A couple of quibbles though: There is very little on how the nation state fits into all this. I would have liked more information about the author's views on this. Then there are a couple of places where the author critiques some views that I myself have supported, so let me just touch on those. Firstly, this one:
"These are also the key elements of the contemporary popular image of socialism, and the key elements of the colourful pop ideology of the ‘new social movements’ as well, aiming at righting injustice by enlarging and radicalizing the idea of equality and trying to impose this idea on the bourgeois states and international financial organizations they despise (they themselves do not wish to take power; theirs is an étatisme by proxy). The ‘statism by proxy’ of the new social movements (we won’t vote for you, we won’t smash your power through revolution, but we want you to draft bills and pass acts of parliament and UN and EU resolutions that we deem useful and edifying), in spite of their many beauties and quite a few successes, is still statism, experimenting with a radical idea of equality of all living beings, hesitating between straight reformism and utopian self-sufficiency and exodus."
I find this point to be a bit dodgy. Refusing to take power (and refusing to vote for capitalist politicians) and refusing therefore to supplant the bourgeoisie at the helm of the state makes more sense than the author concedes. To call this "statism by proxy" is stretching the point a bit. I think it is far better to push the ruling class into reforms than to do their job in their place. Does he believe then that the communists should take over the nation states one by one and administer them, in the absence of a simultaneous, worldwide defeat of capitalism? I find that hard to believe in the light of other things he says, yet he may indeed be advocating something like this. There also seems to be a refusal to see that social movements are a form of organisation of the working class (regardless of whether it is the best form or not), which I find problematic. Then there is this:
"Let’s not forget that bourgeois liberty, i.e., modern (liberal) capitalist class society, was not quite safe until very recently. It should not be forgotten, either, that this element played an important role in the anti-fascist struggle (not understood by purely and uncompromisingly proletarian radicals like Amadeo Bordiga and some, by no means all, left communists). An explanation is here in order. Fascism and National Socialism are constantly interpreted, not without justification, as instances of ‘reactionary modernism’, as a sub-species of twentieth-century revolutionism, etc., initially in order to stress their not negligible parallels and similarities with ‘communism’, especially Stalinism, often under the aegis of the (untenable) ‘totalitarianism’ dogma. However justified and novel these approaches were, they contributed to the (all too frequent) neglect of the obvious. Southern and Catholic fascism wanted to introduce the Ständestaat (always translated as ‘corporate state’ but literally meaning ‘the state of estates’, a sort of new caste society), based on the theories of Othmar Spann, Salazar and others, all inherited from Count Joseph de Maistre, the Marquis de Bonald and Don Juan Donoso Cortés, with a mix of the ‘elite’ theories of Vilfredo Pareto and others. There were variants of the same neo-feudalism in Nazism, too, with racist and sexist elements of ‘arischer Männerbund’ (Aryan male fraternity) and similar pseudo-historical nonsense, very much in vogue then among fashionable people like Carl Schmitt and others of his ilk."
The critique of Bordiga and others who refused to treat fascism as worse than liberalism and stalinism of course is justified to some extent. But it can also be overstated. I have argued before that the achievements of states under democratic or 'communist' regimes are not always and everywhere more impressive than those of regimes designated as fascist.
Then the evidence offered that fascism and nazism implies regression to pre-capitalist ideology and caste society is rather selective to put it mildly. My view is that these movements, despite the regressive sounding mumbo jumbo, were on the whole movements for capitalist modernisation. The very fact that the nation state and nationalism was so crucial to the struggles of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco indicates that we are not dealing with some kind of feudal thinking. The nazis adopted aristocratic mannerisms and pretentions as one of their many adoptions of style. It was not a movement for regression to feudalism as such. The emphasis on racism and sexism above does nothing to prove regression either. Modern, capitalist states such as the US are riddled with racism and sexism, without being non-democratic or non-capitalist.
Tahir
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