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.

Snowden isn't alone

This is a very general comment I made on FaceBook about the Snowden debate:

What scares the US imperialist government is that Snowden (and Manning and Assange and and and) aren't alone. They represent millions of people. They alone did what they did, but not in social or political isolation. They are the tip of a huge iceberg. In the old days it was the mass struggle for bourgeois democracy (aka civil rights, freedom from arbitrary government intrusion and oppression), these days it's for a much wider and broader goal including human rights like health education and welfare for all and economlic equality (aka socialism). This is a war (we can call it class war, between the class of those who own the factories and facilities we need to make and do things and the class of those who don't own shit but are forced to work hard for these others just to stay alive).
And this class war and the representative role of Snowden etc is why the scandals and political fighting don't just evaporate despite all the efforts of lickspittle apologists for tyranny to belittle, criminalize and intimidate.
The big problem for most people today is that the official surface discussion in the US and other states around the world is one big lie never ever naming things by their real names or explaining what all the drama is about. So some people really get hung up about Snowden's girlfriend being a pole dancer or about the fact not that he had to run for his life from the "land of the free TM ha-fucking-ha" but that he ran to this or that other country where he was able to find shelter.

Deposing Mursi in Egypt and Democracy

After the news that president Mursi had been deposed by the military in Egypt, a FaceBook friend wrote:

I'm not going to celebrate a military coup against a democratically elected leader, no matter who he is. Hard to see any good coming out of this.

To which I responded:

 Democracy is more than elections, it's practical rule by the people and for the people through duly elected representatives, and it's the practice and persistence of the democratic popular rule that is more important. As in language learning the thing is "communication over correctness", in politics it's not the formalities of selection that are the gold standard, but the realities of priorities in long-term action. The selection of a team can be carried out with impeccable formality, and the team can still play like shit. If there's scope for running change and improvement, well and good, and little harm done. If not, there's a crisis and emergency tensions explode in violence.
In a lot of countries, Egypt included, there are such shifts in the relationship of the active masses to power and social norms taking place that there is little scope for running change and improvement within the social structures in operation. Which means that all the social weight of different social groups/strata/classes hurls itself into the arena higgledy-piggledy and piecemeal, now in part, now all at once, now in a flash, now like treacle, and in situations like this "democratic elections" is a paper label that will be torn to shreds if it isn't securely fastened on a solid substrate and protected by the transparent armour of social practice.
Contradiction and dialectics rule on the surface of today's events in North Africa and the Middle East, and not just in the depths like everywhere else. It's quite conceivable that a military intervention can be more democratic than an elected official's actions. For instance, a case can be made that the military interventions of Chavez were more democratic and proved so in the long term than the formally democratic actions of the US administrations of recent decades... not to mention the formally undemocratic actions of these same US administrations
Judging events in Egypt by the standard of democratic elections (a most elastic and slippery standard!) at the moment is political and historical myopia.

Discussing the same question on a mailing list, I commented:

The problem - as we can see in the US - is democracy in daily action, not so much the formalities of election. The better the daily dose of democracy, the better elections will work. Formal democracy is an indispensable social decision-making tool where the realities of power and consensus permit it. 

In most countries today the realities of class (or other mass social grouping's) power are contentious or becoming so, and consensus is flying (or has flown, or has always been) out of the window, which means that democratic formalities provide no solution for smooth social functioning. When this happens only coercion will work, and this means violence, and "bodies of armed men" to exercise it - as Engels defined the state.

In North Africa and the Middle East (NAME) today we are seeing (as in so many other places before) a living example of the brokering of social power between mass groupings of social interests (classes, strata, etc) and armed bodies. During such a transitional revolutionary period (think of the French Revolution) formalities take second place and the working out of the various contradictions and antagonisms can take years.

In NAME we have the further powerful influence of events and solutions (or unresolved crises) in neighbouring and distant but involved countries.

The Weimar republic is a good example of this process - one that went wrong as far as democracy in the sense of rule in the interests of the mass of the people is concerned. October 1917 is another good example, where the outcome was right - until the counter-revolutionary Stalinist bureaucracy was able to seize power while the situation was still in post-revolutionary flux. 

The NAME revolutions are still unfolding, so it's pointless to hope for any formal solution soon. What should emerge eventually, unless we get the formal stasis ("peace of the graveyard") of totalitarian dictatorship or its imperialist comprador equivalent, will be a situation where the most powerful group/class is in undisputed control of power, economic decision-making and social levers of cohesion (media/propaganda). Then sufficient consensus will have been achieved and formal mechanisms for election and the exercise of social power will function smoothly. 

The NSA's totalitarian surveillance and the US Constitution

An article in the Register tries to deal with the ongoing massive violation of private individuals' lives and integrity by the NSA by invoking the principles underlying the US Constitution.

Trevor Pott: NSA Prism - boycott US tech


I commented:

Let's think historically, since the Enlightenment and Hammurabi have eased the way for us here.
The productive forces of human society are enormous and constantly growing, and one of the things they are doing is connect us all up so we know what's happening to everything everywhere, as in automatic inventory, just-in-time production and delivery etc. We also know who's where and doing what.
Now, the last time the productive forces of humanity took a huge leap forward in world-changing historical terms was when the merchants and bankers turned themselves into manufacturers, and the city took over from the land. Aka the origin of capitalism. This took centuries, but gradually, from the Reformation around 1500 to the French Revolution around 1800 via the English Revolution of around 1650, feudalism as a mode of production and fundamental form of social organization was ejected, violently, and replaced by capitalism. This happened because the productive forces were tied down and being strangled. Workers under feudalism weren't free but tied to the land as serfs, to guilds as apprentices and journeymen, and to lords and masters as servants, and the same went for the means of production. Capital couldn't be bought or sold or moved at will, but was locked into traditional and inefficient niches. The battle for freedom for capital and labour freed them up, and with them the productive forces.
This is happening today only now it is capitalism that is tying everything down and holding everything back in the name of private ownership of the forces of production and the profit this must generate. We can now produce everything we need to feed, clothe, house, educate and thrill everybody. We have the physical means in the machines, the agricultural capability, and above all the science and technology to manage, develop and plan worldwide deployment of production and the requisite skills. However...
The feudal constraints on business, movement, thought, etc are now parallelled by capitalist constraints on the free exchange of ideas or of scientific and technological discoveries, in the form of copyright and patents, and on a more and more bizarre insistence on holding back production to protect profits. Housing construction for instance only occurs when a) it doesn't threaten rent incomes, and b) it not only generates a surplus over labour and materials input, but a whopping great ten percent more in money terms that is pocketed by the owners of building companies to consume as they and only they see fit. Diamond-studded dog collars and all.
Not to mention the boosting of private profits by a) taxing workers' incomes to subsidize corporations (corporate welfare) and b) shovelling huge amounts of the surplus we produce into totally unproductive branches of industry (death and destruction in the military, and misery and ignorance in addiction, sex industries and gambling).
Anyway, the crises we are going through right now and the surrealistic abuse of advances in science and technology perpetrated by governments like the US, are all part and parcel of the age of transition between an outworn mode of production, capitalism, and a mode of production more appropriate for the productive forces of human society, socialism.
One of the things capitalism is doing in its death throes is throwing off a spectacular display of sound and fury and phosphorescing lights claiming that it is the end product of human history and that there is no alternative to its methods and traditions. This has been pretty successful at fooling "public opinion" that history doesn't exist and that socialism is an impossible illusion.
One of the things the present crisis is doing, however, is to show us precisely the historical incapacity of capitalism not only to solve the problems of humanity, but even to solve its own selfish problems of making stuff and selling it. And it also shows us to just what brutal and destructive lengths capitalism in government is prepared to go to preserve its monopoly of power and wealth. Perverting all its own proud revolutionary democratic principles from the struggle against feudalism (eg the US Constitution) in the process.
Capitalism in its current form is inseparable from oppression, war and the abuse of power. It's utopian madness to dream that there is a good capitalism underneath all the scabs and putrid sores. Just as it was utopian to dream of a good feudalism underneath the boils and gangrene of the Old Regime.
Think historically, and there are solutions.
Ignore history, and you'll be trapped in your own nightmare for ever.

Local democracy

Mary Beard writes about electing the head of a local police authority in her blog:
http://timesonline.typepad.com/dons_life/2012/10/who-shall-i-vote-for-a-police-and-crime-commisioner.html

I commented:

Democracy is a decision-making technique that works well when the decision-makers hold power and have a consensus on how to use it. So you get slave-holding democracy, feudal democracy, municipal/city-state democracy, etc, all working well until the hold on power is challenged and the consensus is shredded.
In the transition to a new power-sharing consensus power becomes the unvarnished exercise of force it always is in essence. We're living in a transitional epoch (capitalist to socialist ie non-capitalist  mode of production, a free universal association of working people) and none of the big historical events we live through can be assessed on the basis of formal democracy.
So we need to get real about the possibilities, limitations and risks of the vote as a problem-solving mechanism. Before any proposal is put to a vote for decision, it has to be devised and formulated by people with an interest in pushing it through. This process is real politics, and the conditions determining whose interests are served are what allow us to judge the adequacy of any claimed democracy. Good for slave-holders? Slave-holding democracy. Good for ruthless, murderous (think Bhopal, or Marikana for that matter) capitalists? Bourgeois democracy.
And it's the big picture that counts even in tiny local decision-making. If the arteries don't work, the capillaries clot up and gangrene ensues.
Sounds pretty much like gangrene setting in in the local organs of police power in Britain ;-)