The Crimes of Empire?

Kendall Clark kendall at monkeyfist.com
Fri Sep 6 13:18:12 PDT 2002


On Fri, Sep 06, 2002 at 12:51:18PM -0700, R wrote:


> close isn't quite enough, kendall. it's like being a little bit
> pregnant. ;-)

Eh, it seemed close enough to cast some doubt on Chris Doss's blanket denial.

A little googling turned up this further elaboration of his point:

Q: You view corporations as being incompatible with democracy, and

you say that if we apply the concepts that are used in political

analysis, corporations are fascist. That's a highly charged term.

What do you mean?

A: I mean fascism pretty much in the traditional sense. So when a

rather mainstream person like Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of

[British economist John Maynard] Keynes, describes the early postwar

systems as modeled on fascism, he simply means a system in which the

state integrates labor and capital under the control of the

corporate structure.

That's what a fascist system traditionally was. It can vary in the

way it works, but the ideal state that it aims at is absolutist --

top-down control with the public essentially following orders.

Fascism is a term from the political domain, so it doesn't apply

strictly to corporations, but if you look at them, power goes

strictly top-down, from the board of directors to managers to lower

managers and ultimately to the people on the shop floor, typists,

etc. There's no flow of power or planning from the bottom up.

Ultimate power resides in the hands of investors, owners, banks,

etc.

People can disrupt, make suggestions, but the same is true of a

slave society. People who aren't owners and investors have nothing

much to say about it. They can choose to rent their labor to the

corporation, or to purchase the commodities or services that it

produces, or to find a place in the chain of command, but that's it.

That's the totality of their control over the corporation.

That's something of an exaggeration, because corporations are

subject to some legal requirements and there is some limited degree

of public control. There are taxes and so on. But corporations are

more totalitarian than most institutions we call totalitarian in the

political arena.

(From http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sld/sld-1-01.html)

And this:

Corporation are tyrannical organizations. They are totalitarian

institutions. In fact, if you look at them...that what is a

corporation...it is an unaccountable private tyranny in which power

comes from above, from the owners and the managers, orders are

transferred down below and inserted inside the system. You take your

orders below and above and you transmit them below. At the very

bottom people have the right to rent themselves to this tyrannical

system. It is essentially unaccountable to the public except by weak

regular career apparatus. In fact, it is a totalitarian institution.

And if you look at their intellectual roots, it happens that they

come out of the same neo-Hegelian conceptions of the rights of

organic entities that led to bolshevism and fascism. We have three

forms of twentieth century totalitarianism: bolshevism, fascism and

corporation. Two of them, fortunately, were dissolved, disappeared

mostly. The third remains. It shouldn't. Power should be in the

hand of populations.

(From http://www.zmag.org/hoodbhoychom.htm)


> i expect chomsky, like many of us on this list, is looking for a way to
> characterize all the "fascist like" behavior and thinking, the social
> darwinism, etc., that exemplifies contemporary US society.
>
> i'm waiting for carrol to come up with the bon mot.

Don't hold your breath.

Best,

Kendall



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