I objected briefly to using fascism in this way, and S responded like this:

S: Firstly, and to be fair, Chomsky makes a distinction between economic and political fascism. He may be appropriating the term to (unhistorically?) characterise a set of socio-economic conditions that do not wholly correspond to those in pre-war Italy, Germany and elsewhere. e.g. the persistence of (almost totally ineffective, corrupt) democratic institutions. Even so, he's not far off the mark. One of the defining characteristics of fascism is corporatism, and there can be no doubt that the US is a corporate-colonial economy. Add the rapidly expanding encroachment on individual freedoms, civil and human rights, an authoritarian regime, compliant courts, controlled media, burgeoning police powers, brutality and impunity, a militarised state that spends more on 'defence' than next 13 countries combined, perpetual war to protect 'national' interests, and you have most of the elements that go to make up what looks very much like an ongoing transition from advanced capitalism to fascism, albeit in a more modern guise.

To which I replied:

Yes, Stuart - lots of facial fuzz, but not yet a full-fledged beard. 

"Ongoing transition" is exactly what this is all about, and in that case the fundamental historical tradition is from capitalism to socialism - from one historical economic mode of production to another. The slave-owning mode of production morphed into the feudal mode of production over hundreds of years with the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of smaller, more flexible states based on feudal relations of vassal fiefs and serfdom. The workers weren't just cattle any more. They were human, but chained to the land and were forced to labour on the lord's land for free besides scraping a living off the plot of land they were tied to.

Then feudalism morphed into capitalism over hundreds of years, starting with the ex-Roman municipalities in Italy and Germany, then magnificently and irrepressibly in the English Revolution of 1640 and onwards (high point 1649 with the beheading of Charles 1 and the setting up of a republic) and the French Revolution of 1789.

These revolutions (as Marx frequently says) borrowed lots of props from the past, especially Rome, but they weren't a revival of the Roman Empire or Republic. 

In the same way, today the world is morphing into socialism. Individual, free enterprise capitalism was dying in Marx's day and he saw it and wrote about it in Capital. All production and distribution is thoroughly socialized and collectivized and we're all inextricably linked to each other through great national and international institutions of circulation like banks and credit card companies and social media. The only capitalist thing remaining is the relation of ownership - but that's enough to make the world the horrifying place it is under imperialist domination.

The capitalist ownership relation was broken definitively by the Bolshevik Revolution and its successful expropriation of the land-owners and capitalists in Russia in October 1917. That model has since been successfully followed in huge parts of the world - Vietnam and China, Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe, and Cuba. Due to the persistence of capitalist ownership and huge material (military) power in the biggest imperialist countries (the US, Britain and France in particular) political pressure on the ruling groups in these countries has been enormous, and some of the non-capitalist countries have been dragged back into capitalist social relations, primarily Russia and the old Eastern Bloc. But they are all dismal failures when it comes to advertising the historical superiority of capitalism that was so deafeningly trumpeted in the 1990s after the capitulation of the Soviet bureaucracy to imperialism. When they have remained independent of US or EU imperialism - like Russia - they have created a post-capitalist capitalism you might call it, a state capitalism where huge oligarchical control of production is mediated through equally centralized political control in a very authoritarian form.

But this is a process foreshadowed in the fate of the post-colonialist countries, too - throwing out the colonialists but not the capitalists has led to all kinds of bizarre authoritarian political set-ups, from ostensibly democratic India, via the stinking corruption of Mandela's non-apartheid South Africa to the familiar dictatorships of Zaire, Zimbabwe, Libya, Saddam's Iraq, Assad's Syria, etc. 

In fact, authoritarian political control coupled with capitalism generates many fascist features, but the process is much more general than what surfaced in Italy and Germany between the world wars.

The truth of it is that modern capitalism - ie decadent, rotten imperialism - is a dead-end, literally dead, necrotic, for human society, and all these "fascist" phenomena worldwide are symptoms of its necrotic decay. If they are allowed to develop unchecked, they will produce barbarism - unchained brutality and destruction of people and the environment in the service of profit.

The only alternative is socialism, that is, a non-capitalist economy and society run on democratic, collective, universally and coherently planned principles by the actual workers producing the wealth in voluntary association with full political empowerment.

This historical alternative, just under the surface, remains invisible to everyone not grasping Marx's scientific explanation of the underlying economic forces shaping human history. And today that means just about everybody. It's not just unfortunate, but a great tragedy that Marx never got round to writing the political part of his work on bourgeois society. He was able to complete the economic part, in Capital and its companion books, but the political part is missing and needs to be worked out by us on our own using his separate historical and political writings - such as the 18th Brumaire, his work on Palmerston, his comments on various countries and their historical development, like Ireland and India and the US, his Critique of the Gotha Programme, and so on. Only Lenin and Trotsky (and to a lesser extent Rosa Luxemburg) have successfully continued this political work and pulled the threads together for us. Most notably Lenin in The State and Revolution, and Trotsky in Results and Prospects, The Permanent Revolution, and The Revolution Betrayed.

It's clear as the noses on our faces that both Lenin and Trotsky (following Marx) weren't just theorists, either, but totally committed to the practical task of organizing a revolutionary socialist party and overthrowing the power of capital, consummated in the successful anti-capitalist revolution in Russia in October 1917.

What I have just written shows the perspectives in which we need to judge what's happening around us, and they have little to do with labels like "fascism" or "corporativism", which scratch the surface of imperialist society with penetrating very deeply. The same goes for "colonialism". They provide a handy way of describing some of the symptoms of our world, but they don't explain anything much, and they certainly don't help us change it.

The Guardian just reviewed the new Viking exhibition at the British Museum, emphasizing the commercial and political exploits of the eastern (Swedish) Vikings overland in what is now Russia and the Ukraine and Constantinople.

How the Vikings gave bling to the world

I made the following comment:

The Vikings - whether western (Norwegian/Icelandic) or eastern (Danish/Swedish) - were all ethnically and linguistically as good as identical. Their language only split into clearly distinguished eastern and western branches in the course of the Viking period itself, which was very brief - around 700 to 1066. And they were only late outrunners of the great Germanic explosion and migrations from around 400, which colonized eastern Europe and conquered central Europe, Rome and the various bits of the vast Roman Empire. And all these peoples had no great difficulty understanding each other - like Spanish and Italian speakers today, at worst. Anglo-Saxons, Vandals. Lombards, Franks, Normans, whatever.
And among the Vikings, the western lot went west and the eastern lot went east.
They conquered anything near water the way the Huns conquered anything near grass. They could sail any waters from great oceans to barely navigable rivers. And they did it with fighting squads as tightly-knit and aggressively inspired as any All Black rugby team.
What's more their politics were brutally fundamental. Power was the game, and they were brilliantly flexible tacticians. The spin-off Germanic (later Viking) states were maybe even more numerous and widespread than the spin-off states of Alexander's conquests, and that's saying something! Especially if you include (as you should) the late Roman Empire (Ravenna) and the Holy Roman Empire (Charlemagne)
In most cases, the fighting squad leveraged its power through vassals and fiefdoms - so a few Germans/Scandinavians could rule foreign populations who greatly outnumbered them - as in Rus and in Normandy. The Vikings probably took this art to its peak. And since power was most important, and loyalty and equality among the warrior elite (primus inter pares etc, Germanic common law) were the factors cementing the ruling caste together, all the rest mattered less - material culture, religion, even language. Becoming Normans, the Vikings adopted French ways, except when it came to power and the ethos of the Germanic nobility (feudalism) and even there their path had been prepared by the Germanic and equally pragmatic power-hungry Franks.
It's excellent that this more commercial, land-locked Viking surge is becoming more widely known.
Too bad our understanding of the whole impact of the Germanic explosion and expansion and its role in reshaping Europe and the Roman legacy is a mosaic that is still being laid. This is an important part of it, but late and very dependent on earlier developments.
Feudalism, for instance, is a fusion of the Roman imperial law (one gold coin is the equal of another) with the Germanic common law (communal sovereignty (so to say) and equality before the law (of "free" nationals of course).
The famous rune stone in Rök in Central Sweden (around 800, very early Viking period) is a monument to this more general sweep with its references to Theodoric in Ravenna. Makes a nice pendant to the Scandinavian (pre-Viking) elements in Beowulf. Sutton Hoo to Rök to the notorious runic graffiti on the Venetian lions from Constantinople.
For a lightning introduction to all this, visit two places when you come to Stockholm. One, the Historical Museum, and two, the burial mounds and museum at Old Uppsala.