Fascism: are we there yet?

Dr Clinton Fernandes asks about Fascism: are we there yet? in the Summer 2006/2007 Edition (No.22) of Dissent (pp.22-26).

Clinton Fernandes discusses the history of fascism to show that the Howard government is simply trying to contain the power of trade unions and curtail civil liberties in order to strengthen capitalism rather than leading a counter-revolution against the Enlightenment.

Dr. Fernandes appears to be describing a disease by listing its symptoms without explaining the underlying cause. This is in contrast to Leon Trotsky's analysis of Fascism.

Dr. Fernandes describes the characteristics of Fascism to be:

Although there remains considerable disagreement over what Fascism is, there is general agreement that is a form of counter-revolution - a revolution against revolution. It includes economic corporatism, hostility to the labour movement, extreme populism, class-based resentment, ultra-nationalism and hostility to Enlightenment values. It is the last attempt to stave off revolution in the context of economic crisis and political upheaval. (p.26)

Emphasis Mine

Here Dr. Fernandes is describing Fascism through its extrinsic nature. He says that Fascism exists only in a dynamic sense. Take away what it is reacting to and it ceases to exist. This would mean that the success of a Fascist revolution would destroy itself. There has to be an intrinsic nature to Fascism because it is fairly durable: German, Italian, and Eastern European Fascism were destroyed by war; Spanish Fascism died with Franco.

As I wrote about previously in Proto-Fascism in the USA, Leon Trotsky emphasised the class nature of the rise of Fascism.

Dr. Fernandes alludes to this class nature though the lens of resentment:

It is instructive that fascists drew heavily for their membership on intermediate layers of the population such as small landowners and members of the lower middle classes. Intermediate layers felt a strong resentment towards the workers they employed as well as towards big businesses that were making their lives harder. They resented the banks that owned their mortgages, the big businesses that were taking away their market share, the unions whose strikes were interfering with their operations, and new movements such as feminism or environmentalism that threatened the social order. They were tehrefore attracted demagogic, charismatic politicians who employed anti-capitalist and anti-working class rhetoric. During the Great Depresion, thousands of middle-class conservatives feared the growing power of the left and saw fascism as the way out of economic crisis. (p.24)

Emphasis Mine

Dr. Fernandes is describing the characteristics of the Petit-Bourgeois. The intrinsic or objective nature of this class is that its member rely chiefly upon the active use of property¹ to generate their income (Bourgeois) but the quantity of such property is at the lower end (ergo Petit or small). The division of the Bourgeois class comes about when the variance in the quantity of property is marked.

From this instrinsic characteristic of the Petit-Bourgeios, the other extrinsic characteristics can be derived. The existence and maintenance of their property is vital to their survival physically and psychologically. Their property is the means by which they feed, clothe, and otherwise care for their family. Their property is their independence from wage-slavery and their independence from masters.

Thus, the demands of the workers for better conditions threatens the existence of the Petit-Bourgeois through greater demands on their property, and through the psychologically challenge of the inferiors against their superiors. The employers care for their workers because their workers depend on them. This attitude emphasises the true independence of the Bourgeois: they are able to care for the less able. For if the workers were better abled, they would be Bourgeois not workers. This is an axiom of Capitalism.

The existence and increasing flow of property to the big Bourgeois affronts the Petit-Bourgeois because their self-image of the acquirer of wealth through hard work is daily being undermined. They cannot see that the operation of Capitalism neccessitates the concentration of Capital (aka property) into the hands of a clique.

The Petit-Bourgeois are then avid subscribers to any conspiracy theory that explains why, despite all that hard work, their property is being sucked by big business and the banks. Their blind faith in the fairness of the Capitalist system hides from them the ugly truth of the rate of accumulation of Capital determines success not ability. It is those who generate the biggest profits in the shortest time that win the race.

The key trigger to the growth of Fascism is an economic crisis that threatens the Petit-Bourgeois. A combination of economic contraction with foreclosures by banks ignites the movement. That a worker's revolution precedes a Fascist one just means that workers are affected much earlier by an economic collapse than the Bourgeois are.

All the other attributes Dr. Fernandes ascribes to Fascism arise from its intrinsic naure. Racism (p.24) and Nationalism (p.25) are emphasised because they are key results of the Capitalist system. (More of the same to overcome the problem).

The opposition to Enlightenment values (p.25) arises because the Petit-Bourgeois see themselves as doers not thinkers. The abstract notions of free speech, freedom of religious practice, etc. do have any practical effect on their daily lives. They are more seen as restrictions on their activities and an effort to keep them oppressed.

Fascism is then the rebellion of the oppressed small business person against their tormentors. They try to create a new society but end up in the same prison of Capitalism. And, as always, it is the banks and big business who have the last laugh.

Footnotes

¹ The emphasis on the active use of property is meant to distinguish the Petit-Bourgeois from the Rentier class who derive their income chiefly through rents on their property. The Petit-Bourgeois do things with their property whereas the Rentiers let others do things with the Rentier's property.

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Knowing the Enemy

In the Dec 18 2006 edition of The New Yorker, George Packer (pp.60-69) wonders about Knowing the Enemy and Can social scientists redefine the "war on terror"? The article is really managing the discontent among the wretched of the earth instead of alleviating the discontent.

Diagnosis and Cure

David Kilcullen, a Lt. Colonel in the Royal Australian Army, is quoted as saying

“I saw extremely similar behavior and extremely similar problems in an Islamic insurgency in West Java and a Christian-separatist insurgency in East Timor,” he said. “After 9/11, when a lot of people were saying, ‘The problem is Islam,’ I was thinking, It’s something deeper than that. It’s about human social networks and the way that they operate.” In West Java, elements of the failed Darul Islam insurgency—a local separatist movement with mystical leanings—had resumed fighting as Jemaah Islamiya, whose outlook was Salafist and global. Kilcullen said, “What that told me about Jemaah Islamiya is that it’s not about theology.” He went on, “There are elements in human psychological and social makeup that drive what’s happening. The Islamic bit is secondary. This is human behavior in an Islamic setting. This is not ‘Islamic behavior.’ ” Paraphrasing the American political scientist Roger D. Petersen, he said, “People don’t get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.” He noted that all fifteen Saudi hijackers in the September 11th plot had trouble with their fathers. Although radical ideas prepare the way for disaffected young men to become violent jihadists, the reasons they convert, Kilcullen said, are more mundane and familiar: family, friends, associates.

Emphasis Mine

The immediate problem with this analysis is there is no cause. Rebellion is presented as something that exists. Here only the explanation is of how rebellion maintains itself.

This shallow analysis leads to an equally shallow prescription:

Steve Fondacaro, a retired Army colonel who for a year commanded the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Task Force in Iraq, is in charge of the Human Terrain project. Fondacaro sees the war in the same terms as Kilcullen. “The new element of power that has emerged in the last thirty to forty years and has subsumed the rest is information,” he said. “A revolution happened without us knowing or paying attention. Perception truly now is reality, and our enemies know it. We have to fight on the information battlefield.” I asked him what the government should have done, say, in the case of revelations of abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison. “You’re talking to a radical here,” Fondacaro said. “Immediately be the first one to tell the story. Don’t let anyone else do it. That carries so much strategic weight.” He added, “Iraqis are not shocked by torture. It would have impressed them if we had exposed it, punished it, rectified it.” But senior military leadership, he said, remains closed to this kind of thinking. He is turning for help to academics—to “social scientists who want to educate me,” he said. So far, though, Fondacaro has hired just one anthropologist. When I spoke to her by telephone, she admitted that the assignment comes with huge ethical risks. “I do not want to get anybody killed,” she said. Some of her colleagues are curious, she said; others are critical. “I end up getting shunned at cocktail parties,” she said. “I see there could be misuse. But I just can’t stand to sit back and watch these mistakes happen over and over as people get killed, and do nothing.”

Emphasis Mine

So the message is spin early and spin often. This is truly totally fucked. Have these people no idea what is going on in the rest of the world? Did they really think that by just changing the channel, everything will be made better and have a happy ending?

There is a myopia here that looks at the world through a television set. Control the programming and you control the world. The reason that other sources of information is because of the demand for information that better explains the reality people are seeing and feeling.

For a Western culture, it is now hard for us to realise that people talk to each other in the rest of the world. They move about. They see the devastation. They remember life before the West came.

There are no isolated incidents to be explained away. What is happening to them is happening to others as well.

This information is not to keep the natives happy - it is keep Westeners comfortable in their ignorance. As long as we have our creature comforts, we can ignore the cries of pain coming from the outside. Ignorance can then be truly bliss.

The Cold War and the GWOT

The Global War on Terror (GWOT) is now to seen as the replacement for the Cold War:

Kilcullen’s thinking is informed by some of the key texts of Cold War social science, such as Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer,” which analyzed the conversion of frustrated individuals into members of fanatical mass movements, and Philip Selznick’s “The Organizational Weapon: A Study of Bolshevik Strategy and Tactics,” which described how Communists subverted existing social groups and institutions like trade unions. To these older theoretical guides he adds two recent studies of radical Islam: “Globalized Islam,” by the French scholar Olivier Roy, and “Understanding Terror Networks,” by Marc Sageman, an American forensic psychiatrist and former covert operator with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. After September 11th, Sageman traced the paths of a hundred and seventy-two alienated young Muslims who joined the jihad, and found that the common ground lay not in personal pathology, poverty, or religious belief but in social bonds. Roy sees the rise of “neo-fundamentalism” among Western Muslims as a new identity movement shaped by its response to globalization. In the margin of a section of Roy’s book called “Is Jihad Closer to Marx Than to the Koran?” Kilcullen noted, “If Islamism is the new leftism, then the strategies and techniques used to counter Marxist subversion during the Cold War may have direct or indirect relevance to combating Al Qaeda-sponsored subversion.”

Emphasis Mine

This is the closest the article comes to recognising that there might a common cause for both Communist Revolution and Islamic Jihad. The article then goes on to examine whether such approaches are relevant and makes some suggestiosn that Janet Albrechtsen, while saying that There is no substitute for knowing your enemy, interprets as:

But that depends on two things. Muslim communities must recognise and own the problem that exists in their communities. And non-Muslims must work with them to build up trusted networks, providing better alternatives to radicalism. It's here, at the grassroots, that the battle of ideas needs to be fought and won.

Emphasis Mine

And she misses the whole point which was to divert the discontented away from joining organisations that confront the new world order into those that work within the system.

Complex Warfighting

In the New Yorker article, the cause of this discontent is never mentioned or examined. It just exists as if it were part of human nature.

However, Lt Col Kilcullen is more forward in Complex Warfighting which he wrote for the Royal Australian Army. He says that [t]he key driver is Globalisation (pp.2-3):

5. The key influence on contemporary conflict is Globalisation. A widely accepted definition of Globalisation is ‘a process of increasing connectivity, where ideas, capital, goods, services, information and people are transferred in near-real time across national borders’.²

6. Globalisation, during the last decades of the twentieth century, has created winners and losers. A global economy and an embryonic global culture are developing, but this has not been universally beneficial. Poverty, disease and inequality remain major problems for much of the world, and the global economy has been seen as favouring the West while failing developing nations. The developing global culture is perceived as a form of Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism: corroding religious beliefs, eroding the fabric of traditional societies, and leading to social, spiritual and cultural dislocation. This has created a class of actors – often non-state actors – who oppose Globalisation, its beneficiaries (the developed nations of the ‘West’) and, particularly, the US.

7. Globalisation has created enemies of the West, and given them unprecedented tools to further their cause. Globalised media, satellite communications, international travel and commerce, and the Internet facilitate the coordination of diffuse movements that oppose Western dominance. The free flow of capital, people and ideas allows the spread of movements inimical to Globalisation, and provides them the means to further develop.

8. Moreover, Globalisation is not fully controllable by governments. Multi-national corporations, trans-national organisations, and non-government actors are key players in Globalisation. Indeed, this is one reason why inequalities and problems have developed: in many cases, forces other than conscious national policy drive the process of Globalisation. This hampers an effective response to the opposition provoked by Globalisation.

9. Finally, national security, like almost all of national life, has become globalised. Under Globalisation, a nation’s security interests no longer equate to its territory. Indeed, the Government’s 2003 foreign policy White Paper emphasised this, stating that ‘Australia’s interests are global in scope and not solely defined by geography’³. National security concepts based on geographical theories such as the ‘sea-air gap’ or the concentric circles of the 1980s ‘defence in depth’ concept are hence not applicable to Australia’s circumstances. Such geographical determinism assumes Australia will automatically be secure if we keep an adversary out of our physical space. However today, Australia’s economic, political, technological, and industrial interdependence with the rest of the world means that our interests and sovereignty can be seriously threatened without an attack upon our territory.

In other words, global capitalism is rapidly expropriating wealth at a rate that is causing widespread discontent. And there is nothing governments can do about it. The areas of exploitation are now required to be defended by the Australian Armed Forces in order to keep the exploitation running smoothly.

An all we Westeners have to do is believe that poverty and despair is the problem of the poor. It is their fault for being poor. not ours. We just stole their wealth - so can we be held responsible. Next time you know, you would say Capitalism is a crime against humanity and join a Communist Party.

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What Is a Planet?

Scientific American: What Is a Planet? [ ASTROPHYSICS ]
The controversial new official definition of "planet," which banished Pluto, has its flaws but by and large captures essential scientific principles

The interesting point about this article is the philosophical idea that something can be defined by what it does without the necessity of an intrinsic property.

Ancient Classification

In a way, a planet was originally defined by what it did instead of what it was. In the scheme of the ancients, the planets were sources of light that moved relative to other sources of light in the sky.

Here the movement had to be detectable by humans. This meant the timescale for detection was limited to, at most, several years. Saturn, the outermost planet known to the Ancients, has an orbital period of 29.46 years - this means that Saturn moves relative to the "fixed" stars at a rate of about one (1) degree per month.

Although it is now known that all other bodies are in motion relative to each other, this motion was not detectable on the scale of a year with optical technology exiting prior to the 20th Century.

In this ancient scheme, there was the Sun and the Moon along with the other planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. These all moved across the sky as sources of light. The stars were then sources of light that did not move relative to each other although they did move relative to the observer on Earth in a predictable pattern based on the time of day and time of year.

Copernican Classification

The Sun and the Moon were later separated out into their own categories with the general acceptance of the Copernican System when the Earth became a planet. Here the definition focussed on the centre of rotation. The Sun was thought not to orbit around anything. The planets were then bodies that orbited around the Sun, while moons were bodies that orbited around planets.

Modern Classification

With the rapid advances in optical and timing technology in the late 18th and 19th centuries, the number of planets rose to 23. In 1852, these planets were divided into two (2) categories: planets and asteroids. Now the intrinsic property of size is used to classify planets.

So we now have an extrinsic property (orbiting the Sun) and an instrinic property (size) to differentiate between asteriods, suns, moons, and planets.

The discovery of Eris in 2005 meant that under the then current definition, Eris would have to be classified as a planet because its size was comparable to that of Pluto.

Latest Classification

The recent IAU definition of a planet relies on an intrinsic property (roundness) and an extrinsic one (orbital dominance).

The former property is an upgraded version of the size property, while the latter property is meant to convey the idea that the planet controls the orbits of other bodies in its immediate neighbour by flinging them in other orbits, absorbing them through collisions, or by stabilising their orbits.

It is at this point, the author of the article, Steven Soter, wants to remove the intrinsic property altogether and to modify the extrinsic property to be a more measurable one of mass ratio between the largest body and all others in the same orbital zone (see the article for a more precise definition).

His argument is that the largest body would become naturally round when it has absorbed almost all of the matter in its orbital zone, and, as a consequence of that great concentration of matter, is then able to dominate the orbits of all other bodies in its neighbourhood.

Philosphical Implications

This new definition proposed by Steven Sator means that something can be classified by its extrinsic property. This works because there is a theory that explains how planetary formation comes about.

We observe bodies in space near Earth. We can classify them by what they do. The reason for their existence and behaviour derives from the theory of their formation.

The intrinsic properties of a planet then derives from its being a planet. That is, the mass of the planet is determined by how much material it was able to accumulate. (This is awfully vague and ambiguous).

Why Change at All?

The change is needed to create a more precise signifier for astrophysicists to communicate among themselves. This is contradistinction to the cultural norm of keeping the idea of nine (9) planets.

The cultural forces for the retention of nine (9) planets are now impeding scientific understanding of planetary formation and behaviour. It would seem that a lot of people think that the signifier of "planet" is some arbitary and is therefore susceptible to political pressures.

The passion with which some people are defending Pluto as a planet probably reflects upon the uncertain nature of the current political and cultural environment. They the certainity of the past instead of the changing present.

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An eyewitness view of the new world war

Paul Sheehan gives An eyewitness view of the new world war in which the evil Muslim bogeyman is waging World War III. Every indicator we have says that we should get used to the concept. And of course, the chief perpetrators are Iran and Saudi Arabia. Yet again, we are being set up for another war in another oil-producing country. (Who would've thought?)

His conclusion is that:

Jihad and shahada have been the common denominators of the otherwise unrelated bloodshed in Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and the violent arc of a dozen Islamic states from Pakistan to Morocco. It is the common denominator of bloodshed in Britain, France, Spain, Holland and the United States, all the scenes of terrorist attacks, and Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Italy, where growing Muslim threats and violence are part of what is now a global confrontation between Western values and medievalism.

Emphasis Mine

So instead of the International Communist Conspiracy, we now have the International Islamic Conspiracy.

Paul Sheehan visits the spot where Hizzbolah guerillas ambushed an IDF patrol killing six (6) and capturing two (2) soldiers, and how the guerillas lured an IDF tank and Humvee into a landmine, killing all the soldiers.

Mr. Sheehan puts this failure of the IDF down to the guerillas knowing the terrain and what the responses the IDF would make to certain events. A patrol of two (2) Humvees is sent out to investigate an alarm on the border fence, and a tank and a Humvee is sent out in response to an ambush. The IDF had become completely predictable.

Here the guerillas achieved an edge over the IDF. This is rather galling when a Western country is bested by a medieval one.

We have two (2) signifiers of very great import today

• Western values
• Medievalism

Mr. Sheehan has presented them as a polarity. Indeed, 500 years ago, they would have been indistinguishable. This was when Europe was the cultural and economic backwater.

These only make sense in a Capitalist culture.

The "Western values" is a geographical placement of cultural norms. In this case, "Western values" are really those of the European Capitalists to distinguish themselves from the corruption of the Orient (the East).

"Medievalism" is a temporal separation of the Capitalists from their Feudal predecessors in Europe. What had gone before was barbaric and looked down upon.

So these two (2) terms are to identify Capitalists by geography (the "West" i.e Europe) and time ("post-medieval").

The term, "Medievalism", also has religious and social dimensions. The medieval society was one of uniform religious beliefs and norms which were stringently enforced by the Catholic Church. From this flowed the social dimension as a Christian one. Western Medieval European society was a Christian society (aka Christendom).

It is probably in this context that Mr. Sheehan refers to "medievalism" as meaning an Islamic dominated society.

This is classic prejudice of a Capitalist against any religion: they are ll interchangeable. Islam can be subsituted for Christianity without loss of relevance in any historical analogy.

Instead of realising that there are a multitude of different movements with differing motives and means within Islamic countries and communities, Mr. Sheehan and other Capitalist propagandists are creating this monolithic enemy. This did not even exist during the years of the USSR, but it was convenient for the Capitalists to say so in order to keep their populations living in fear of the other.

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