[lbo-talk] Tamas on Fascism

[Arthur Maisel]

Aren't we at least as likely to be confronted not with a return of a highly
stratified society but with a "classless" society in which the state itself
serves the ideological role of class? This is how future dystopias are
often portrayed in the various fictional media.

I'm thinking of a situation where all individuals would be substantially
"equal"---meaning, among other things, equally at the mercy of the state,
whether they are bureaucratic funtionaries or not. The large corporation
seems to be becoming models for this: there are at any given time
individuals who hold positions of power in the structure, but in the
context of the corporation they are not essentially members of a class so
much as simply those individuals who happen to be in those positions---they
come and they go, and the only thing that really remains in the corporation
itself. (Within the larger society at present, they do constitute a class,
it's true, but if society as a whole becomes like this model, this would no
longer have any meaning.)

We have seen the corporation granted rights that would previously have only
made sense as the rights of individuals, and this could be interpreted as a
sign that "corporate life forms" are on the way to subsuming "individual"
ones.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 12:55 PM, JOANNA A. <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:


> This seems to be the drift of Corey Robin's "Reactionary Mind" -- that at
> stake is always the need to justify hierarchy as the only possible
> foundation of a health society.
>
> But the growth of the police state seems to be a needed parallel. Noted
> this today:
>
> http://rt.com/news/annoying-behaviour-uk-law-598/
>
> "The UK government is moving towards passing legislation which could
> criminalize behavior deemed capable of causing a “nuisance or annoyance.”
> The bill has already passed through its second hearing in the House of
> Lords and looks set to become law."
>
> Joanna
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>
> What all this verbiage amounted to was a quite serious attempt to
> re-intro­duce caste society, that is, human groups with radically different
> entitlements and duties (against uniformizing and levelling, ‘mechanistic’
> conceptions of egalitarian liberalism and socialism and bourgeois
> individualism): the Führ­erprinzip in all occupations (witness Heidegger’s
> infamous ‘Rektoratsrede’, i.e., commencement address); vocational groups
> dissolving classes (e.g., steel-workers would have meant, in the future,
> Krupp and Thyssen as well as the steel-workers proper); untouchables (Jews
> and other condemned races), and so on.
>
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