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Fascism and the Crisis of Pax Americana

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 22; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/08854300802083380

1745-2635

Gregory Meyerson, Michael Joseph Roberto,

European history and politics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. In this paper, we will not consider several recent works from the Right, such as those by Norman Podhoretz (2006) on world war and Islamofascism or Jonah Goldberg Citation(2007) on so-called "liberal fascism." From a libertarian point of view Goldberg correctly sees the corporatist component of liberalism but then equates corporatism with "friendly" and "unfriendly" fascisms. He sees libertarian capitalism as the antidote to fascism, which, oddly enough, makes him a bedfellow of the liberals, who now want to separate good from bad capitalism (the latter leading, for some, to fascism). In a parody of the dialectical method, Goldberg's bad capitalism is the liberal's good capitalism and vice versa. 2. For example, Chris Hedges (Citation2006: 194–201) recalls how, at Harvard Divinity School 25 years ago, his ethics professor James Luther Adams warned students that they would one day find themselves fighting "Christian fascists." Echoing the 1930s prediction of Sinclair Lewis that fascism would come to the United States wrapped in the American flag and bearing a Christian cross, Adams believed that the transformation of the US as a global Christian empire would be facilitated by American fascists wearing neither swastikas nor brown shirts. Robert Paxton concludes his recent study of European fascism with a discussion of possible contemporary forms, including Protestant fundamentalism, which he says could become a "functional equivalent" of fascism "to regenerate and unite a humiliated and vengeful people" (2004: 203). 3. The most recent example is Naomi Wolf's The End of America (2007). Wolf argues that the tactics used by the Bush administration in abusing the Constitution reflect those the Nazis employed to undermine the Weimar Republic. Rejecting comparisons between the United States in 2007 and Nazi Germany, Wolf says a "fascist shift" has occurred in the United States, suggesting that the "10-steps to dictatorship" taken by the Thai military in its 2006 coup are currently "being put into place here in the United States today" (13f). Wolf ignores political economy and class struggle, viewing fascism in strictly political and ideological terms. Her preventive is to rally all patriots around the seminal ideas of the Founders who, she says, understood the fragility of democracy better than we do. Wolf here falls in line with others who have similarly linked the potential for fascism in America with the machinations of the Bush administration and the neoconservatives. Among these are Joe Conason Citation(2007), Mark Crispin Miller Citation(2005), Lewis Lapham Citation(2005), Lawrence Britt Citation(2003), and Carl Davidson and Jerry Harris (2006). 4. There is also a Luddite position that calls for the end of civilization. The works of Derrick Jensen are most prominent in this genre. 5. We borrow the term "fascist processes" from Pem Buck Citation(2001), who conceptualizes fascism as a process in order to avoid freezing its contemporary forms into its past forms. Buck stresses, as we do, fascist processes as a property of capital that waxes and wanes with major organizational changes in class rule. She notes rightly that only the ruling class can institute fascist processes. 6. Gregory Meyerson and Michael Joseph Roberto, "It Could Happen Here," Monthly Review Commentary, www.monthlyreview.org (October 2006). One of the central advantages of this functional definition is that it allows us to zero in on fascism's changing forms in the same way that Marxists analyze imperialism's changing forms. We thus avoid sterile debates over necessary empirical features of all fascisms, as in Matthew Lyons's Citation(2007) argument that "revolutionary populism" is a necessary ideological feature of all fascisms. If we were to follow such prescriptions, a massive increase in repression in the US could not be viewed as "an intensification of fascist processes" unless it took revolutionary populist form. As we have said in our Monthly Review piece, we think it's best to follow George Jackson Citation(1990) in his comment that "we will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class" (118). 7. See Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of extreme dystopia, The Road (2007). In film, see Children of Men. It is important to note that post-apocalyptic and dystopian fiction is by no means necessarily hopeless. On the contrary, the best fiction of this sort is a wake-up call, not a call to fatalism. George Monbiot Citation(2007b) has argued, interestingly, that The Road communicates the dangers of global warming (without any mention of the term), and thus the necessity to combat it now, more powerfully than even the most recent (2007) report by the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC). Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic fiction is also immensely hopeful, even when it employs fatalism as a central trope. For example, in the Lilith Brood trilogy (2000), the human species is nearly destroyed by a genetic flaw that leads humans to persecute the different, the other. Does Butler really think that racism originates in a genetic flaw? No. But the feelings of horror induced in the reader by this trope function to create a rage to change what presumably cannot be changed. 8. While the Reagan administration gave its full support to counterrevolutionary forces in Central America, it also foresaw the possibility of resistance at home. Accordingly, it developed plans for martial law, giving sole power to the president and authority to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to round up dissidents, aliens, enemies, etc., and place them in detention centers. 9. In July/August of 2001, an editorial in Monthly Review (vol. 53, no. 3) reported that both political parties gave equal support to "getting tough on crime" legislation. "Criminal justice expenditures grew (in constant 1996 dollars) from $234 per person (in total population) in 1982 … to $454 per person in 1996" (14). The editors emphasized that these expenditures meant cuts in health, welfare, and education spending. States went on a prison-building boom, more than doubling capacity – only to face overcrowded conditions. 10. In numerous studies spanning the period of the general crisis, Harry Magdoff and Paul Sweezy developed their position on the persistence of stagnation, which, they explained, was caused by a shortage of opportunities for investment of the surplus. John Bellamy Foster has emphasized repeatedly how Sweezy and Magdoff "have helped us to understand why US capitalists necessarily turned to financial products as the solution to existing shrinking opportunities in the so-called "real economy." Foster reminds us (Citation2007a: 2f) that Sweezy offered "the most succinct expression" in 1997 of the need for financialization as a response to two major trends operating in the world economy following the global recession of 1974–75, the slowdown in the overall rate of growth, and the proliferation of multinational corporations. As monopolization swelled profits, the demand for further investment in markets controlled by the multinationals declined, thus slowing down capital accumulation. The decline in real investment precipitated and then fueled financialization. 11. There is considerable debate about Brenner's thesis, which basically argues that the decline in profitability, particularly the rise in production costs relative to prices in the manufacturing sector, was in the main caused by interimperial struggles between the United States, Germany, and Japan. James Crotty and others have criticized Brenner's thesis, because it dismisses labor militancy as a factor in determining constraints on profit. While we note the significance of the debate, the central point for us is that the rate of profit indeed fell. 12. Between 1950 and 1965, the value of foreign assets of US firms grew at twice the rate of GDP, from $11 billion to $47 billion; foreign earnings as a share of after-tax profits of US non-financial corporations rose from 10% to 22% (MacEwan Citation1990: 38). 13. Between 1967 and 1978, US based firms increased their foreign investment in absolute terms, but their share of the global total began to decline by 5% (MacEwan Citation1990: 42). 14. Michel Beaud (Citation2001: 268) has observed that the share of imports and exports within America's GNP rose from 7–8% to 18–21% during the 1970s. US corporations increased overseas investments from $100 billion in 1973 to $220 billion in 1980, while the growth of investments in the United States by non-American corporations was even greater, from $20 billion to $60 billion in the same time period. Meanwhile, the Ford and Carter administrations kept pumping dollars into the economy to finance the rising federal, trade, and current accounts deficits – all of which served to push down the value of the dollar. Between 1975 and 1979, the dollar fell by 26% and 27% against the yen and mark respectively. This made credit easier for US producers who now sought to increase investment in manufacturing, which in turn led to a temporary increase in US exports from 1975 to 1979. But the inability to improve profitability, added to the increasing trade imbalances – all operating against the contracting world market – prevented a revival of the productive economy, and the structural contradictions of the US economy deepened (Brenner Citation2006: 166ff). 15. According to Baker, unemployment for African Americans reached 21% at the start of 1983. 16. Some 2.3 million manufacturing jobs disappeared between 1980 and 1985 (Parenti Citation2001: 23). Brenner (Citation2006: 196) says that while union membership in absolute terms had held up reasonably well into the mid-1970s, it plummeted by an annual average of 817,000 between 1979 and 1983, then 316,000 between 1983 and 1987. Brenner also provides statistics on the sharp decline of union elections and on the number of unfair labor practices committed by management during union organizing drives. 17. Dean Baker's recent work, The United States Since 1980 (2007), demonstrates how the economic policies of successive administrations from Reagan to Bush II regarding trade, immigration, labor-management relations, macroeconomics, deregulation of industry, and minimum wage, contributed to a massive upward redistribution of income that widened the gap between wealth and poverty in America. Baker's book relies heavily on first-rate scholarship, such as the 2004–05 volume of the ongoing The State of Working America by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and Sylvia Allegretto. Both books connect the US decline over the last quarter century to the collapse of a once vibrant industrial economy that ended relative prosperity for a substantial portion of the American working class, while increasing the share of the national income of the richest 5% of families by more than one-third. 18. According to Baker (Citation2007: 56), the 1974–75 recession was much more severe than any prior postwar slump, with unemployment peaking at 9% in May 1975. While the economy bounced back and grew at a healthy pace for the next two years, it never returned to its pre-recession prosperity. This marked the beginning of a pattern for all subsequent recessions. In April 2003, the editors of Monthly Review reported that the recession which began in March 2001 was more than a traditional downturn in the business cycle, reflecting a new and deeper round of stagnation caused by excess capacity and the absence of new growth stimuli in the United States and the global economy. The evidence for substantial recovery was indeed lacking. Having lost more than 2 million jobs since the beginning of the recession, Americans faced a jobless recovery, the worst hiring slump in almost 20 years. In the initial phases of the four recessions preceding that of the early 1990s, workers losing their jobs permanently averaged 51%; in the initial phase of the 2001 recession, the share of permanent layoffs was 87%. 19. This figure for China it should be noted is based on assumptions that we (and Foster) would question as it takes unproblematic capitalist growth for granted, as if oil weren't peaking and the environment facing perhaps a critical tipping point. 20. The data on savings from 2001 to 2005 come from a report in The New York Times (September 9, 2006). 21. Global Policy Forum, www.globalpolicy.org 22. In the debate between early and late peakers, the evidence in our view does not favor the late peakers. They have made several predictions that have turned out way off. For one example, we only need turn to the United States whose own oil peak was accurately predicted, on the basis of different methods, by M. King Hubbert (in 1958) to be 1970. The United States Geological Survey (USGS), one of the cornucopians, predicted in the 1960s that US oil would peak in 2000. As Deffeyes Citation(2005) has noted, the USGS in the year 2000 "estimated a U.S. total of 362 billion barrels" for unproduced reserves, compared to an estimate of 228 billion barrels using Hubbert's method. The problem with the high estimate is that it can't explain the peak unless, as Deffeyes notes, "the USGS was counting on bringing in Iraq as the 51st state." Crucially, as a rebuttal to techno-optimists, Deffeyes points out that "improved technologies and [financial] incentives have been appearing all along and there appears to be no abrupt dramatic improvement that will put an immediate bend in the straight line" (39). The reason the unproduced portion (the 228 billion) is so important is that the curve drawn on its basis fits the oil production history. If it did not, he says, "we wouldn't be talking about it"; but "because it does fit, the possibility arises that the unproduced fraction of the total oil dominates over all other factors… . The price of oil matters; it just doesn't matter very much" (40). 23. In one model, California and the Rocky Mountain states were headed for certain summer drought while the Midwest and Northeast had (respectively) 60–80% and 40–60% chance of drought. In the other model, the whole continental US would suffer summer drought. Water resource managers hearing Rind's reports asserted that adaptation under such conditions would be impossible. See Kolbert (Citation2006: 107–10). 24. Friedman quickly returns to normal after his moment of systemic critique and offers individual solutions to systemic problems: "if you want to help preserve the Indonesian forests, think fast, start quick, act now." 25. In his book on the new imperialism, Harvey (Citation2003: 209) sees the solution, "albeit temporary," as "some sort of new 'New Deal' that has a global reach." In the book that follows on neoliberalism (2005) he again takes up the question of a new New Deal. We discuss Harvey's contradictions around any new New Deal in our forthcoming book. 26. Warming causes stratification, which in turn shuts down the circulation of nutrients from colder waters to warmer. 27. See Scheer Citation2007, for a similar argument about solar power and decentralization. 28. One of the green technologies with the most promise involves producing ethanol from waste material. In one version of the technology, cellulose is broken down by enzymes; in another, by bacteria. One company in Illinois has claimed to be able to produce ethanol for about $1 per gallon. The process is hyperefficient and produces virtually no CO2. As Strahan notes, however, in Canada, a country with much agricultural waste product, much of the straw must be used for soil amendment and the totality of what is left can produce about one tenth of Canada's fuel use today. It is a great technology, but not under capitalism. Having the population choose between food and a $100,000 car will not mitigate the contradictions leading to an intensification of fascist processes. 29. The term "contributive justice" comes from Paul Gomberg Citation(2007); justice goes beyond distribution to include as a necessary feature the need for meaningful contribution to society, a contribution not possible in a division of labor based on competitive equal opportunity.