Fascism Old and New

American Politics at the Crossroads

Carl Boggs

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138485341
• eBook ISBN: 9781351049696
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Fascism & Totalitarianism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Deep historical trends suggest the United States could be moving toward a distinctly novel form of fascism, embracing elements of the historical phenomenon as it appeared in such countries as Italy, Germany, Japan, and Spain while departing in significant ways. A twenty-first century fascism would hardly be revolutionary or totalitarian, as it would involve no dramatic break with the past, following a logic of continuity and building on firmaments of entrenched power going back to World War II. This new type of fascist regime would be driven by a tightening confluence of sectoral interests in American society: corporate, state, military, and cultural – interests favoring oligarchy, authoritarianism, the warfare system, and surveillance order within an expanding globalized matrix of power. The dominant historical forces emphasized by such theorists as C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite) and Sheldon Wolin (Democracy, Inc.), an important foundation of this book, have grown stronger and more pervasive across the decades. An integrated power structure has been fueled by new advances in technology, a money-saturated political system, and neoliberal globalism bolstered by the spread of right wing populism that, among other things, has catapulted Donald Trump into the U.S. presidency.

In this book, Carl Boggs explores new political and ideological terrain in systematically considering the prospects for a gradual development of fascism in contemporary American society and, by extension, elsewhere across the advanced industrial world. He persuasively argues that modern fascistic trends, arguably most visible in the U.S., demonstrate a closer affinity with Mussolini's Italy (corporate state) than with the more extreme Nazi German model of tyranny and genocide.

A very timely scholarly enterprise, this book will be of interest to students of contemporary radical politics, fascism more broadly, US political history, ideologies and party politics.

1

Power in Capitalist Society

Our exploration of fascist (or proto-fascist) politics inevitably begins with those modernizing forces, interests, and ideologies that ascended during the late nineteenth century – and have expanded across the twentieth century into the present. Modernization has extensively transformed every realm of life: economic, political, cultural, global. Regarding fascism, it is best understood within this historical framework of advancing capitalism, defined by the steady growth of state institutions, corporate interests, bureaucracy, military power, and nationalist ideology. Fascism originally developed through movements, parties, and regimes, mainly in Europe, as one expression of this modernizing force, integral to that history, part of a matrix of interests not too far removed, if at all, from those of rival modernizing systems.

The fascist phenomenon was one outgrowth of modernizing capitalism as it evolved from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. As feudalism and preindustrial society waned, so too did its main ideological expressions, including conservatism – though strong residues did survive well into the modern era, and often contributed to the rise of fascism in Europe and Asia. While classical liberalism served as the hegemonic ideology of historical capitalism, its attachment to such ideals as free markets, individualism, and democratic politics would face difficult challenges from the increasing concentration of state, corporate, bureaucratic, and (in many cases) military power. By World War II liberal capitalism was giving way to a more robust statism that would soon underpin competing systems of the period: social democracy, fascism, Communism. These variants of modernization would be aligned with state-directed economies and, for both fascism and Communism, a populist-style nationalism reinforced by a large military apparatus. The first two were expressions of capitalist development, or corporate-state modernity, while the third (Leninism) would become the driving-force behind the epic nationalist revolutions in lesser-industrialized nations: Russia, China, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba.

By the 1920s and 1930s, with both social democracy and fascism on the rise in Europe, classical liberalism – identified with laissez-faire economics, limited government, pluralism – was in severe decline, no longer functioning as an ideological basis of economic growth and political legitimacy. In fact the Great Depression effectively signaled the eclipse of neoclassical economics and the fantasy of free markets, although that trajectory had already been set in motion by World War I, if not earlier. Benito Mussolini’s famous assault on liberal democracy and his exaltation of state power in Italy during the early 1920s was not the great aberration usually depicted; it was more a reflection of the Zeitgeist, above all in the European context. The U.S. appeared as something of a lone holdout against this expansion of statism, its elites adhering firmly to the prescriptions of liberal capitalism, until Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal changed everything. By the early 1940s and onset of World War II, American capitalism had come under broadened government controls through a mixture of social and military Keynesianism, and that pattern would continue across the postwar years. Over time, while retaining these features of Keynesianism, the U.S. would follow a fourth pattern – that of a militarized state-capitalism, built on a merger of corporate, government, and military power.

Taking into account the four distinctive paths to modernization, ideals historically associated with liberal democracy would face mounting obstacles. Classical liberalism had upheld the virtues of citizen participation, civic rights and freedoms, institutional access, and social autonomy. By the 1920s and 1930s, however, such virtues were being overwhelmed by the spread of state-organized economies, corporate-oligarchical power, and rising nationalism that often fueled both warfare and fascism. Relentless expansion of authoritarian-state power, whether in the form of Communism, fascism, or rationalized state-capitalism, was sure to hasten the eclipse of classical liberalism; it was just a matter of time.

The Logic of Capitalist Rationalization

While capitalism and liberalism had an uneasy and conflicted marriage throughout the nineteenth century, that dynamic would take new forms by the early twentieth century. Capitalism would flourish in its corporate-state and globalized form, while liberalism would lose much of its relevance as a vibrant belief-system aligned with freedom and democracy. A system that had long celebrated the blessings of a laissez-faire economy – though state power had been far more decisive than generally believed – liberal capitalism was bound to meet the limits of its own contradictions. As sprawling corporate interests and their oligopolistic markets took hold, the system grew ever more dependent on government functions, from subsidies to taxation, regulation, tariffs, public infrastructure, law enforcement, and military supports. Modernity required complex levels of generalized direction, organization, and planning, cemented by the integration of elite power: never again would classical liberalism furnish the basis of democratic politics. Under the weight of incessant economic and bureaucratic rationalization, the fragile linkage between capitalist accumulation and liberal politics would inevitably erode and then dissolve.

Strong central governments would be indispensable, everywhere, to serve and reinforce rapidly-modernizing economies. For Europe and North America that involved three broad alternatives: social democracy, fascism, or a renovated state-corporate liberalism – all departing, sooner or later, from classical liberalism in their fuller embrace of statism, among other differences. Both the first and third alternatives would be hitched to a Keynesian economics adopted primarily to save capitalism from its own lethal dysfunctions. It would be the third alternative that shaped American development, rooted in combined social and military Keynesianism, bringing a merger of corporations and government. Everywhere the state became a systemic necessity, hardly resembling an alien or external force. By the 1930s, if not sooner, the foundational elements of classical liberalism had become more or less dormant: unfettered competition, “invisible hand”, night-watchman state, free markets, citizen sovereignty – all this was now largely fiction.¹ The system would be catalyzed more by the imperatives of bureaucracy, science, technology, and public infrastructure (education, transportation, urban services, welfare, etc.). Institutional stability and economic growth – not to mention ideological legitimacy – depended overwhelmingly on state power.

As noted, the seminal theorist of capitalist rationalization was Max Weber, whose work happened to coincide with the initial phase of the historical period in question. Driven by modernity – by the elite drive for maximum efficiency and control – capitalism in Weber’s view could never expand without adopting forms of large-scale organization and its complex division of labor, hierarchy, routinization, and command functions, all superseding the mythical free flow of resources, commodities, and markets. To survive, much less flourish, modern capitalism depended on far-reaching networks of planning, direction, and coordination – the essence of a state-corporate model embracing material and social progress within an Enlightenment framework.² That elevated state power would be integral to capitalist development had been obvious even before World War I, reflected in the experience of Bismarckian Germany and the first appearance of mass social-democratic parties, a phenomenon accelerated by several warfare systems that emerged from the Great War.

For Weber, writing in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the system in its modern incarnation had become increasingly “emancipated from its old supports” associated with early capitalism, yielding not only to the process of economic rationalization but to a closer alliance with state power.³ Further, “this process of rationalization in the field of technique and economic organization undoubtedly determines an important part of the ideals of life of modern bourgeois society.”⁴ In the end, the very spirit of capitalism turns profoundly against the most “spontaneous aspects of life” as it favors the incessant accumulation of capital.⁵

Weber’s view of rationalized capitalism clashed in many ways with Marx’s class-conflict model. For Marx, the system was so riddled with contradictions – between workers and bourgeoisie, universal ideals and private interests, social needs and capital accumulation – that prospects for stability, order, and control through bureaucratized state organization were dismissed as illusory. Commodity production gave rise to systemic alienation, conflict, instability, and crises that could only be resolved by overthrow of an exploitative capitalist economy.⁶ While Marx never arrived at a comprehensive theory of the state, his work generally approached the political realm as secondary or “superstructural”, subordinated to the mode of production. Thus statism (or Bonapartism) could be nothing more than an episodic moment, a desperate but futile maneuver by reactionary interests to overcome crisis-tendencies endemic to an otherwise anarchic and volatile capitalism. Class struggle leading to revolution was the historical tendency of modern bourgeois society, and no governmental power could in the long run stave off collapse. For Marx, the state was little more than a constellation of capitalist economic interests, the site of little if any autonomy.

Weber, for his part, was hardly unaware of the systemic contradictions theorized by Marx, but writing decades later he was better able to extensively conceptualize the historical tendencies driven by expanded corporate, bureaucratic, and (especially) state power. Whatever its intractable contradictions, capitalism was destined to undergo rationalization involving some mode of state direction. History had called into question the central features of both classical Marxism and classical liberalism: the primacy of economics (markets, commodities, class relations) was yielding, in one way or another, to the privileged role of politics in the form of both Leninism and fascism.⁷

For early Marxism and liberalism alike, politics was always secondary to ostensibly deeper, underlying conditions and forces. The Weberian inversion of this dynamic made abundant sense by the early decades of the twentieth century, reflecting as it did newer historical trends first visible in the European context. As we have seen, such affirmation of the political was vigorously set forth by Mussolini in the early 1920s. Attacking liberalism, Mussolini famously said, “The foundation of fascism is the conception of the state, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the state as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the state.”⁸ We know that Mussolini, crucially, was architect of the corporate state.

While extreme, Mussolini’s celebration of a dynamic and creative statism generally fit the Weberian understanding of capitalist rationalization stressing corporate efficiency, organizational hierarchy, and new modes of integration and control. As with fascism itself, the system would be run by elites atop the economy, government, military, and cultural life – hardly consistent with any meaningful liberal economy or democratic politics. This same organizational logic extended not only to fascism, what remained of liberal capitalism, and social democracy, but (as mentioned) to Lenin’s vanguard party in Russia, later crucial to the success of twentieth-century Communist revolutions. Reversing Marx, Lenin unapologetically embraced the primacy of politics under conditions where the revolutionary party would develop into a new kind of party-state. As for European social-democracy, whose leaders sought to extend both the social and political terrain of capitalism, it was Robert Michels (in his classic Political Parties) who argued that, beneath even the most democratic ideals, large-scale organization was destined to create oligarchy, or rule of the few – precisely the experience of early German Social Democracy. Wrote Michels: “It is indisputable that the oligarchical and bureaucratic tendency of party organization is a matter of technical and practical necessity.”⁹ Bureaucratic power meant that, even where the best democratic intentions are in place, popular sovereignty is destined to become something of a political fiction. Michels, it turns out, was a keen student of Weber, pushing the theory of rationalization to new levels.

Michels has often been situated among “elite theorists” of the period, joining Gaetano Mosca and Vilfredo Pareto, though the list could easily have extended to Weber, Lenin, and others, all pessimistic about the efficacy of mass participation. Such “elitism” in fact roughly coincided with the Zeitgeist of the period, bolstered by the appearance of warfare systems during and after World War I. European liberal democracy was passing from the scene, under siege from both left and right. What Mosca observed had more than a little resonance with political reality: “In all societies … two classes of people appear – a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power, and enjoys the advantages that power brings …”.¹⁰ Pareto, like Mosca and Michels, believed that democracy was a rather naïve idea easily corrupted by “demagogic plutocracy” which allowed a few elites to easily dominate large-scale institutions.¹¹ While Michels considered his theory an “iron law”, much the same thinking could have applied to the others, all convinced that an authoritarian process of rationalization was constitutive of capitalist development.

Capitalist rationalization was driven not simply as a matter of bureaucratic and statist imperatives, but through changes at the industrial workplace and other sites of everyday life. The modern corporation emerged in Europe and North America during the 1880s and 1890s, its economic and political power solidified by the time of World War I. New rationalization techniques were already introduced in the U.S. at the Ford Motor Company, in the form of scientific management or “Taylorism”, and these would starkly challenge the stated principles of classical liberalism. Weber was not alone in theorizing that modern industry would require increased precision, routine, and speed within a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Trends towards feudal capitalism
• 2. Globalization: the emergence of “Mamounia”, the new global nation
• 3. Robots and informats will cause economic and social crises
• 4. Aspects of a policy architecture for the fourth industrial revolution
• 5. Concepts
• Index