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Klonda56's avatar

“…. The beating heart of Nazism was not to be found in Hitler’s fist pumping oratory, but in the dutiful record-keeping performed by thousands of clerks in hundreds of concentration camps all over Europe….”

I would take this point back further even, to note that the modern field of management accounting has its origin in the record keeping innovations of southern slavery plantations.

They innovated the method of keeping meticulous records as to exactly how much each slave produced, eg in cotton picking. And how different methods of sadism impacted the productivity of the slaves.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1045235403001023

https://studyofcapitalism.harvard.edu/publications/accounting-slavery-masters-and-management

Those record books were used by plantation owners to engage financiers of plantations up north, in Boston, Hartforfd, New York etc, to provide how much each slave was worth in potential profit and therefore to underwrite loans.

Really sick stuff. And invented in America. So yes indeed it has been an important breeding ground of fascism.

Fast-forward to today and this management accounting is what’s being used in Amazon.com warehouses where workers are being subjected to the same relentless squeezing.

Also rather than Reagan, I would go back to Goldwater and J. Edgar Hoover as the real anchors of modern fascism in America. An no surprise the FBI’s headquarters is named after J Edgar Hoover, the foremost fascist of the 20th century.

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Slightly Lucid's avatar

This is a brilliant piece.

On the other hand, I have one quibble.

“I have lived for several year in Italy and Spain, and I have always been impressed by the cavalier manner in which Italians and Spaniards identify themselves as fascists. The word simply does not have the negative connotations that it does in the US.”

In Italy, this is untrue. The word “Fascism” is banned. The fascist party was banned. This is not to say fascism isn’t alive and well, (and, in fact, resurgent,) but the word itself isn’t publicly used: now, the call themselves “lega nord” and “fratelli d’Italia.” Of course too we have old wannabe oligarchs of the merchant classes giving each other little salutes and now a rise of thugs who beat up school children. But the F word itself is only NOW beginning to be whispered and officially embraced, and only recently have the laws banning fascism been blatantly ignored.

And of course, it was a feckless neoliberal left who made this possible. (We’d not be having this conversation without Uncle Miltie, The Chicago Boys, or the ultimate Manchurian; Bill Clinton.)

In the mid 2000’s, under the influence of Merkel’s austerity pograms, the PD and it’s ally’s pressured the left (our numerous communist and socialist parties) to coalesce under the PD umbrella on the promise that within the coalition they would have more power. Once this was done, the PD shifted right (under Renzi, acolyte of Clinton.) Italy’s robust, instabile, fractious democracy died. The IMF became happy. The world bank was overjoyed. Then EU was thrilled at the vast and sudden speed of the privatization of everything. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer, and now we have a PM who is a fascist in all but name.

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