Multipolarity and BRICS Once More

The debates over “multipolarity” and the significance of an allegedly multipolar BRICS grouping continue. In an opinion piece in People’s Voice (Multipolarity, BRICS+ and the struggle for peace, cooperation, and socialism today, June 16-30, 2024) writer Garrett Halas mounts an earnest defense of multipolarity and the BRICS+ “as a positive step towards socialism.” 

Halas joins many others in envisioning all twenty-first-century resistance to US imperialism and the imperialism of its (largely ex-Cold War) partners as the same as resistance to imperialism in general. They divide the world into the US and its friends and those who, to some extent or another, oppose the US. Sometimes they characterize this as a conflict between the global North and the global South. Sometimes they refer to the imperialist antagonists collectively as “the West.”

From the perspective of the multipolarity proponents, if the countries resisting the US should neutralize US domination and that of its allies, then the world will become peaceful and harmonious. In their view, it is not capitalism that obstructs enduring peace, but US imperial aspirations alone. Accordingly, in the idealized future, multiple friendly, cooperative states (poles) will engage in peaceful, equitable economic transactions that all agree will be mutually advantageous-- what Chinese leaders call “win-win.” If this isn’t achieved immediately, it will soon follow. Is not socialism down the road?

The reality is that as important as resisting US domination and aggression surely is, its decline or defeat will not put an end to imperialism, as long as monopoly capitalism continues to exist. 

In the history of modern-era imperialism, the decline of every dominating great capitalist power has spawned the rise of another. As one power recedes, others step up and contest for global dominance-- that is the fundamental logic of imperialism. And, all too often, war ensues.

• CLASS: Glaringly absent from the theory of multipolarity is the concept of class. Advocates of a multipolar world fail to explain how class relations-- specifically the interests of the working class-- are advanced with the existence of multiple capitalist poles. Halas tells us that the “BRICS+ is a coalition with a concrete class character rooted in the global South” but he doesn’t tell us what that “concrete class character” is. This is a critical question and a significant problem, given that Halas concedes that “most BRICS+ nations are capitalist”! Of the original BRICS members, capitalism is unquestionably the dominant economic system in Russia, India, South Africa, and Brazil. Of the candidate members scheduled for entry in 2024-- Argentina (likely a withdrawal), Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates-- all are capitalist. The idea that working class interests will be served, and socialism advanced by this group seems far-fetched.

• CLASS CONFLICT: Class struggle-- the motor of the struggle for workers’ advances, workers’ power, and socialism-- has been stifled by the governments of nearly all the BRICS and BRICS+ countries. In Iran, for example, Communism is illegal and Communists have been executed in large numbers. Communism is likewise illegal in Saudi Arabia. Modi has conducted class war against India’s farmers. South Africa’s working class has seen unemployment and poverty rise under the disappointing government. Egyptian workers labor under a brutal military government. How does their entry into BRICS promise socialism?

• GLOBAL NORTH/GLOBAL SOUTH: Halas and the “multipolaristas” would have it that the “contradiction” informing multipolarity is the clash between the “global north” and the “global south” or, paradoxically, the “West” and the rest of the world. Apart from the fact that the geographical division captures little—other than the imagination of social-media leftists-- it gives the impression that Australia and New Zealand have something in common with impoverished Burundi. Or that Serbia and Germany are Western partners in exploiting small African countries. There is, of course, a division between wealthy countries and poor countries, between exploiters and exploited. Historically, the sharpest fault lines have been defined by colonialism and its successor, neo-colonialism. But the imperialist cards are shuffled from time to time due to resource inequities, uneven development, or other gained advantages. For example, the Arabian Peninsula was once a dominated colony of the Ottoman empire. That empire’s dissolution and subsequent developments led to an emergent Saudi Arabia infused with resource wealth and high up on the imperialist hierarchy. Today, India has three of the top 20 corporations in Asia by market value, larger than all Japanese corporations except for Toyota. India’s Tata Group has a market capitalization of over $380 billion, with its tentacles spread to 100 countries. The June 28 UK Morning Star editorial informs us: “Tata Steel’s threat to shut the blast furnaces at Port Talbot three months earlier if Unite goes ahead with strike action is blackmail. The India-based multinational does not believe steelworkers should have a say in the plant’s future… It’s outrageous that the future of British steelmaking should be at the whim of a billionaire on a different continent.”

• DECOUPLING: Halas suggests that BRICS+ offers an opportunity for countries to break out of the capitalist international financial structures imposed after World War II and the dominance of the dollar in global transactions. Such an option may exist in the future, but clearly it is intended as an option and not a substitute for existing structures and exchange instruments. As recently as late June of this year, PRC Premier Li Qiang said that “We should broadly open our minds, work closely together, abandon camp formations, (and) oppose decoupling…” [my emphasis] It is clear that the picture of global country-to-country relations-- as envisioned by Peoples’ China’s second most prominent leader, Li, at the “Summer” Davos-- offers no challenge to existing financial arrangements or to the dominance of the dollar. The antagonistic conflict between the old order and the new multipolar order is more a fantasy in the minds of some on the left than a real policy goal of the leading country in BRICS.

• ANTI-IMPERIALISM: Halas would like us to believe that twentieth-century anti-imperialism is multipolarity embodied in BRICS. He cites the UN votes on Palestinian status and oppression (predictably vetoed by the US) as an example of “global south” anti-imperialism. While symbolic and not without significance, it is hardly the principled anti-imperialist action we came to know in earlier times. It is worth reminding that Saudi Arabia was on the verge of abandoning Palestine for better relations with Israel before October 7. Egypt has long sold out the cause of Palestine, as has much of the Arab world. According to Al Jazeera, India is currently selling military supplies to Israel. Virtue-signaling at UN forums is not a substitute for concrete, material solidarity.

• CHINA: This is not the place for debating whether the Peoples’ Republic of China is a socialist country, a favorite parlor game of the Euro-US left. However, it is worth stating that-- as the only self-acclaimed socialist country currently in BRICS-- the PRC does not claim to be advocating, encouraging, or materially aiding the struggle for socialism outside of China. Unlike the former Soviet Union, the PRC does not prioritize or privilege investment or material support for countries embarking on the socialist path. The word “socialism” is largely absent from its foreign policy statements. While the Chinese leadership defends its outlook as “socialism with Chinese characters,” it does not demonstrably support “socialism with anybody else’s national characters.” Yet, some on the left see multipolarity and a largely capitalist BRICS as a road to socialism for the rest of us?

• WE HAVE SEEN THIS BEFORE: In the 1960s, it was common for the left in Europe and the US to lose hope in the revolutionary potential of the working classes. Where working-class movements in Europe aligned with Communist Parties, they fully committed to a gradualist, parliamentary road to socialism. An anti-Communist New Left proposed a different vehicle of revolutionary change: The Third World. In the common parlance of the time, the Third World was the newly emergent, former colonies that were neither in the US camp nor the Soviet camp. Per this view, revolutionary change (and ultimately) socialism would grow from the independent road chosen by the leaders of these emergent nations. But instead, they were overwhelmed by the neo-colonialism of the great capitalist powers and absorbed by the global capitalist market, with few exceptions.

• AND EVEN EARLIER: Karl Kautsky, the major theoretician of the Socialist International, anticipated multipolarity in 1914, introducing a concept that he called “ultra-imperialism.” Kautsky believed that great power imperialism and war had no future. The imperialist system would, of necessity, stabilize and, due to declining capital exports, “Imperialism is thus digging its own grave… [T]he policy of imperialism therefore cannot be continued much longer.” For Kautsky, a stage of “concentration” of capitalist states, comparable to cartelization of corporations, will lead to inter-imperialist harmony. Lenin rejected this theory out of hand. For a discussion, go here.

Imperialism is not a stable system. Capitalist participants are always seeking a competitive advantage against their rivals. Sometimes they find it useful or necessary to form (often temporary) coalitions or alliances with others in order to protect or advance their interests. One such alliance was forged by the US after the Second World War in opposition to the socialist bloc and the national liberation movements. 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US sought to keep existing coalitions intact by selecting or devising new enemies-- the war on drugs, the war against terrorism, and wars of humanitarian intervention. Beneath these political ties existed a US established and dominated global economic structure privileging the US, but deemed necessary to protect the capitalist system.

This politico-economic framework served capitalism well, until the great economic crash of 2007-2009 and the ensuing cracks and fractures in the framework. The turmoil unleashed by the crisis dampened the pace of growth in international trade and accelerated the competition for markets. Further challenging the US-centered framework was the ability of People’s China to navigate the crisis rather painlessly. Where the US ruling class formerly saw the PRC as an opportunity, it began to see China as a rival in the imperialist system. 

The post-Soviet global market-- cemented by the so-called “globalization” process-- began to unravel in the wake of twentieth-century economic instability, especially the 2007-2009 crash. Rather than defend existing free-trade dogma, capitalist countries were drawn to protectionism and economic nationalism. Beginning in the Trump Administration and accelerating during the Biden Administration, the US waged a tariff-and-sanctions war against economic competitors. US dominance of international financial institutions and the nearly universal dependence upon the US dollar gave US leaders even more weapons in this competition. 

The US “pivot” to China in its defense posture and its growing hostility to Russia were reflections of its losing ground to the PRC’s growing economic might and Russia’s dominance of Eurasian energy markets. 

Understandably, in this new era of economic nationalism, Russia, China, the leading power on the subcontinent, India, Africa’s top economic power, South Africa, and the largest economy in Latin America, Brazil, would look to counter aggressive US and EU competition. The era of mutual cooperation was ending, and the era of intense rivalry and national self-interest was emerging. It was in this environment that BRICS was born. 

It was a capitalist response to a capitalist problem, not a path to socialism.

The main task for Communists and progressives is not to take sides, but to fight to ensure that these fractures and frictions do not explode into war.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Lessons of the European Elections

The recent European Parliament elections shocked the mainstream European parties and their international friends and allies.

The 720-member European legislature has largely been the handmaiden for the technocrats in Brussels, who craft the economic and social direction of the European Union. Since its inception, the EU has presented a stable, reliable face of capitalist rule organized around market fundamentalism, minimizing market intervention, and slowing, even reversing, the growth of the public sector. The broad right-center and left-center-- traditional pro-business, liberal, and social democratic parties-- have united in ensuring that agenda. 

With the demoralization or decline of the anti-capitalist left, there has been little resistance mounted to the forward march of the EU program.

Into the breach left by a marginal or now timid anti-capitalist left, stepped a new wave of right-wing populists preparing to exploit the growing mass dissatisfaction with twenty-first-century capitalism and its political custodians. The economic setbacks, stagnant or declining standards of living, inadequate social and employment security, inequality, social strife, and displacement incurred by European workers cried out for political expression. Right opportunists gladly answered these calls with hollow nationalism, ill-aimed blaming and shaming, and cultural anti-elitism. 

Throughout Europe, new and refashioned parties like Austria’s Freedom Party, France’s National Rally, Alternative for Germany, Hungary’s Fidesz Party, Italy’s Lega and Brothers for Italy, Netherland’s Party for Freedom, Spain’s Vox, and many others, vie to fill the radical oppositional space evacuated or neglected by the anti-capitalist left.

Where the European Communist Parties could always count on a far more robust protest vote beyond their core membership, the protest vote now goes to the populist right by default.

To stem the right-populist tide, various strategists devised new alliances, power-sharing agreements, even technocratic governments. New “left” populist parties-- Syriza, PODEMOS, France Insoumise -- sprung up to draw support from the same mass anger and frustration exploited by the populist right. 

But none of these supposed answers to right-wing populism have succeeded in containing or reversing its advance. The mid-June European parliamentary elections have, in many ways, marked a new high water for right-populism. In both France and Germany-- the two anchors for the Eurozone project-- the right has made spectacular gains. 

Most dramatically, the French National Rally (RN)-- the historic party of the Le Pen family-- won more than double the vote (31+%) of Macron’s ruling party. In an act of frustration and, perhaps, desperation, Macron called for early national elections at the end of June. He, no doubt, expects to cry for a “united front” against the threat of right-wing governance, as he has successfully done in the past. He assumes that his party and RN will win in the first round and the left will have no choice but to support him in the second-round run-off. 

Meanwhile, Macron’s approval rate in France has reached an all-time low of 5.5%. And he has begun his campaign by attacking both the left and right (“the fever of extremes”) -- hardly a formula for drawing the left in a presumed second round of voting. 

But the soft leftist parties-- France Insoumise, the Communist Party, the Socialist, and the Greens-- have cobbled together their own shaky “united front” to make an impact in the first round. The interesting question would be whether Macron’s party would return the favor and support this effort in a second round against RN. I doubt they would. Bourgeois “solidarity” only goes so far.

In Germany, the hard right, semi-populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party became the second largest party behind the Christian Democrats, garnering more votes than any of the individual parties in the governing coalition. The war-crazed Green Party took an especially hard hit in this election, losing nine seats.

While AfD has done less than RN to attempt to clean its ownership of fascistic detritus, it nonetheless draws a great deal of support from working-class protest voters. Germany’s ARD polling found that “a full 44% voted for the AfD out of disappointment at other parties.”

And that is how much of the electoral support for the populist right should be understood. The traditional right has long drawn its support from the bourgeoisie, small businesses, the professional strata: those protecting their status in a capitalist society. The populist right, taking that approach a step further-- through nostalgia, misplaced blame, false anti-elitism, and the bogus promise of life-altering change-- appeals to the masses: those alienated from a capitalist society. Unless one wants to cynically dismiss the people for their bad choices or pompously scold them for their bad judgment, you must conclude that the existing left parties have failed the masses, lost their credibility, and surrendered leadership on the popular issues, allowing right-populism to fill the breach. 

Can one imagine Le Pen or even Macron winning the votes of France’s workers from the post-war Communist Party of Thorez, Duclos, and Rochet, the party esteemed for its role against fascism, and the party promising socialism? 

Can one imagine Berlusconi, Lega, the Five Star Movement, Brothers of Italy drawing the Italian working class away from the Communist Party of Togliatti, the party that led the anti-fascist struggle, the party that offered Italian workers a dignified struggle against capital?

Can one imagine the AfD flourishing in the GDR, that part of Germany that today supplies the greatest number of votes to the AfD?

They do so today because the French Communist Party has abandoned its historic role as the champion of the working class and neither listens to workers nor puts their interests at the top of its agenda.

The Italian party dissolved itself thirty-five years ago and paved the way for decades of political farce and faux populism in Italian politics.

And the capitalist pillage of the former socialist German Democratic Republic planted the seeds of despair that grew into the AfD.

But it doesn’t have to be this way. The untold story of the European parliamentary election reveals a world of possibility.

Purposely overlooked by the media were the impressive left gains in Greece and Germany. In both cases, working-class partisanship, principled socialism, and militant anti-imperialism and the promise of peace attracted voters. Where the weak-tea, decaffeinated left campaigned on fear of the right and defense of the European Union’s foreign policy, the Greek Communist Party and a new, radical German party surprised observers with significant gains.

The Greek Communist Party (KKE) nearly doubled its percentage of the vote over the previous European parliamentary election held in 2019. The results substantially exceeded last year’s parliamentary percentages as well. Its strength was shown especially in Attika and urban and working-class areas. These gains were made because of the principled stance of KKE and in spite of swimming against the EU tide of capitalism and war shared by all the other parties. KKE shows that defeating right-wing populism is possible by giving real, bold, and radical answers to the despair of working people.

In Germany, the left wing of the Die Linke Party-- the working class-oriented, anti-imperialist wing-- finally broke away and established a new party openly opposed to the European Union agenda, its institutionalized capitalism, and its war policies. Led by the independent-minded Sara Wagenknecht, the new party was quickly organized five months ago, yet drew 6.2% of the vote in the European parliamentary elections. The persistently compromising, centrist-orienting Die Linke was trounced, reduced to 2.7% of the vote. ARD polls show that the new party drew 400,000 votes from Die Linke, 500,000 votes from the Social Democrats, and 140,000 votes from the AfD. In some parts of Eastern Germany, the new party-- yet to create a sustainable name-- drew as much as 15% of the vote.

Perhaps better than any result, the new party delivered a shocking blow to the idea that one must stop the populist right by rallying to the center in defense of a moribund capitalism. As Lenin reminds us: “Two questions now take precedence over all other political questions—the question of bread and the question of peace.” Wagenknecht’s new party gave the questions precedence, attacking Germany’s economic malaise and inflation, as well as the deadly war in Ukraine. We should follow the development of the new party closely.

By attending to working-class interests, The Austrian Communist Party and the Workers’ Party of Belgium also made gains against the right-populist wave.

It should be clear that the hollow tactic of opposing right-populism by circling the wagons around mainstream centrist parties is proving to be bankrupt. The notion that voters can be shepherded away from populist poseurs with a “united front against the bad guys” approach has failed to win people from a desperate need for bread and peace.

These examples show a principled, proven approach to the problem of the populist-right, an approach that neither resorts to a retreat to the center or a bogus, unsustainable, ineffective “united front.” The thirst for change is there.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

What is Independent Political Action?

I recently found an unpublished essay written in 1979 by a comrade from Western Pennsylvania who argued passionately for the urgent necessity of independent political action. In The Time is Now: A Position Paper on Independent Political Action, Bob Bonner challenged the left to begin the process of building independent political organizations and to convince the people to support them.

Bob is not a starry-eyed academic or a know-it-all armchair socialist, but a keen observer of local politics, its limitations, and its possibilities. 

He was then a worker, a founding leader of the Clairton Coalition, a leader in a local independent political party that scored some notable electoral victories, and a founder of the Pittsburgh Coalition for Independent Politics. He grew up in Clairton, PA breathing the foul air of the country’s largest cokeworks, a virtual company town that knew every corporate injustice that one found in the industrial heartland. It has become fashionable to refer to people like Bob as community organizers; I prefer to see him simply as a peoples’ leader.

There are many parallels today with the world that Bonner wrote about in 1979. Jimmy Carter had run and won in 1976 on the most progressive party program that the Democrats had offered since the New Deal; but by 1978, he had jettisoned the program and turned to policies that presaged the policies of the soon-to-be-president, FBI snitch and B-actor, Ronald Reagan. By the midterm elections of 1978, Carter had reneged on virtually every progressive campaign promise and was saddled with brutal inflation.

Bonner wrote at the time: “America’s two-party system has reached an all-time low in the eyes of the voters… rendering the concepts of majority parties and representative government meaningless and, to some, a laughing stock… 62.1% of American voters, or 90 million people, stayed home last election day, an increase of another one and a half percent from 1974… Millions more can’t be motivated enough to even register [to vote].”

Citing a New York Times-CBS poll, Bonner notes that “fully half of those who participated in the two-party charade felt that the outcome would have no appreciable effect on their lives.”

Bonner goes on to show that despite dire media assessments of a rightward trend, where progressives or independents offered voters a real choice, they were met with enthusiasm, often victory. 

The then-left-oriented Congressional Black Caucus picked up three new members in the interim election, and arch-reactionary Frank Rizzo was denied a third term in Philadelphia. “The massive monopoly effort in Missouri to pass an anti-union ‘right to work (for less)’ law through a referendum failed, and in some states liberal to progressive tax initiatives won,” Bonner reminds. Communist Party candidates, running as Communists, received vote totals unprecedented since the 1940s. There was a sense that inroads were possible for independent politics.

With regard to the then-emerging danger of the so-called “new right” of Reagan and his ilk, Bonner had this to say: “The high visibility of the ‘new’ right is made possible by the huge gap that exists between the direction of the two main parties and the urgent pressing needs of the people as a whole. The ruling class has recognized this gap and has smartly and opportunistically shoved reactionary one-issue groups into this vacuum in order to confuse and misdirect the voting public.”

Ironically, today’s corporate Democrats have followed this Republican strategy by placing single issues front and center at the expense of a popular program meant to resonate with all working people.

Bonner believes that “[t]he electorate is searching for meaningful alternatives. That is why they vote for ‘mavericks’; that is why Black people voted for Republicans in the last election…”

Forty-five years later, this obvious point is missed by the elite pundits who denounce working-class “deplorables” turning to unlikely “mavericks” like Donald Trump and Robert Kennedy Jr. They are surprised and alarmed that polls show many Black and Latino/Latina voters-- ignored by Democratic Party leaders-- leaning toward Trump’s false promises of change.

Today, one-issue groups abound, with foundations doling out financial support, designer NGOs staffing causes, academics offering studies, and consultants mapping strategies. Talk of “intersections” are just that, with more and more divisions denying any basis for common cause, as our common plight grows more desperate.

And when the two parties’ thinkers offer even a hint of prospective benefits in exchange for their votes, it is not a vision, but a reminiscence. The Republicans promise a return to the land of milk and honey before “freedom”-restricting laws on civil rights, the environment, workplace safety, and unions. 

The Democrats, on the other hand, offer an idyllic time before the Reagan revolution-- the so-called Neoliberal era ushered in with the 1980 election-- conveniently forgetting the long, painful, previous decade of stagflation. In essence, we are given two different versions of “Make America Great Again.” Neither promise works for the twenty-first century.

Sounding eerily prescient, Bonner cites the opposition to the unbearable weight of the military budget and the threat of war, actions against the energy monopolies, a militant women’s movement for women’s rights, the fight against police brutality, the miners’ strike, and the struggle for the Dellums National Health Service Act as a basis for bringing together a united, independent movement escaping the political inertia of 1979. “There is absolutely no reason and no excuse for not pulling several of these forces together and entering the political arena…,” Bonner asserts.

Forty-five years later, we have yet to create this needed movement, and the battles of 1979 are yet to be won.

We must recognize that a mere declaration of independence is not enough, as our own US Revolution shows. Achieving independence is an arduous process. In our time, it is a battle against the dependency that comes from taking the money offered from corporations, foundations, non-profits, NGOs, and governments, and from uncritically accepting the influence of think tanks, universities, academic “authorities,” and consultants. 

Most importantly, political independence only begins with a concerted effort to fight capture by the two parties. Far too many left initiatives have been absorbed and suffocated by the Democratic Party. In its essence, independence is always independence from some external force that doesn’t share our values and goals.

We must also judge independence by acts and not rhetoric or posture. The fallacy of celebrity, the fetishism of personality, is a sure barrier to independence. Instead, the steps away from wealth and power should be our measuring stick of independent political action. Where independence exists, we must nurture it; where it doesn’t, we should sow it.

In the forthcoming election, how will we express our political independence?

Greg Godels
zzsblogml@gmail.com

Fascism: What’s in a Word?

The word “fascism” is a lightning rod. No one wants to be called a fascist. Everyone is ready to call someone else a fascist. 

Like many highly charged words, the more common its usage becomes, the more inexact its meaning becomes.  

Today, Trump is a fascist, Putin is a fascist, Modi is a fascist, Radical Islam is Islamofascism, the House and Senate members who passed the FISA renewal are fascists, Ukraine is a fascist country, political correctness is fascism, anti-Zionists are fascists, Zionists are fascists, and so on….

Clearly, the word “fascism” in these contexts is most often an expression of extreme disapproval-- a kind of expletive.

A problem arises when the claimant-- the person using the word-- has something more definite in mind, something more exacting. A problem arises when the user of the word intends to draw an association with the real, historically concrete phenomena of fascism that emerged in the aftermath of World War I and rose tragically to ravage and terrorize nearly the entire world. 

The idea that people or organizations are preparing to organize Blackshirts, Brownshirts, Silver Shirts or whatever to intimidate or overthrow conventional political processes is understandably reprehensible. But to conjure such an image in order to influence the political process, though without sufficient warrant, is misleading.

In a highly charged political context, it is not only misleading, but also unhelpful, and even incendiary.

Even a policy as sanctified by much of the left as the New Deal has been called fascist, proto-fascist, or fascist-tinged by commentators from across the political spectrum. And the “sainted” FDR has been labeled fascist by many. Critics from both left and right have seen parallels between elements of the New Deal and Mussolini’s corporatism. Still others have found similarities between the Rooseveltian Civilian Conservation Corps and Hitler’s German Labor Services. Since the New Deal was a mish-mash of trial-and-error pragmatism, it is a disservice to wed it with any particular ideology.

Of course, “fascism” depends on how we define it. Problems of definition arose immediately after World War II and the defeat of the major fascist powers. The emerging Cold War led to the US and its allies accepting a narrow definition when it came to new-found allies among former Nazis and Nazi collaborators. In its conflict with the Soviets, US leaders relied on Germans and Eastern Europeans with dubious, fascist ties to advance weapons programs, utilize intelligence, and bolster anti-Communism. Vetting of fascists by ideology was a haphazard process at best.

On the other hand, attempts to link fascism to Communism was an ongoing project. Determined efforts to find common features to justify anti-Communism led to a construct called “totalitarianism.” Popularized by Hannah Arendt, Cold Warriors wanted and got a tally of supposed similarities that served their purposes and served to generate a common definition of two disparate ideologies.

Thus, the Cold War created both a narrow and broad interpretation of fascism-- one for practical purposes, the other for propaganda purposes.

As the Cold War warmed in the 1980s, academics like Stanley Payne (Fascism, Wisconsin, 1980), made attempts at more independent, nuanced, and objective definitions of “fascism.” Payne engaged in comparative historical analysis and arrived at his typological description of fascism. Unfortunately, it suffered somewhat from raw empiricism and a failure to properly weigh the factors disclosed. To its credit, it undercut the Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism by emphasizing anti-Communism as a common feature of fascism, and not conflating it with Communism. 

Further, Payne in 1980 recognizes the historically met concept of “liberal authoritarianism” -- a form of illiberal liberalism-- that might serve to explain much of the confusion of our anti-Trump left today, who are anxious to dispense with the Bill of Rights to save “our” democracy.

In a recent essay regarding the “fascism is imminent” fashion of today, noted liberal commentator, Patrick Lawrence, riffs on the concept of “liberal authoritarianism.” Lawrence declares in his article This Isn’t Fascism posted on Consortium News that “I cannot quite tell what people mean when they speak of fascism in our current circumstances. And [as] far as one can make out, a lot of people who use the term, and maybe most, do not know what they mean, either.”

Unfortunately, while Payne still serves as a keystone for contemporary Western academic scholarship, the old Cold War conflation of Communism and fascism has resumed, particularly under a new wave of retro-Cold Warriors like Anne Applebaum and Timothy Snyder. 

But more consequentially, the charge of fascism-- invoked irresponsibly-- has served as a weapon in electoral politics. Specifically, many in the Democratic Party-- bereft of an appealing program-- charge that a vote for Biden is a vote against fascism. Given that Biden’s failure on inflation and his bloody war-mongering are rejected, especially by youth and the Party’s left wing, portraying Trump as a fascist is an act of desperation, but an act that will ultimately do little to forego the rise of Trump and his ilk.

Again, invoking Lawrence:

Much of this, let’s call it the pollution of public discourse, comes from the liberal authoritarians. Rachel Maddow, to take one of the more pitiful cases, wants us to think Trump the dictator will end elections, destroy the courts, and render the Congress powerless. The MSNBC commentator has actually said these things on air.

One-man rule is the theme, if you listen to the Rachel Maddows. The evident intent is to cast Donald Trump in the most fearsome light possible, as it becomes clear Trump could well defeat President Biden at the polls come Nov. 5.

We can mark this stuff down to crude politicking in an election year, surely. There is nothing new in it. But this is not the point.

Opportunistic voices on the left will often draw a crude analogy with the rise of Nazism. They argue the simplistic and false case that disunity on the left opened the door for Hitler’s ascendency to the Chancellorship of Germany in 1933. They repeat an old whitewash of history-- dismissing Hitler’s backing by the German capitalists, the perfidy of the weak government, and the betrayal of the Social Democrats. They ignore the economic crisis, the rulers’ failure to address the crisis, and the peoples’ desperate search for a radical answer to that failure. An unquestionable sign of that desperation was the continuing growth of the votes for the Communist Party, along with the decline in votes for the Social Democrats, and other centrist parties.

Nazism was not inevitable, but ushered in on a fear of revolution, of workers’ power, by a despairing ruling class. That was the reality wherever fascism seized power in twentieth-century fascism.

Today, the answer to a deepening crisis of capitalist rule that is losing its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses is not rallying support around the failed policies that created and deepened the crisis. The answer is not to cry wolf or remind the people that matters could get worse. They know that!

The answer is to develop real answers to the despair facing working people-- reducing inequality, raising living standards, guaranteeing health care, increasing social benefits, improving affordable public transportation, protecting the environment, improving public education, and so on. These issues have existed for many decades, worsening with each passing year. There is no mystery. We are offered only two parties and they are determined to evade these issues. 

Lawrence makes a similar point:

I suppose it might make America’s many-sided crisis — political, economic, social — more comprehensible if we name it [fascism] to suggest it has a frightening antecedent. But this is profoundly counterproductive. So long as we, some of us, go on persuading ourselves we face the threat of fascism or Fascism, either one, we simply obscure what it is we actually face.

We name it wrongly... I do not see fascism in any form anywhere on America’s horizon. To call it such is to render ourselves incapable of acting effectively.

But that still leaves us with the question: What is fascism? Is there no cogent definition?

Indeed, there is one that springs forth from a deep and thorough study by the late Marxist thinker, R. Palme Dutt. Published in 1934, soon after Hitler’s rise to power, Fascism and Social Revolution (International Publishers) locates fascism in the cauldron of the rise of Communism, a deep economic crisis, and the collapse of capitalist class legitimacy.

Dutt, unlike servile academics weaving a bizarre, historically challenged link between Communism and fascism, discovers direct ties between capitalism and fascism (p. 72-73).

Fascism manufactures its ideology around its practice. Dutt explains: 

Fascism, in fact, developed as a movement in practice, in the conditions of threatening proletarian revolution, as a counter-revolutionary mass movement supported by the bourgeoisie, employing weapons of mixed social demagogy and terrorism to defeat the revolution and build up a strengthened capitalist state dictatorship; and only later endeavoured to adorn and rationalize this process with a “theory” (p. 75).

Dutt’s operational definition contrasts favorably with the failed attempt by writers like Payne who attempted to engage comparative studies in order to arrive at a superficial typography of fascism.

Dutt further adds the class dimensions, absent in nearly all non-Marxist definitions:

Fascism, in short, is a movement of mixed elements, dominantly petit-bourgeois, but also slum-proletariat and demoralized working class, financed and directed by finance-capital, by the big industrialists, landlords and financiers, to defeat the working-class revolution and smash working-class organizations (p. 82).

Elegant in its simplicity, robust in its comprehensiveness, Dutt’s explication of fascism aptly characterizes historic fascism from the march on Rome to the Generals’ coup in Indonesia and Pinochet’s regime in Chile. When social conditions deteriorate drastically and workers and their organizations threaten the capitalist order, the rulers throw their support behind counter-revolutionaries prepared to defend and strengthen the capitalist order, even at the expense of bourgeois democracy.

These institutions and organizations fester within bourgeois society as latent counter-revolutionary forces ready to be unleashed at the right moment by a desperate capitalist ruling class.

Clearly, Dutt’s study and elucidation of fascism clears the muddy waters stirred by today’s alarmists and opportunists. There is no imminent threat of revolution; the revolutionary left and the workers’ organizations currently pose little threat to the capitalist order, unfortunately. 

There is no emergent organized mass movement responding to a counter-revolutionary call. The mass movements of the right-- the Black Legions, the KKK, the Proud Boys, the militias, etc.-- do exist, should conditions ever ripen for a mobilization against the working class; but for today, they remain unacceptable to most of the ruling class.

For the most part, the capitalist class, especially its dominant monopoly sector, is satisfied to conduct its business within the confines of bourgeois democracy. “Finance-capital… the big industrialists, landlords and financiers…” defend and protect the two-party system because they regard it as functioning adequately, though the “lawfare” attacks piling up on Trump and the rabid media attacks against him show that an important section of the ruling class considers his unpredictability to be a threat to stability. 

Others think that his buffoonery and bluster serve as a safety valve for the discontent infecting the citizenry, much as Berlusconi’s clown-act pacified and entertained Italians unhappy over their political fate for three decades.

In any case, Trump does not pose the threat of fascism that many would like us to believe. 

We need to find other words to describe the deep crisis of bourgeois legitimacy that we are enduring, words that do not force us into a frenzied defensive posture that deflects us from finding real solutions to a real and profound problems facing working people. 

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Are We Having an Election in November?

With an important US presidential election-- we are told-- only months away, but one posing two repugnant, disheartening choices, it may be a good time to explore where we are and how we got here.

What we can agree is that most of us, when asked, believe that things are going badly: an October, 2023 AP-NORC poll finds that 78% of those polled responded that “the country is going in the wrong direction;” a January Morning Consult poll concludes that less than a third of those responding “say the country is headed in the right direction; a recent Harvard Kennedy school poll says that less than 10 % of youth 18 to 29 believe that the US is “generally headed in the right direction” and so on with NBC, ABC, Pew, etc. polls. We could quarrel over the exact numbers expressing dissatisfaction, but all polls point to a nation decidedly unhappy with our direction.

Of course, there is room to debate exactly what people mean by the “wrong direction.” They may mean in regard to their own current situation or that of their family or friends; they may mean their sense of security; they may mean their own or others’ prospects. Or they may mean that “society” is heading the wrong way culturally, politically, or economically. No doubt respondents to the various polls have complex, even contradictory reasons for losing confidence in the US trajectory. Moreover, one cannot discount the influence of monopoly media reportage and commentary in constructing the sense of dissatisfaction.

It is fair to say, however, that most people believe that our future will be determined by political outcomes. Whether or not they have confidence in the political system-- polls say they don’t-- they do, in fact, rely on campaigning and elections to determine the future course of the country. Most US citizens have not yet chosen or do not know of other political courses of action beyond voting or indifference.

A fixture of our political system is the two-party monopoly. While it is not unlawful or completely uncommon that there be other parties, tradition, entry-demands, financing, chicanery, and even violence have worked to deny third-party movements access or ensure their lack of success. Popular sentiment is denied by Republican and Democratic leaders and functionaries and those others invested in the two-party system who control the rules of the game. A fall, 2023 Gallup poll finds that “Sixty-three percent of U.S. adults currently agree with the statement that the Republican and Democratic parties do ‘such a poor job’ of representing the American people that ‘a third major party is needed.’” For a poll-based summary of US voters’ overall negativity, see this Pew article.

So ahead of a November election, we face two poles: one represented by a self-styled nationalist-populist promising to “Make America Great Again,” while weighted down with a sordid, vulgar, and elitist history; and the other represented by a corporate Democrat once known as the “senator from MBNA” (the infamous credit card company) for his cozy relationship with the credit card industry, a reliable friend of wealth and power, and a history of supporting legislation hostile to the interests of Black people.

This is where we have arrived.

Do the two-parties offer answers to the negativism expressed in polls?

I don’t see it. 

The Republican Party remains a corporate party wedded first and foremost to the interests of capital. It has a relatively independent wing that is able and willing to force its own cultural and social agenda on the entire party. Parts of that wing recognize that the self-proclaimed “party of labor” -- the Democratic Party-- has long failed to deliver anything of deep or lasting value to working people. Elements of this wing have-- in the twenty-first century-- constructed a faux-populist image to attract working people, with some success. Variations of Trump’s “Make America Great Again” had been used earlier by Reagan and the Clintons to entice workers’ votes.

Trump and others have attracted angry voters with their vocal disdain for the “establishment,” elite arrogance, East Coast condescension, and US leaders’ general superciliousness. While “draining the swamp” is a worthy goal, four years of the Trump administration provided no relief from elitism.

The Republicans historically vacillate between isolationism and belligerence. But at least they vacillate. 

While the Republicans do not want to identify with racism, misogyny and the many other know-nothing-isms, they are not above courting the scum that do. 

The Democratic Party-- the other option that we are allowed by our ruling class-- wears the mythical mantle of “the party of the people.” The sole basis for this claim is dim recollections of the New Deal, a little understood period of US history that brought some benefits to working people as a result of a desperate attempt to save capitalism from itself.

With capitalism on a firmer footing after World War II, US rulers, with the full cooperation of Democratic Party Cold Warriors, dealt a fatal blow to the so-called popular front, purging left-wing militancy from unions, universities, schools, media, and any other area of influence. 

The coup de grâce to New Deal thinking came after the collapse of the Keynesian paradigm/New Deal political coalition in the 1970s. When Reagan ushered in market fundamentalism and ushered out government intervention, the Democrats were not long in jumping on board. Soon, every Democrat saw the wisdom of efficiency, balanced budgets, private initiatives, and entrepreneurial sovereignty. As the Republican Party embraced religious zealotry and medieval justice, many saw the Democrats as the new Republicans, with their stealth attacks on welfare, Social Security, and Medicare.

Today’s Democratic Party is neither democratic nor a party, but a brand. It lives and breathes on money from corporate sponsors. Its contact with its supporters is through advertising, television talking heads, the punditry, and indirectly through various media; the idea of human contact with potential voters is only useful if it can be filmed and included in a television commercial.

Like the Republicans, the Democrats have an activist wing that provides a social democratic veneer to the party’s image. Unlike the Republican counterpart wing, the “progressive” Democratic wing never dares to attempt to impose its views on the party. Without exercising “leverage,” the Democratic Party left wing simply serves as a cover, a safe space for “progressives” to welcome other progressives into the party’s arms.

The truth is the Democratic Party is a corporate party, but a party that has occasionally been forced by social pressure, circumstances, or crises to play a people-friendly role. The pressure is not there now.

Moreover, the Democratic leadership has nothing to offer working people. The class base of the party has shifted. With the loss of the South to the Republicans and the ugly Nixon fiasco in the 1970s, the Democrats captured the suburban petty-bourgeoisie and its aspirants who were comfortable with the shrinkage of the welfare state, lower taxes, and deregulation, yet socially liberal on personal questions. Stable super-voters, active in social movements, and financially generous to the Democrats, they (and their contemporary urban gentry counterparts who share a similar profile) are the new keystone of the Democratic Party. The traditional backbone of the Democratic Party-- minorities, unions, youth, the poor-- are taken for granted. After all, according to the reasoning of Democratic leaders, those groups have nowhere else to go.

This realignment has refashioned its core issues around lifestyle, personal rights, and a hyper-regard for the diversity of individual values. The traditional left's concerns for common social values of equality, community, and material security have been forced into the background. Good jobs, health care, education, and secure retirement are not there for all to have, but for those who earn them.

Democratic leaders celebrate achievers-- those who have broken through glass ceilings-- but have contempt for those fallen or stuck in the basement. Both Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama have arrogantly, and with little forethought for appearances, relegated the heartland of the US to a land of gun-loving, Bible-thumpers-- in Clinton’s unforgettable words, “the deplorables.” Never mind that the Midwest has been ravaged by corporate deindustrialization, leaving cities and small towns depopulated, poor, with shrinking social services, and marginal employment. The “deplorables” have failed to push on, get a late-life STEM education, and rise by their own bootstraps. In the meantime, let’s extend a welcoming, helping hand to those few who merit admission to the highest rungs of elite society. 

This contempt for the non-coastal residents came forth most recently in a New York Times bestseller, White Rural Rage, by Schaller and Waldman, who depict small town USA as backward and infected with racism. Like so many in the Democratic Party intelligentsia, they see this as a threat to “our” democracy. That is to say, the authors worry about contempt for the democracy of the “successful,” but care little for the democracy of the “losers.” For a tightly argued, thoughtful rejoinder to this dose of elitism, read Les Leopold’s Wall Street War on Workers, though I wish Leopold would have as a sub-title “and the Two Parties’ War on Workers.”

For the forthcoming election, the Democrats will once again hope to corral those left-of-center with Trump’s alleged threat to “our” democracy. They will go so far as to raise the specter of fascism. Ironically, the closest move against democracy that resembles the realities of life under fascism is the recent bipartisan passage of an expanded section 702 of the infamous FISA, an act that permits warrantless spying on US citizens. The ACLU comments that it is a “bill that gives the government more ways to secretly surveil us.” Even more ironically, Trump-- the alleged enemy of democracy-- denounced the entire FISA act.

Leftish Democrats will again raise the old canard about divisions on the left in Germany opening the door to fascism in the 1930s. According to this historical reconstruction, the failure of the Communists and Social Democrats to unite against Hitler allowed him to take power. It is an ill-informed, simplistic take on a complex situation. But suffice it to say, it excuses the real causes of Hitler’s rise: the draconian Treaty of Versailles, discredited centrist politics, compromised industrialists and business people, a profound economic crisis, displaced workers whose voices were not heard, their desperation, and-- yes-- a rotten, broken capitalist system. 

The Democrats face an enormous problem with poor management of the economy and support for unpopular wars. Some say the Democrats are the war party. But that is not fair. Both parties are war parties, each with its own badges of shame.

But Biden and the Democrats will pay a price for enabling the bloodletting in Ukraine and, especially, for complicity in the massacres in Gaza. The intensity of the outrage against the genocidal slaughter in Gaza will only increase.

Regardless of which of the two parties wins in November, we are in for a rough patch. While the candidates are different, they are different in equally despicable ways.

I will follow the wise council of most of my fellow citizens who say that “a third majority party is needed” and cast my one vote towards that goal.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com