JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> I was a thinking about a specific instance, a young man from the recently contested ethnic studies progarm at Berkeley who spoke at a panel on prisons with Angela Davis at the Pacific Division APA last spring.. . . until it emerged that one main theme of the young man's talk was that the American criminal justice system means taht we live under fascism. At this point I demurred, noting that if we lived under fascism, he wouldn't be giving this talk, and if he did, he'd be dead or in a camp. He found !
Whatever the faults of pomo (and whether or not pomo exists) this is a false rap. This wrong use of "fascism" goes far beyond the ranks of anyone who might be called pomo. And even your reply leaves too much room for loose usage of the term. There are many regimes which practice extreme repression which it would be incorrect to call fascist. And the chief harm in loose usage of the term is that it obscures how repressive and brutal ordinary run-of-the-mill bourgeois democracy can be. The Jim Crow state was not a fascist state. The Indonesia that murdered some 2 million back in the '60s was not a fascist state. The Argentinian generals who conducted the dirty war did not preside over a fascist state. Bringing this young man's error into the debate over pomo trivializes what is an important debate. It is at leas an arguable position that there have been no fascist states since 1945; that "fascism," like "royalism" and "buonapartism," belongs only in the history books and we need to work on new terminology.
(Despite my insistence on this radical change since the '30s, I am confess to believing that in very important ways there has been no fundamental change in the last 2 or 3 centuries, and not just since the 30s.)
Carrol