The Golden Dawn, Fascism, And What It Means.
Posted: May 5, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: analysis, anticapitalism, authoritarianism, current events, politics, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, antifascism, authoritarianism, crisis, EU, europe, European Union, eurozone, fascism, golden dawn, greece, politics, privatization | Leave a comment »There are two distinct strains of fascism. The first, what I call blackshirt fascism, comes about in the face of economic distress. This variant of fascism isn’t pathologically racist, inasmuch as minorities are willing to go along to get along and do as they are told there’s no problem. You can see this in Franco’s Spain or Mussolini’s Italy, as (respectively) Moroccans and Ethiopians were vital parts of both regimes’ militaries. That’s not to say that blackshirt fascists aren’t racist, but they aren’t genocidally so. The second, what I call brownshirt fascism, comes about in the face of national humiliation, which is where the Nazis came from. These fuckers are eliminationist when it comes to race and aren’t willing in the least to abide diversity, even when minorities are obsequious to the majority.
The difference comes in the nature of stress applied to a society. In a capitalist society suffering under severe economic dislocation that applies the kind of uncertainty that the working poor usually cope with to groups that don’t usually have to face it, like the educated and middle class, it causes society to turn to alternative perspectives on existing politics. The middle class usually breaks towards fascist narratives for a couple of reasons. It’s a vision that’s far more compatible with conventional systems of government than the end goal of leftist thought. It maintains (and strengthens) the state, plays on patriotism, and retains the existing economic power dynamic by retaining the capitalist mode of production. This compatibility reassures the middle class, who are by and large not used to facing these kinds of economic pressures the way the working class is. This desire for reassurance is also the root of why these groups are willing to cast away their right of self-determination and support a totalitarian form of government, as fascist societies always create rigid roles and boundaries for the people who exist within it. To this way of thinking, people who are fucked over by these boundaries deserve it for breaking these boundaries.
All of this applies to a capitalist country that has been humiliated as a nation, as economic stress usually follows a national humiliation. However, the difference comes from the motive for seeking reassurance. In blackshirt fascism, the motive is to feel secure again. In brownshirt fascism, the motive is to feel secure again by making the nation strong once more. This retrenchment towards ethnic and national identity takes the latent nationalism that is a feature of all fascism and makes it far more malignant. By binding the reassurance that a fascist society provides to national and ethnic identity, it virtually eliminates a fascist society’s already low level of pluralism, and reduces its tolerance of subjugation of those who share its ethnic identity: a German in 1927 might not give a fuck about the Sudetenland, but the same German in 1937 sure as hell does.
Which brings me to the Golden Dawn, a fascist party on the rise in Greece. From where I sit, they are a brownshirt fascist group. This is interesting because the economic uncertainty came before the national humiliation, as Papademos’ coronation as PM by the EU, the continual scapegoating of Greece for the eurozone crisis, and the damage to Greece’s sovereignty those two things represent occured long after the economic crisis set in. Their rise is extremely worrying and depressing. It’s worrying because they will likely not be tolerant of Turkish Cyprus or the way ethnic Greeks are treated in Turkey proper, which could lead to further instability in Europe as shipping to and from the Black Sea through the Med becomes uncertain. It’s depressing because Greece fought the Italians and then the Nazis long and hard during the Second World War, with people like Archbishop Damaskinos showing true courage in the face of such malevolence.
Some of this is the fault of the establishment left. PASOK is like most “socialist” parties in Europe: neoliberal shills who aren’t willing to take a stand for the average person. The KKE has been actively working against the trade unions, left-communists, and anarchists who are trying to fight the ruinous cuts being inflicted on the people of Greece. By not standing up, fighting back, and providing a genuinely left alternative to the existing neoliberal order, both PASOK and KKE are treading dangerously close to proving Walter Benjamin right: “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.”
I can only hope that the other leftists in Greece are able to do what the KKE and PASOK aren’t willing to.
Capital won’t stop until it’s beaten (to death with rocks) – Example #3
Posted: February 10, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: analysis, anticapitalism, current events, socialism, the economy | Tags: bankers, crisis, labor, labor union, organizing, politics, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy, socialism | Leave a comment »After locking out 465 members of the Canadian Auto Workers (CAW) Local 27 in London, Ontario, Caterpillar decided last Friday to close its 62-year-old locomotive facility there and move production to newly “right-to-work” Indiana, where American workers will work for half of what Canadian workers would make. Caterpillar’s decision to close the plant after workers refused to agree to major wage concessions has provoked outrage across Canada in light of the fact that Illinois-based Caterpillar made a record $4.8 billion in profits in 2011.
CAW members, who have already been blockading a completed locomotive from leaving the London plant, have vowed to continue blocking any products from leaving there as they attempt to extract a better severance from the company. The CAW local is also considering occupying the plant. “The CAW has occupied workplaces when employers have shown disrespect,” Canadian Auto Workers Union President Ken Lewenza told Bloomberg. “It’s a tool. It’s an option.”
As I reported last week, under the Investment Canada Act, foreign companies taking over Canadian companies must demonstrate a “net benefit” to Canada. Critics claim that the government allowed a foreign-owned company (Caterpillar) to buy a Canadian company without having any intention of providing any “net benefit” to Canada.
I really hope the CAW follow through with that occupation, because fuck Caterpillar and because Stephen Harper won’t stand up for them. They might not be able to save their jobs, but they might be able to make this a Pyrrhic victory for Caterpillar.
In addition, don’t think that the recent dues freeloading law passed by Indiana has absolutely nothing to do with this decision by Caterpillar, because it has everything to do with it. Caterpillar is staggeringly profitable, and the wages paid at this plant aren’t insane. They are decent, skilled-labor wages, but the environment in the US is conducive to a race to the bottom, the jobs go away and lives get just a little better for those in Muncie and a whole lot worse for those in London.
This whole sad story yet again proves exactly how morally bankrupt the existing economic system is. This plant closure will ruin people’s lives. It will unhome people, it will impoverish people, it will cause a whole swath of societal ills that won’t be addressed because of Mike Harris’ public sector cuts in the nineties. I remember very clearly supporting my teachers’ picket line in 1997 because of what Harris was looking to do was so repellant. What’s happening in London is the inevitable continuation of that neoliberal effort. There is literally no reason, none at all, to do any of this aside for sheer naked avarice.
The Liberals will probably try to make hay over this, but they have supported similar efforts in the recent past under Martin. The only party that’s in a position to really slam Harper and the Tories on this is the NDP, recently ascendant to the Official Opposition after the last election. However, I fear that the leadership vacuum within the New Democrats after Layton’s passing will leave them unable to really go after Harper for allowing and even supporting this kind of asset stripping. If Layton was still alive, they would have easily been able to absolutely shellack the Tories on this bullshit, but with their leadership election taking up all the air in the room, it will be an afterthought at best.
In the end, I’m hoping for the best, but I don’t think this turns out happy for the CAW workers. It’s really fucking sad. I hope someone burns down the house of Caterpillar’s CEO.
Occupying Workplaces: An Absolute Necessity
Posted: February 8, 2012 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: analysis, anticapitalism, current events, socialism, the economy | Tags: anticapitalism, bankers, civil rights, crisis, EU, European Union, eurozone, labor, labor union, neoliberalism, Occupy Oakland, occupy wall street, organizing, politics, socialism | Leave a comment »Greece is, to put it simply, fucked, and the Greeks realize it. The EU and IMF are meeting today to figure out how to fuck them over further in the name of preventing a default and thus triggering another crisis of capitalism when we haven’t even remotely come close to recovering from the last one. If anything, a Greek default could cause a bigger crisis because of how precarious things are right now.
Yet the Greeks have been remarkably resistant and the EU’s decision-makers have yet to figure out the best way to make Greece play by the privatize-and-burn neoliberal model that’s been forced down the throat of dozens of countries in the developing world. This is, to some extent, due to their unions and some of their left wing (their Communists are regrettably moving in lock step with the government). Lagarde, Merkel, and Zapatero had hoped, like in every other instance this particular model had been rolled out, it could be pushed through in an undemocratic fashion as fast as possible because ‘there is no alternative’ and ‘this is a crisis and you have to take bold action’.
Except that there is an alternative to what the European Commission and the IMF have planned for Greece, and some workers at a hospital in Kilkis have decided to take bold action, just not the bold action the international financiers were hoping for.
Health workers in Kilkis, Greece, have occupied their local hospital and have issued a statement saying it is now fully under workers control.
The general hospital of Kilkis in Greece is now under workers control. The workers at the hospital have declared that the long-lasting problems of the National Health System (ESY) cannot be resolved.
The workers have responded to the regime’s acceleration of unpopular austerity measures by occupying the hospital and outing it under direct and complete control by the workers. All decisions will be made by a ‘workers general assembly’.
The hospital has stated that. “The government is not acquitted of its financial responsibilities, and if their demands are not met, they will turn to the local and wider community for support in every possible way to save the hospital defend free public healthcare, to overthrow the government and every neo-liberal policy.”
As I’ve stated earlier, this is what Occupy here in the US will have to move towards doing. It requires a big leap of faith and a lot of courage, because the first successful one will be attacked by police just as savagely as Occupy Oakland was on the 28th and heaped with scorn in the media, likely in the vein of, “look at those Occupy hippies tryin’ to get jobs AND THEY STILL CAN’T DO IT RIGHT!”
It will get attacked by the cops because taking over a failed capitalist institution and turning it into a going concern outside that framework is intolerable to the employing class. An enterprise like reopening a failed business as a worker collective shows their method of organizing society to not be the only way, but potentially a less successful one. So out come the enforcers with tear gas and rubber bullets to prevent this from even making a short-term run at success. I’d also add that it’s important to take over a closed business and not start up a new worker co-op. Part of the point is to be provocative and confrontational, and by doing so draw attention to this effort.
Once the cops have cleared the reoccupied business, it then becomes necessary to figuratively poison the well, to keep people from trying something like this again, which is where the media reaction to this fits in. Occupying abandoned buildings for community centers and the like is at least noble in intent, which is why you barely saw why the OPD embraced their inner blackshirt on January 28th mentioned. If an Occupy reopens a shuttered business in this time of massive un-and-underemployment, that would be entirely too good of a story to just ignore, but the media couldn’t afford to depict in in a positive light.
The media narrative would be along the lines of, “Well, those Occupy hippies have done it again! They finally got jobs, but since they are dumb hippies, they can’t just do things normally like getting a job at McDonalds. Get this…they took over an abandoned business and started it back up again, and since they are dumb hippies, they decided to run it democratically! How crazy is that! How can they function without a boss! Good thing the cops went in and cleared them out before something bad happened.”
Granted, the actual phrasing would probably be a bit more subtle than all that, but that would be the general tone. Make no mistake: the Occupy protests in their current form have the employing class worried. The reoccupation of foreclosed homes has them alarmed. A shift to this kind of occupation, just taking over shuttered businesses and running them democratically, would scare the fuck out of them and push them to try and break up the Occupy movement for good. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it’s possible to win this particular battle.
So if I’m right about the reaction to such a workplace occupation, how do you successfully defend it? Firstly, you take over the space quickly and quietly. You don’t announce it beforehand, you don’t launch the start with a march. You pick out a dozen or so people from the group who are interested in doing this, take over the space, and get it up and running. Operate it quietly as any other business for a couple weeks if possible. Then launch it as an Occupy effort. Have the march, the big press release talking about putting power back in the hands of the people, the whole nine yards. When the cops come to clear you out, to hell with Chris Hedges’ liberal ass and fight them off. Make the cops go full-on stormtrooper to shut down the business and make sure you capture them doing so on video (this last part probably won’t be a problem) and slam them for physically assaulting ‘job creators’. Finally, when the media comes to pass judgement on this enterprise, have another two reoccupations in the pipeline that you can launch so you can prove them to be liars when they say it was unsustainable.
The next stage of this movement has to be reoccupying closed workplace. I’ve said that for a while, and I think this Kilkis hospital takeover hints at me being correct about this. I’m going to watch what news emerges from that like a hawk because it presages what’s feasible here in the US. A better world is possible, we just need to bring it into being.
Democracy and the European Union
Posted: December 21, 2011 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: authoritarianism, commentary, current events, politics | Tags: bankers, civil liberties, crisis, democracy, EU, European Union, eurozone, politics | Leave a comment »Note: A version of this piece was first posted on DemandNothing.org and is a continuation of yesterday’s entry
I find it interesting that a supranational union composed of ostensible democracies would allow this kind of behavior to happen. Between Fidesz’s naked power grab in Hungary, the austerity government installed by the EU in Greece that contains people who lead thugs for the Greek military junta from ’67 to ’74, and the fact that the European Parliament has literally no power over the European Commission, it’s becoming fairly clear that the European Union is highly undemocratic if not antidemocratic. Continuing the policies that buoy the wealthy and screw the rest, like ultratight monetary policy, the EU is going to bind the member states on the periphery into a cycle of misery that won’t be easily broken.
When you get right down to it the EU was never intended to be democratic. The European Commission is effectively free of oversight from the Parliament because of the latter’s lack of legislative initiative: it can only approve legislation proposed by the Commission. While other bodies (NGOs, member states, other European Union organizations) can propose legislation, they still ultimately have to get approval from the Commission to have the European Parliament to do anything. The Parliament is further hamstrung by forcing it to share most of its legislative power with the European Council, which is comprised of the heads of states of the constituent nations, including the budget process. And hell, if the Parliament wasn’t useless enough already, the Commission can act without legislative approval in several areas.
This complete and utter uselessness of the European Parliament leads to staggeringly low turnouts on MEP elections. and this leads to only cranks, loonies, and soulless bureaucrats contesting these seats. That only geniuses like Nigel Farange of the UKIP try to become MEPs completes the cycle and ensures that no reasonable person wants to see any kind of significant power invested in the European Parliament, despite being the “first institution” of the EU. This cycle ensures the Commission remains free of any appreciable oversight of pesky elected representatives. The bulk of this hamstringing of the EP happened while the Treaty of Lisbon was being ratified, which happened while the sovereign debt crisis was starting to rear its head, a bit of timing that might be coincidental but is fairly convenient. And now the central states to the EU are talking about bolstering the European Commission that allows that body to force austerity on the periphery states.
Because the Commission has never really had to be restrained in a democratic fashion, it sees no reason to defend that particular function of parliamentary democracy in its member states. Look at the freak-out that Merkel, Sarkozy, and the Commission President Zapatero had when then-Greek PM George Papandreou tried to put the austerity policies inflicted on Greece by the EU up for a referendum. Look at the deafening silence from the Commission and the ECJ as Hungary’s democracy slides into a half-dead state. So long as member states don’t literally install a dictator and round of political dissidents, I doubt the European Commission steps in to do anything to defend democracy.
In the end, the EU’s dead and doesn’t realize it. The people of the Europe will only tolerate shit like Pidesz trying to establish permanent control over Hungary and ex-fascist government ministers being installed at the behest of the Commission for so long before they decide to tear the fucker down because there is no democratic relief valve at the EU-wide level of policy-making, no place to direct reformers and incrementalists and hope they go away. The worst part is that all of the pain that will come from this is entirely avoidable if the EU wasn’t hell-bent on dismantling democracy..
The Second Time As Farce
Posted: December 20, 2011 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: authoritarianism, commentary, current events, politics | Tags: authoritarianism, civil liberties, crisis, EU, europe, eurozone, politics, progressive politics | Leave a comment »leitmotif (noun) – a recurrent theme throughout a musical or literary composition, associated with a particular person, idea, or situation. – Oxford English Dictionary
A lot of my analytical focus is on how fascism can emerge in the modern day, but that’s not the only form of authoritarianism that is creeping in. Paul Krugman gave some space in his blog to Kim Lane Scheppele on this very topic and it’s worth a read, if a bit light on analysis:
In a free and fair election last spring in Hungary, the center-right political party, Fidesz, got 53% of the vote. This translated into 68% of the seats in the parliament under Hungary’s current disproportionate election law. With this supermajority, Fidesz won the power to change the constitution. They have used this power in the most extreme way at every turn, amending the constitution ten times in their first year in office and then enacting a wholly new constitution that will take effect on January 1, 2012.
This constitutional activity has transformed the legal landscape to remove checks on the power of the government and put virtually all power into the hands of the current governing party for the foreseeable future.
This is basically your bog-standard reactionary takeover, and it reads like a history of Hungary’s interwar years. A rightist party gained power with questionable democratic legitimacy, attempted to remove its center-left opposition from existence, and ended up getting flanked and overthrown by a fascist party and their allies from Germany. The big difference is that this time it’s not the fascists the Germans are supporting. It shouldn’t be terribly surprising that you can look backward and find examples of Fidesz’s behavior in the past. When you get right down to it, reactionaries aren’t very creative people, and as the man said, “All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
Fidesz’s actions aren’t unique in Europe, either. It’s a pattern that’s playing out relatively quietly across Europe while the ongoing financial crisis rages on and draws the bulk of the media attention. When it does get mentioned, the context is about how good this kind of subversion of democracy is for Europe. Spain just put in power a rightist party whose roots go back to Franco’s regime in a low-turnout election. Greece’s EC-appointed government has people filling cabinet positions that beat the shit out of students with axe-handles for the military junta that was in power from ’67 to ’74. I have no doubt that there will be more of these kinds of government as this crisis continues to wear on because political behavior is rooted primarily in material concerns with cultural concerns coming in second. This kind of antidemocratic behavior spreading across Europe makes me pose the following question: is there something about the EU that is inimical to democracy?
More on that later.
Reflections on the Old Year
Posted: December 31, 2011 | Author: Cato the Younger | Filed under: commentary, current events | Tags: crisis, foreign policy, fuck scaf, labor, occupy wall street, organizing, politics, privatization, progressive change, progressive politics, public policy | 1 Comment »This year has been a pretty good year, and a pretty bad one.
It’s been good for the idea of resistance being permanent, that no matter how hard totalitarians try, eventually they will slip and folks will rise up. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Bahrain…these are all countries that labored under the boots of Western-backed strongman thugs and have risen up to get rid of them with varying success. Tunisia looks to be shaping up alright, but Egypt is looking more like post-Duvalier Haiti than a conventional parliamentary democracy right now, where the generals and other senior officers that Mubarak put into place continuing to use the systems of oppression he built to maintain control. And the less said about Libya in this context, the better: it’s looking less and less like the West intervened to defend democracy and more and more like we intervened for the same reasons we did in Iraq: to replace a recalcitrant strongman that does inconvenient things for Western economic interests with a more pliant, less stable dictator or other nondemocratic government. But in the end, no matter how these end, that they started is a good thing.
It’s been good for the idea that the system doesn’t work for you but works you over. Everybody here in the US will probably point to Occupy as an example of this if this topic comes up, but I’d point to Greece’s general strikes and various other labor disputes throughout Europe as well as the fact that the gap between rich and poor continues to grow despite tepid economic growth and flat jobs numbers. People are slowly but surely coming to the realization that capitalism is a system hand-designed to protect the wealthy and harm the worker. In my generation, you see an increase of interest in labor unions (this is a good thing because they are going to be part of the solution to the problems we face, in my opinion. Above all I am a syndicalist philosophically) and further skepticism of what pronouncements come from on high. Given how heavily Millennials like myself invested emotional energy into the Obama campaign four years ago, there’s going to be some significant disillusion in the political process because of how he’s turned out to govern like a moderate Republican, and this is a good thing because it makes it easier to bring folk around to the idea of taking direct action, cf. Occupy Our Homes as an example of this.
And finally, it’s been a bad year for most people. Despite all these rays of hope there are still untold amounts of human suffering that come about from just having to survive day to day in this world. I get a bit more access to it than most because of my political avocation and family ties to what you could call a local capitalism harm-mitigation organization. As much as I take hope from what’s happening locally and internationally, it’s impossible for me to forget that there are decent people starving and put out into the street because they were lied to by their mortgage broker in the name of earning his commission, and a commission for his boss, and a bonus for the banker that broke his mortgage into a million shards and turned it into a CDO, and a bonus for his boss and so on. This is fucked, and some of what drives me forward in my activism.
In the end, I look backward to build the courage to look forward without flinching, and I find inspiration in what people did and said when people with my opinions got tarred and feathered, or murdered, or imprisoned and still kept on fighting for what they believed in despite all of this. So I’ll leave it on this note. Tommy Douglas, the first head of the NDP and the father of Canada’s universal health care system, said this, “Courage, my friends; ’tis not too late to build a better world.”
Have a good New Years’ Eve.
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