Greg: Chip I have just read your piece referred to below:
Chip: See my tiresome message "What is Fascism? Round Four" for answers to several comments and questions posted under this heading.
Greg: After reading it I remain all the more convinced that Dimitrov, by linking fascism so closely to financial capital, was essentially right.
I am not happy ith classifcatory systems, in one sense fascism is something that had it specific period and in that form cannot re-appear. But the general tendency towards reaction of which fascism was a part is re-emerging and as I said, lacking anything else, fascism is a good place in starting to understand what is going on. The emphasis is on the word "starting" the final conclusion cannot be fascism as we have understood it in the past.
<snip>
Greg
> Repression unlimited and overt is something very different to
> what many of us have ever experienced,
Chip It is not unlimited, it is limited, though bad. And the reason we all need to read the history of political repression under capitalism is that it will make clear that even though many of us have not experienced this level of repression before, it is hardly unprecedented.
Greg The limits I was referring to were the limits imposed by bourgeois democracy on itself, specifically the recent moves have been to destroy this framework and go well beyond those limits. Colonial, semi-colonial repression has been common for two centuries - specifically placed beyond the constraints of bourgeois democracy. I thought we were talking about movements within advanced capitalism towards openly repressive measures - not repression as such which in terms of violence and pain there have been many episodes within history.
Greg
> the social, economic
> and cultural effects damaging to the working class and
> perhaps in this last stage of capitalism the first step
> towards historic and long lasting barbarianism as suggested
> by Marx as being the only alternative to transforming an
> exhausted mode of production.
Chip I wish I had a dollar for every time someone predicted the last gasp of capitalism
Greg Hence my use of the qualifying word "perhaps" - there is no prediction involved it is a speculation of alternatives. Do you deny the possiblity?
Greg
> I praise Hakki's suggestion of an anti-fascist front (he will
> probably not agree but in my parlance a popular front), we
> need to lay aside are sectarian squabbles, act as a rallying
> point for the defeated liberal democrats and social democrats
> and strike out against the forces of reaction. Few will agree
> with my formulation but something within it is begging to
> come forth and time is running out.
Chip Call it a popluar front if you want, and what you sugest is a good idea. But here is the problem. Things can (and probably will) continue to get worse. If we start out calling onerous but limited capitalist political repression--what term do we use when it gets worse? What do we say when a real middle-class fascist movement erupts? What strategies and tactics would change if we really were living under fascist rule? This crying wolf has a bad track record.
Greg Unfortunately history is not so neat. Things always begin in little ways and these become more pronounced, fascism in Germany in 1923 was a comic opera version (but was it different in essence from what latter developed?). At what point is "worse" - the nature of reaction is that it can only become worse if it is allowed to continue, at what point would you wait until you employed the term? As for middle class fascist movement erupting, how do you think this is possible when the "middle class" is not longer independant but a class largely of managers?
Managers have their own means of political expression unique to their social role, what do you think the managerially courses teach? Managers are already schooled in fascist corporatism, in fact that is how they earn their living. What they desire is wider scope for their powers and reaction promises them this and they are its active agents and promoters. We do not live in the 1930's why should we expect the same forms to re-emerge, or the fact that they cannot re-emerge in the same fashion do we also dismiss an essential relation to reaction in a new form.
Fascism is as I said probably the only starting point we have. If all that these leads us to do is declare fascism it is pointless and I agree with you to this degree only.
Greg Schofield Perth Australia g_schofield at dingoblue.net.au _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________
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