State power operates only destructively, bent always on forcing every manifestation of life into the straitjacket of its laws. Its intellectual form of expression is dead dogma, its physical form brute force. The state can train subjects, but it can never develop free people who take their affairs into their own hands, for independent thought is the greatest danger that it has to fear.
--Rudolf Rocker
The existence of this blog, Censor Free Zone, has -- or rather the contributors to this blog have -- attracted a bit of negative attention from the regular commenters on the blog, Leftist Politics, administered by the Disqus commenter who goes by the handle "newestbeginning". It's not like the blog, Leftist Politics, has not been the target of negative attention on this site, Censor Free Zone, either.
The Disqus commenter and Leftist Politics blog administrator took umbrage at the (gaslighting?) question by aprescoup -- a contributor to this Censor Free Zone blog -- "The newest beginning you're hoping to usher in is neoliberal new normal fascism, eh?"
This is the context of "heresy" that I'd like to throw open for discussion, NOT disqus personalities.
For a topic of open discussion, what do you think about leftists accusing fellow leftists of heresy?
Was newestbeginning unjustly targeted and attacked? Is this a microcosm of the left / the Left destroying itself? What's your honest opinion of leftists attacking fellow leftists?
(As a disclaimer and confession, I admit that I'm more guilty than most of you, dear reader, of this vile and sociopathic verbal behavior.)
Are some of us struggling to discover within our core a genuinely radical & personal leftist political-economic ideological philosophy and then authentically working / laboring to bring that philosophy to the forefront on blogs such as Leftist Politics and Censor Free Zone?
Does it even matter politically how a person politically self-describes or how we describe others?
Frankly, only actions & behaviors matter. Words, speeches, debates, arguments, polemics, written essays, interviews, blogging are kind of like quasi actions. The messiah is purported to have taught "The good man brings good things out of the good treasure of his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil treasure of his heart. For out of the overflow of the heart, the mouth speaks."
But politics isn't about hearts and minds. It's about the exercise of power and it's about struggle (particularly the class struggle) and it's about taking a stand (such as what hill you'll make your stand on and die on if need be) after choosing a side. Politics isn't about "I identify as (fill in the blank)" or "She / He is best described as (fill in the blank)."
But part of political power is influence. The ruling classes seem to have all the power to propagandize, to leverage, to aggressively coerce. But the lower classes still have some influence, at least with one another. Influence with the state / governments? Some elected politicos might put serving the citizens over serving the wealthy rentiers and capitalists, but (if that's even true) their numbers are few and these politicos have little influence with their fellows.
It's our behavior, our actions which will influence our fellow inhabitants of the unwashed mass, our fellow lumpen. Like it or not, a big part of that behavior is verbal.
As for the Disqus commenter and Leftist Politics blog administrator, newestbeginning, I'll give her my vote of confidence, for what it's worth, that she's genuine in her struggle to side with the working class.
With respect to nearly anyone who is trying to fight back in our current context, I differ from what most people think about the current state of US unionism.
Of course, none of that can be split away from an analysis of our current circumstances which I believe is an international hot war, and economic war, of the rich on the poor and the rapid emergence of fascism as a popular movement.
It does not have to be that way.
Let us hope that another scenario is possible if we take on the hard tasks of the immediate future and connect them to a vision of what can be. One of those tasks is to determine the role of the unions and the relationship of radicals to them.
Labor bosses at all levels are the nearest and most vulnerable of workers’ enemies. Rather than “move unions to the left,” better, “demolish the labor quislings, take their treasuries, seize their buildings, as we build a mass class conscious movement to transcend the system of capital.”
Why does that make better sense?
Since the Industrial Workers of the World (a grand vision but fatally flawed practice) were nearly demolished in the Palmer Raids of 1919, American unionism has been a false flag operation: not what most people think of as unionism.
*Every major labor leader in the US adopts the corporate-state view of unity of Labor Bosses, Government, and Corporations in the national interest. These are hardly “labor” unions in the strict sense of the word. They are the empire’s unions. I assume the connections of labor and US intelligence are fairly well known and do not need to be explained. They are the unions of what now is, surely, the US corporate state.
*It follows that the Labor Bosses deceive people from the moment they join a union, the key lie being that none of labor’s elites believe that workers and employers have contradictory interests–the very reason most people agree to send them money.
*The remarkable salaries of US Labor Bosses (past National Education Association president Reg Weaver made $696,949 in his last year in office) come directly from the fruits of US imperialism and war. They know that. They have been war hawks for decades, using the unions to promote the Empire’s desires. They sit on the boards of the Social Democrats USA, the National Endowment for Democracy, The Albert Shanker Institute, The George Meany Center, and other fronts for the Central Intelligence Agency. Following the history of the American Federation of Labor, which sought to organize white men into craft (skill based) unions, and exclude most of the working class, the international operations of the AFL-CIO seek to demolish indigenous workers’ struggles so, in theory, American workers will do better. Clearly, this failed.
*Union tops sell a pacified or disciplined work force for money from employers. That is the nucleus of “collective bargaining.” Employers collect dues (check off) on behalf of the union, send it to the union heads, while the labor tops promise labor peace for the duration of the contract. That is precisely the traditional exchange.
Labor heads use violence to “protect the contract,” because employers can sue them if the rank and file wildcats, strikes within the contract’s time period. Unions become the bosses enforcers.
Henry Ford fought unions for years. When he finally came to understand this devil’s deal, he said, “You mean I’m the union’s banker? Sign me on!” Today, Ford management organizes Ford plants on behalf of the United Autoworkers Union. The upshot is, labor leaders (1) condition the work force for passivity, (2) urge members to think of the union as a vending machine, (3) consider the treasury, and thus mis-leaders own jobs and pensions, to be more important than the interest of the rank and file members–the union becomes a bank.
*When labor tops cry, “Save Collective Bargaining,” they really mean, “Save My Job and Pension!” The last 40 years of labor history show they are willing to concede everything the members have (wages, hours, working conditions, pensions) to management, often under the guise of “Save Our American Industry,” but what they really want is to preserve their money. “Save Collective Bargaining!” becomes, “Save Our Automatic Check-off and We will give you Labor Peace!”
*The vast majority of unions are corrupt and hierarchical at the core, usually mimicking the structure of the employers. So, those seeking to reform those unions are not learning lessons to transcend capitalism, but rather they learn every opportunist and corrupt maneuver that has kept US “unionism” afloat when it should have been put to death years ago.
* When one gets close to “reforming” a US union, one will face serious violence. That will come from not only the union bosses, but their allies in the courts, the cops, joint union/Boss firings, intelligence, and the mob–one or all. Those unprepared for that should, at the least, be forewarned.
*The unions accept without question the multiple divisions of labor that, in part, lay at the base of the capitalist system. The unions divide people far more than unite people. And each union’s structure mimics the structure of the management of their workplace.
*The divisions between elements of “Labor” are easy to see. Look at any airport–five or six unions representing people with different jobs, skills, etc. The American Federation of Labor was founded to preserve divisions–skilled craft workers from everyone else; usually meaning white men vs everyone else. The Congress of Industrial Organizations, founded mainly by the Communist Party USA (sic–the wellspring of the greatest betrayals of American radicalism), pits one industry against another: steelworkers vs autoworkers, etc. While the CIO did indeed lead heroic cross-industry struggles that won significant reforms, concessions, in the thirties, by the early 50’s the CIO evaporated into an appendage of the empire, turned into something many of its founders set out to oppose.
*Further evidence of the divisive nature of “unions” is the incessant raiding that takes place. The Service Employees International Union grew to super-size by raiding other unions and independent organizations–and they are still at it. SEIU can rightly claim to be victimized by raids as well. The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers spent a decade and millions of dollars raiding each other: the “Teacher Wars.”
*Unions routinely scab on each others’ strikes as harshly demonstrated by the California grocery strike of the not-too-distant past.
*The old labor saw, “I paid my dues,” conceals the marriage of unions and capital and the boundaries the wedding created. For example, in a teachers’ union, students are not about to be invited to meetings as active participants and voters. They didn’t pay their dues. But they are the most valuable allies teachers, especially professors, have–and the people most likely to see the necessity of militant direct action.
*The “Labor Movement” is full of police, prison guards, and others dedicated to the promulgation of the violence that is the stick behind capital’s carrots (vanishing fast).
*The empire’s war industry is nearly fully unionized: Boeing, shipyards like NASCO, etc., indicating the nature of imperialist unionism: war means work. More war means more work.
*Other labor unions are so mobbed up that it is impossible to distinguish the labor leaders from the gangsters–an indicator of the relationship of those who do crime, and the cops who often help them organize it. In this case, the relationship has a third party, the members, who are thrice robbed: by the cops, by the gangsters, and by fetish that is their union, but is not a union.
*Fake unions like those that exist in the National Football League, or Major League Baseball, win a lot of support when they claim to be part of the working class–while making millions a year, living in gated communities, negotiating individual contracts, and polluting a popular culture where adults dress up in team uniforms and slug it out, occasionally killing one another.
*Construction unions collude with developers and politicians to fleece the public: building unneeded sports stadiums and convention centers. This deepens the divides in the working class, creates a population of superfluous very well paid workers eager to get into the pockets of the rest of the working class. More importantly, the practice underlines the unity of unionites, bosses, and pols in the corporate state.
*The last thing the Labor Movement and its aristocrats wants is a mass of class conscious workers who are willing to fight in solidarity to control their work places and communities. That would mean the Labor Bosses would have nothing to sell to the Big Bosses (labor peace/no strike clauses for check-off). Instead the ability to control the work place becomes confused with ability to control the union, which is often a contradiction. There is no way to overcome this structural and psychological poisoning of the well.
*The prime maneuver union tops use to distract, divert, and finally demolish any hint of class consciousness is to herd people into electoral work, the fake “democratic,” process where people are offered the chance to choose who will oppress them best while asking the question, “What about me?” (capital’s favorite question) to the executive committee and armed weapon of the rich that is the government. This scam reinforces the dangerous false, nationalist, belief that we are all in this together in a democratic society, when every message from reality says we are not.
*The Labor Movement is not about to teach people Grand Strategy (overcome capital), strategy (how to study concrete conditions about how capital works in specific places and make broad plans to fit the Grand Strategy) and tactics (direct action on the job: sit down strikes, mutinies, etc) not only because the Labor Movement bitterly opposes that, but also because there is nearly no one left in Labor who even knows how to fake it.
*The “Labor Movement” is not a movement and it is not where most people who work are. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people who are likely to be early change agents are not in unions: soldiers, immigrants, and students. To lure them into some bogus kind of US unionism, or nearly any other “unorganized” person, is to just add a layer of enemies for them. Why do that?
*The argument that people “must learn by baby steps,” rises out of a bizarre idea that people need to be lied to from the outset so they can learn not to be lied to later. Just as far too many radicals are unwilling to use terms like “capitalism and exploitation,” “imperialist war,” and “corporate state fascism,” so are they unwilling to unmask the realities of the US’ bogus unions.
*Yes, some people are in unions and those who are serious about transforming capitalism need to be in those unions, attacking the leadership, the corruption, the hierarchies, the betrayals, the theft of treasuries, nationalism, etc. But they need one toe in and nine out.
*There are, nearly, no progressive lessons to be learned from the Labor Movement, except when the rank and file fights the union — with the goal of overturning it entirely. The IWW notion that, “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common,” applies to workers and their union leaders as well.
*Repeated efforts to reform “Labor” have either been silly like Aronowitz and others’ “Scholars, Artists and Writers for Social Justice,” etc, or simply failed, if pretty heroically: Labor Notes.
*Today’s imitation “unions,” their leaders backed by the majority of their members, made a mockery of the history of labor in the 19th and early 20th centuries. They have spit in the faces of their grandparents who fought and often died for a vision of unionism that recognized the fact of labor/management opposition. They have wittingly made concessions that gave back nearly everything the fighters of the past won. They scab on their own children’s future when they cut newer workers’ wages in half, setting up two tiers where only the cheaper will prevail–again and again.
The emergence of fascism will not mirror its predecessor movements in precise ways. However, if as that process deepens, the US union offices would be where people would be instructed to pick up their brown-shirts.
It is well past time to get beyond the genteel idea that AFL-CIO top, Richard Trumka, the picture of narcissism, is going to be “moved left,” or voted out of office, just as it is well beyond the time to grasp what capitalist democracy is: capital trumping whatever democracy may be at every turn today.
I am sincerely sorry UAW members have not yet assaulted Solidarity (sic) House, thrown the vile leaders of the UAW in the Detroit River, grabbed membership lists, needed machinery, and whatever of the treasury they can, and either fled or held the building as long as possible while reinforcements have a chance to arrive to fend off the UAW’s goon/staff a la their action at the Detroit Mack Avenue plant in 1973.
I am sorry workers have not stormed podiums, grabbed mikes, thrown off the labor hacks, and made speeches to their co-workers about what a real workers’ organization would look like (see Paris Commune for starters).
Harsh, harsh measures to those union hacks who seek to foist concessions on the rank and file when 40 years of labor history show that concessions do not save jobs. Like feeding blood to sharks, concessions only make employers want more. Harsh measures.
I look forward to all of that happening, and more, and I think it will.
The core issue of our times is the rise of color-coded inequality and the real promise of perpetual war met by the potential of mass class-conscious resistance for the clarion call that has driven social movements for centuries: Equality!
This is not a utopian scheme that aims at a far distant tomorrow and refuses to address the necessity to win some kind of reforms today, or to even defend what is minimally left to poor and working people today. It is, instead, to insist that unionism as it is cannot win even short term reforms and, moreover, to split the needs of today from the requisite need to transcend capitalism is to lose both.
Or, perhaps more abstractly, to abandon both the theory and practice of revolution is to deny science (evolutionary leaps), philosophy (dialectics into materialism), history (revolution on revolution) and passion itself–a cornerstone of any movement for change.
At issue is connecting reason to power.
So far, the entire national agenda, including the education agenda, is a war agenda.
The Rude Pundit... a long standing reactionary asshole, house slave for the ruling class, and lesser of two evils Democratic Party bootlicker auditions for the role of Covid Brownshirt and Jackboot Stormtrooper for the Covidian Nazi Cult. Do note that this gutless coward has commenting on his site shutoff.
The easiest way to describe the genuine anger at the anti-vax idiots is that we're fucking sick of their shit. We're tired of having the direction of our lives decided by the most credulous and easily manipulated motherfuckers in the population. We've reached the end of our proverbial ropes and, goddamnit, we're done buying longer ropes.
You saw that today when New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy, who successfully guided his state through the worst shit in the first part of the pandemic, was fucking done with the anti-vax protesters at a news conference he was having. "Because of what you are saying and standing for people are losing their life... and you have to know that," he told the hooting morons, calling them "knuckleheads," a favorite term of his.
I could go back a long fucking time in detailing all the shit we've been forced to eat, but let's just concentrate on the last few years. So much of it was assholishness and savagery that we had no fucking say in and no control over. We've had to sit there while knuckle-dragging, Fox-lobotomized cock dribbles cheered for all the brute bullshit that Donald Trump and the various infected pustules in his administration could do, like banning people from mostly Muslim-majority countries for no rational reason and separating migrant children from their families for the specific purpose of being dicks to them. We could do nothing when the perverse Republicans in the Senate not only prevented Barack Obama from making a Supreme Court pick nearly a year before the next president would be inaugurated, but then decided it was cool to rush through a nominee after people had already started voting for the 2020 election, thus allowing a SCOTUS face-fucking on issues like abortion and voting rights all but inevitable. We watched in horror as the federal government was used as a weapon against Black Lives Matter protesters and as open, enthusiastic racists were welcomed, even honored, by the GOP, who couldn't be bothered to do a goddamn thing about the ongoing execution by cop of black people. We couldn't do a fucking thing as Trump pranced around the globe, dicking over the United States's longtime alliances, wiping his ass with the Paris Agreement on climate change, and pissing on the Iran nuclear deal. And speaking of climate change, we've had to watch dumbfounded for years as Trump reversed even the small bit of progress that the country was making, essentially declaring that he'll be dead, so fuck it, burn all the fossil fuels you can, fuckers, because wind turbines are ugly and kill birds. And that's not even getting into the scandal upon scandal upon scandal, all happening while the sinister cuntmites in the GOP grinned, their teeth slicked with MAGA jizz, discovered that they fucking loved being openly evil, and enabled, supported, aided, abetted, and cheered the filthiest urges of this filthiest of presidents and his mongrel circle, making celebrities out of the skeeviest, stupidest of their pitiful lot.
And then we were helpless for the first year of the Covid pandemic, aghast as we saw the White House simply refuse to do basic things to help not just the sick, but the front line workers who were working themselves sometimes to death trying to keep the rest of us alive. We saw organized groups threaten to fucking murder leaders over efforts by state governments to mitigate the spread of the virus. And we saw Trump and the GOP act as if this was all just the price to pay for some debased notion of freedom, one that was contorted around allowing a certain number of people to die rather than raise taxes on the wealthy in order to prevent economic collapse.
And, through it all, we had to watch the idiot hordes of MAGA cretins whoop it up, acting like every fucking day was asshole Christmas, electing rank boobs to Congress just because they promised to be Trump's ass remoras while doing nothing except piss off the liberals. The last fucking straw was the vaccine. That was it. That was the breaking point. When these yahoos who aren't fit to live in sewage ditches refused to get vaccinated from the very vaccine that their great and powerful leader bragged about helping create, when they decided that that vaccine was a plot to control their brains or poison them, and when their monstrously dumb decision allowed the virus to regroup and fill the hospitals with patients again in places where their idiocy ran amok, when the yahoos and their skeevy leaders mock the idea that masks might be needed again because of the actions of the very yahoos who need to masks, well, that fucking does it. E-fucking-nough.
So, yeah, we have some fucking control, some power here, and we're gonna use it. Companies are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or fuck off." Cities and schools and other places are saying, "Get fucking vaccinated or stay in your homes, you plague rats." And while some states have banned mandates for localities and schools, many of those are based on the emergency authorization and would expire once the Covid vaccine receives full FDA approval, which is expected in the next couple of weeks.
When I read shit like "Stop Harassing the Unvaccinated" by Washington Post columnist and torture apologist Marc Thiessen, I just wanna say, "Bitch, we've been polite up until now." Shit, most polls show that at least 60% of Americans support vaccine mandates. We haven't even started harassing them.
We're done. We've eaten enough shit force-fed us from the right-wing moron brigade. Finally, there's something where we have some control, where we don't have to beg GOP senators for crumbs or where we don't have to try to convince Joe fucking Manchin or Kyrsten goddamn Sinema to end the filibuster rule. Those of us in places where hospitalization isn't skyrocketing because of the rate of vaccinations want to keep it that way.
And we're saying, "Fuck you" to the unvaccinated because, at last, we can and because we're tired of bearing the consequences for your irrationality and ignorance.
(Note: This shouldn't need to be said, but, obviously, if you can't get vaccinated because of some medical condition, you're not included. Also, if you're in an underserved area, that's a different case. And kids. But if you're just being stubborn, selfish, and/or stupid, yeah, fuck you.)
Sometimes secondhand books can come into our possession in ways that make it quite clear they need us to read them.
Such was the case with Le fascisme italien by Pierre Milza and Serge Berstein, (1) which reached me by means of a random sequence of events including a friend moving flat, an unexpected traffic jam and a small public park on the outskirts of Paris.
It did not disappoint and, as I am about to explain in more detail, helped me to see a number of crucial issues more clearly.
Firstly, it confirmed that, despite constant claims to the contrary, fascism was not at all anti-capitalist, but extremely pro-capitalist.
Secondly, it presented interesting parallels with the Coronavirus-linked totalitarian mindset so dominant in 2020, which I am calling ‘newnormalism’.
Thirdly, it sparked some wider reflection on my part about the participation of most of the left in this 21st century authoritarianism and how that relates to my own anti-fascist position.
FASCISM AND CAPITALISM
It is well known, I think, that Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator, began his political career on the left and, when he started building a movement immediately after the First World War, the initial programme that attracted support was left-wing, with anarchist influences.
However, as Milza and Berstein make abundantly clear, this prototype fascism was quickly and drastically ditched as Mussolini realised the only way he was going to gain the power he craved was with the support of capitalists and big landowners.
Much much later, at the end of the Second World War, in a desperate last-ditch attempt to rally the Italian people behind them in the face of defeat, the hardcore fascist Saló republic rediscovered their socialist side, but it was all hopelessly too late.
Having lived through the fascist ventennio (20 years), the population were not going to fall for any more redwashing attempts or superficial anti-bourgeois posturing. They had seen clearly that fascism in power defended the interests of Capital, rather than the people.
The authors trace this story back to 1910, when the Italian Nationalist Association was founded with “the support of certain business circles, in particular that of heavy industry”, (2) who had a very obvious direct vested interest in promoting the nationalist call for Italian participation in the approaching war in Europe.
It was Mussolini’s sudden support for Italy going to war (on the Allied side) that led to him being thrown out of the socialist party, the PSI, splitting from others on the left. This left him ideally placed to benefit from capitalist funding, though it is not clear whether his conversion to the war cause was actually motivated by this consideration.
It is known that Mussolini received money from the French government and from pro-war businessmen like Filippo Naldi.
The first fascist general assembly in 1919 took place in a hall in Milan lent by a group of wealthy capitalists.
Funds started to roll in from business, banks and big landowners
Fascism benefited greatly from the ruling classes’ fear of a Bolshevik-style revolution in Italy, with post-war waves of strikes and a rural movement which reclaimed land from rich property owners.
Explain the authors: “The fear born in the world of the country landowners as a result of the land occupation movement greatly outlived the phenomenon itself and helped pushed them into the arms of fascism, through fear of a challenge to property rights”. (3)
Business organisations such as Confagricoltura and Confindustria were set up to defend capitalism. Fascism was happy to win favour by providing them with foot soldiers, squadristi, who physically attacked trade unionists and leftists in a wave of “preventative counter-revolution”. (4)
This, say Milza and Berstein, represented fascism’s big break and funds started to roll in from business, banks and big landowners.
Moreover, the fascists started receiving the support of local authorities, the army and the police in their fight against leftist ‘subversion’. They were the system’s emergency weapon against the threat of revolution.
“Prefects, magistrates and officers of the Carabinieri, let the fascists carry on and assured them of impunity. The moment that the State started to crumble, the bourgeoisie, so frightened by the popular uprising of 1919-20, lent their support to fascism’s reactionary violence”. (5)
Fascist squadristi
In November 1920, for instance, violent fascist squads descended on Bologna, where the radical left had gained control of the local council. There were nine deaths and more than 100 injuries.
Elsewhere, in the next couple of years, they smashed up trade union and co-operative HQs and attacked working-class districts, wielding clubs and revolvers to force strikers back to work.
By now the fascists had stopped pretending to be left-wing and were openly singing the praises of capitalism and economic liberalism. (6)
Fascist economic policies were all in the interests of the ruling class.
“Mussolini himself set before the future party a manifesto which no longer owed anything to the leftist tendencies of 1919. In the economic realm it was absolute liberalism, with the State indulging in no intervention or nationalisation, or any fiscal measures deemed ‘populist’. On the political and social side, a strong State was to be created, capable of imposing the ban on strikes in the public sector”. (7)
This was authoritarian capitalism, meant to please “the big money interests from whom Mussolini was now seeking political and financial backing”. (8)
As the future dictator said himself: “We are liberal economically, but we will never be so politically”. (9) This was a question of sacrificing political liberalism in the interests of economic liberalism, aka capitalism. (10) (For more on the little-appreciated similarities between fascism and liberalism, see this article on the orgrad website)
Once the fascists were in power, the clamp-down on opposition was ruthless. Strikes were banned and workers found themselves defenceless against their bosses.
Fascist economic policies were all in the interests of the ruling class. When finance minister Alberto De Stefani reformed the tax system in 1923 this “was above all to the profit of the rich”. (11)
He offered tax breaks for foreign investors, did away with the “red tape” of bodies controlling food prices and rents, ended state funding for co-operatives and halted land reforms which threatened the interests of rich landowners.
After 1925, in the face of economic crisis, the pure economic liberalism of the Manchester School went out of the window, in favour of state intervention.
But this was intervention in the interests of business and Capital, not in the interests of the Italian people whom fascism mendaciously claimed to represent!
‘Development’ was at the forefront of fascist plans, as is the case with all industrial capitalists. More land was cultivated and an infrastructure of roads, new towns and industrial estates was built.
“A vast programme of public works was undertaken, carried out by private firms, who were offered lucrative contracts by the State. Electrification of the rail system began, with the construction of tunnels on the Rome-Naples and Bologna-Florence lines. A massive roadbuilding programme was entrusted to ANAS (Azienda Nazionale Autonoma delle Strade), created in 1928, which oversaw the showcase construction of big toll motorways, the first in Europe”. (12)
This was nothing other than a bailing-out of the capitalist economy by the pro-business fascist state, for which the cost would ultimately have to be borne by the public.
Ring any bells in 2020?
Banks were also treated to fascist largesse, notably BCI, saved by the Italian state with a massive influx of money.
Note the authors: “There was neither socialisation nor nationalisation. The State became capitalist; it guaranteed the property of most of the shareholders and their future dividends. The only socialisation was that of the losses, assumed by the public purse”. (13)
In 1931, Mussolini even set up a body, L’Istituto mobiliare italiano, with the role of helping businesses in financial trouble, declaring that this was “a means of energetically driving the Italian economy towards its corporative phase, which is to say a system which fundamentally respects private property and initiative, but ties them tightly to the State, which alone can protect, control and nourish them”. (14)
But the emphasis was very much on the big businesses and financiers allied with the fascist regime. Economic crisis saw numerous small and medium-sized firms go to the wall or gobbled up by big companies, as the fascist state aided this concentration of wealth into ever-fewer hands. (15)
“As for the working classes,” add Milza and Berstein, “they paid the price for this alliance, with unemployment, reduced wages and higher cost of living”. (16)
Fascist corporatism, with its officially-approved phoney trade unions, was supposed to bring together workers and bosses in the interests of the nation, but did nothing of the sort: “It allowed big industry and financial groups to use the State’s arbitration and power of coercion to reinforce their positions and impose their law on their employees”. (17)
“Far from being destroyed by fascism as the first proto-fascist manifesto suggested, Italian capitalism found in it a defender which managed to save it from revolution or collapse and went on to reinforce its structures and its means of action”. (18)
It was not for nothing that the bankers of J.P. Morgan boosted the fascist regime with a $100m loan between 1925 and 1927 (19) or that Winston Churchill praised, during a 1927 visit, Mussolini’s success in defending Italy from what he termed international subversion. He meant the radical left. (20)
FASCISM AND NEWNORMALISM
Already, in the above account of Milza and Berstein’s work, there are some striking parallels with society a hundred years after the fascists seized power in Italy, in particular regarding the way in which a pro-capitalist regime will use the power of the State not to control big business, but to rescue it from collapse, defend its wealth and impose its interests on the people.
But the similarities become still more alarming when we consider the ideological framing of the fascist mission.
Everything was to be “new” under fascism. A new creed for a new Italian people in a new Italy. The old days were gone for good and nothing would ever be the same again. Mussolini’s dictatorship was the New Normal.
The regime tried to change the date to symbolise this complete rupture, insisting that party members stopped thinking in terms of the 1920s or 1930s and instead spoke of Year 8 or 10 of the fascist New Order. (21)
It also tried to abolish handshakes – not because they might spread disease but because they represented the decadent old world that had been left behind. Socially-distanced fascist salutes were preferred. (22)
It hoped that a fascist future would be carried forward by a new brainwashed generation, building a cult of youth and a structure of youth organisations which aimed to foster “obedience and fanatical attachment to the regime”. (23)
Fascism differed from other pro-capitalist and authoritarian regimes in that it aimed to reshape, to reinvent, everything about society.
Milza and Berstein stress “its totalitarian character, in other words the way in which it tried to direct and control every aspect of every individual’s activity and thinking”. (24)
These early 20th century fascists, like the newnormalists today, were obsessed with “remodelling the social body and transforming it radically”. (25)
Mussolini dreamed of “the fascisisation of the spirit, complete transformation of society and the creation of a new man… with a radically new conception of the world”. (26)
It is when we look at what this new fascist existence would actually involve that we can begin to understand the agenda behind this early experiment in behavioural change.
Explain the authors: “It was about reducing all Italians to the same model, that of the fascist man. This ‘new’ man was not to be defined by ideas, actions, faith or social utility but by a ‘style’, the fascist custom, taken straight from futurist raptures. Speed, dynamism, efficiency and decisiveness were its main components”. (27)
Futurism, one of the great inspirations for Italian fascism, was the ideology of industrialism, of the man-machine, of the surrender of all that was human and natural to the giant cogs and turbines of technological progress.
One of the great successes of the fascist period in Italy was the acceleration of the working rhythm
20th century industrial capitalism needed a new kind of human being – a regimented, automated human being – to fit in with its brave new world and the unimaginable profits and power that could roll off its factory conveyor belts.
Inconveniently, actual human beings – reactionaries, oldthinkers, enemies of progress – did not seem to want to remould themselves to suit the requirements of capitalist machinery, so compulsion was required.
“Only a strong power could impose on the masses the sacrifices necessary for the accumulation of capital”, (28) note Milza and Berstein and, indeed, one of the great successes of the fascist period in Italy was “the acceleration of the working rhythm”. (29)
Mussolini wanted to “modernise” Italians in the way that Margaret Thatcher modernised British people in the 1980s or in which Emmanuel Macron has been trying to modernise the French with his own brand of neoliberal authoritarianism.
And today there is a global attempt to modernise us all in order to suit the requirements of 21st century capitalism and its nightmarish Fourth Industrial Repression.
We are to be reduced to fearful, isolated, obedient and dependent cattle owned and exploited by a ruthless and truthless financial elite.
Once again, we have not been shuffling fast enough towards the abyss on our own, so “strong power” has been activated, on the back of the Coronavirus hysteria, to shove us deeper into the jaws of the life-consuming industrial beast.
The propagandistic language, hysterical mass brainwashing and police-state coercion used by the newnormalists for their “Great Reset” are straight out of Mussolini’s hundred-year-old handbook.
NEWNORMALISM AND THE LEFT
There is at least one significant difference between the fascist period and today’s newnormalism and that concerns the left.
As we have seen, Mussolini came to power on the back of attacking the left, earning him the gratitude of a ruling class scared by the prospect of revolution. Once in power, he did all he could to destroy it, with most left-wing radicals fleeing Italy or ending up in jail.
Indeed, my reading Milza and Berstein’s book led to a conversation with a woman whose grandfather, a left-wing activist in Italy, had been forced to escape the fascist regime and settle in France.
How can it be that the left – theoretically anti-capitalist and anti-fascist – finds itself marching in step with totalitarian capitalist newnormalism?
Today, however, there is a resounding silence from most of the left in the face of the newnormalist totalitarian coup.
Many of them, even some self-described anarchists, are enthusiastic supporters of the fascistic “lockdown” and compulsory mask-wearing. They regard support for the system and its framing of reality as socially responsible and therefore “left-wing”. Anyone who challenges the system is irresponsible and therefore “right-wing”.
How on earth has this happened? How can it be that the left – theoretically anti-capitalist and anti-fascist – finds itself marching in step with totalitarian capitalist newnormalism?
Putting aside the possible factors of sheer gullibility and deceitful bad faith, I can see two reasons for this total ethical and ideological collapse.
The first is the way that much left-wing thinking has drifted away from direct opposition to capitalism. The beginning of this was, I think, the failure to understand that industrialism is nothing other than capitalism and that technological progress is not the same thing as social or human progress.
The left has therefore evolved within the framework of industrial capitalism, essentially accepting its basic premises. As a result, the left often has nothing more to propose than a reform of capitalism, or its relabelling.
Increasingly it has been sidetracked into defending the right of various minorities to be fully accepted within capitalist society.
Nothing wrong with that in itself, but it does not tackle the central injustice of the full-spectrum rule of a tiny elite class and the ways in which this central injustice is hidden from view and excluded from the realm of political discussion. Indeed, it helps to hide it still further from view.
Neither does it challenge the domination of industrialism and often reinforces its myth of “progress”.
The second reason concerns human nature. It has become widely accepted on the left that there is no innate human nature, that our minds are born as blank slates and, like machines, we are “programmed” by family and society to become who we are.
In fact, this misunderstanding arises from the broader failure to understand that human beings are part of nature, which is a planet-sized collective organism (see Nature, Essence and Anarchy).
Denying the existence of human nature effectively involves denying us all our primary freedom – to be who we are.
It automatically justifies outside imposition on each individual, and indeed community, in order to ensure that we are all “programmed” the right way.
This attitude can begin with a relatively harmless over-emphasis on formal top-down education (rather than allowing people to discover and think for themselves), but ends up with an insistence on controlling and policing every aspect of everyone’s lives.
Both these factors in fact stem from the contamination of left-wing thinking by liberal ideas. Liberalism is, of course, the philosophy of capitalism. Economic liberalism was, as we have seen, a central pillar of historical fascism.
So it should come as no surprise that a strong liberal influence on left-wing thinking should result in it siding with the capitalist fascism of newnormalism.
Left-liberals have taken on board the ruling class’s elitist belief that the mass of people are incapable of thinking or acting properly without strict supervision and training.
Total freedom, for them as for our rulers, is thus a frightening concept, one which has to be permanently penned in with qualifications and restrictions.
The mainstay of this current of thinking, to which I associate myself, is that human (and animal) nature is innately co-operative and that it is only the domination and exploitation imposed on us for many centuries that has forced people into an unhealthy condition of narrow individual selfishness combined with pathological dependence on authority.
For real anarchists, the smashing of the chains of tyranny would release humankind to live in the way it was always meant to live, to fulfil its true potential.
The idea is that human society would arise organically from human nature, and our belonging to the Earth, that we would create a society that suits who we are.
The opposite point of view says that there is no innate tendency towards mutual aid and social co-operation, indeed no innate tendency towards anything at all.
It says that human nature is entirely malleable and should therefore be forced to adapt to whatever way of living is deemed necessary by those in charge of society.
For Victorian industrialists in England and 20th century fascists in Italy, this meant forcing complex and multi-dimensional human beings into the square hole of industrial servitude.
For today’s big business transhumanists and newnormalists, this means forcing living human beings to adapt to the demands of their sinister and dehumanised “smart” totalitarian world.
From my point of view, a very clear divide has opened up here. On one side of this are those of us who are motivated by a love of life, of people and of nature and who seek to bring about a future in which all of this can thrive.
On the other side are those who are motivated by the vision of a certain future system, the end result perhaps of hundreds of years of industrial so-called progress, and who see life, people and nature as subservient to that.
If human nature doesn’t fit with their system and their way of thinking, that human nature has to be changed by whatever means necessary.
To me, this mindset is extremely noxious. It is a kind of sterile hygienism, an attitude which regards everything “bio” as a hazard, anything natural as dangerous and imperfect, in contrast to the artificial symmetry and cleanliness of its machine-based futuristic dream.
I have previously labelled this ideology “vitaphobic“, meaning that it amounts to nothing less than a hatred of life itself.
It comes as no surprise to realise that historical fascism was part of this vitaphobic trend. It is harder to accept that the same is also true of much of the contemporary left, including groups and people I was, until recently, happy to work with.
I am every bit as much opposed to vitaphobic newnormalist leftists as I am to fascists
These kind of leftists invariably and inevitably feel the need to dismiss anyone who does not entirely share their dogma as being “right-wing” or “fascist”.
But, in fact, here my opposition to their vitaphobic ideology comes from the very same place as my opposition to fascist vitaphobia.
This does not mean that they are themselves “fascists”, which was a specific historical phenomenon, but that, in 2020, they have aligned themselves with a life-hating ideological trend of which historical fascism was also part.
This is why I am every bit as much opposed to vitaphobic newnormalist leftists as I am to fascists and consider their ideology equally dangerous to the future of humankind and our Mother Earth.
1. Pierre Milza and Serge Berstein, Le fascisme italien 1919-1945 (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1980). All subsequent notes refer to this work. 2. p. 30. 3. p. 68. 4. p. 71. 5. p. 110. 6. p. 104. 7. pp. 110-11. 8. p. 111. 9. Benito Mussolini, cit. p. 113. 10. p. 119. 11. p. 223. 12. p. 232. 13. p. 245. 14. Mussolini, cit. p. 246. 15. p. 247. 16. p. 248. 17. p. 283. 18. p. 276. 19. p 228. 20. p. 316. 21. p. 194. 22. p.213. 23. p. 203. 24. p. 198. 25. p. 275. 26. p. 198. 27. p. 212. 28. p 414. 29. p. 283.
