“…. 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.
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.
Thanks for the excellent feedback! I used Reagan because of personal experience, but you are right, especially about that cross-dressing psychopath, Hoover.
Good summary. However, I continue to be a bit surprised that the role, and the name, of the Project for the New American Century is not brought up in critiques of how we got to be in the dismal place we're in right now. One small bright note was in the graphic symbol of the fascia in Ukrainian colors. We are now fighting to "defend democracy" in a country that immediately shut down opposition parties and media after the US financed and organized coup, and went about using artillery to subdue the parts of the country which opposed the neo-Nazi battalions providing the muscle for the regime until the US could load it up with NATO weapons.
“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.
I was writing from personal experience. My first job out of college often took me to Torino, where my company's Italian engineer would take me to his favourite restaurant. Upon entering, one was met with a giant bust of Mussolini, and the restaurant itself was festooned with fascist regalia. When I asked about the strange decor, I was told that the owner and his family were unrepentant and unreconstructed fascists. More recently, in my local bar on Lake Como, I knew of at least two people who openly said they were fascists, and several others who had nothing but good things to say about "Il Duce" - long paeans of praise that went well beyond the old wag about making the trains run on time.
Ah. Yes. The north. I am in Tuscany - where we commies chased the Nazi scum out. Still, under Italian law, these fuckers are illegal. I find it interesting that the fascists - by whatever name they refer to themselves, are led by the merchant oligarchy.
“a government that represents the perfect “marriage” between the powers of the State and those of corporations, means, by historical definition, that we have a “fascist” system of government.”
You may want to go back and study the meaning of corporatism as it was in the 1930s and earlier vice today. In corporatist theory, workers and employers would be organized into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation. It has nothing to do with corporations as defined today thus your entire essay is bunk
I think you need to go back and re-read my article. I am aware of the Corporatist movement in the 1930's but seems to be more of a way to put lipstick on the pig of fascism. There is also the movement by the intelligentsia to put forth an alternative to socialism which would emphasise social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property - and they called THAT "Corporatism".
My article clearly adheres to the definition of fascism that Gramsci and Mussolini adopted. I am not conderned with the "Corporatist" movement to which you refer.
For example, you will not find the word "Corporatism" anywhere in my article.
Yep, read it again, same conclusion. The gist of your essay is that the U.S. is a fascist state and as evidence you refer to Mussolini’s statements about corporatism. Thus it is not whether or not you are not concerned with the “Corporatist” movement to which I refer but to what is Mussolini referring.
You begin with a quote from Mussolini as the basis for your essay
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
The problem is that while many have attributed this quote to Mussolini no one has ever actually found said quote. In most attributions for this quote refer to the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana however the quote does not appear in the Enciclopedia Italiana.
“Where the quote comes from remains a mystery, and while it is possible Mussolini said it someplace at some time, a number of researchers have been unable to find it after months of research.
It is unlikely that Mussolini ever made this statement because it contradicts most of the other writing he did on the subject of corporatism and corporations. When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.”
So you have based your argument on a suspect quote.
To wit:
“Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State. (p.15)”- Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.
On 13 November 1933, Mussolini gave a speech “On the Corporate State” in which he made the following points:
- Define Corporations as the instrument which, under the aegis of the State, carries out the complete organic and unitarian regulation of production with a view to the expansion of the wealth, political power, and well-being of the Italian people;
- Establish that the general staff of each Corporation shall include representatives of State administration, of the Fascist Party, or capital, of labour, and of experts;
Thus we see that the corporations Mussolini refers to are subservient to the State, unlike your statement where you claim the State is run “by and for the corporations” and unlike the corporations you refer to Mussolini’s corporations consist of equal representation of the State, the party, the owners and the workers. More a kin to socialism than capitalism. Keep in mind Mussolini was a socialist and a union organizer in his earlier years.
The following day in another speech he presented a critique of capitalism and further laid out the purpose of a corporation neither of which agree with your statement :
“Yes, Mussolini sought to combine corporate power with state power, but that is only because corporations were the face of Capitalism at that time, and they represented the power and wealth of Capital in Italy.”
Mussolini:
“In my opinion Italy should remain a country of mixed economy, that is, a strong agricultural organisation at the root of everything (so true is this that the slight revival in industry witnessed of late is due, in the unanimous opinion of all who are acquainted with these matters, to the fairly good crops of the last years); a sound small and medium-sized industry; banks which do not speculate; a trade system fulfilling its proper task of supplying commodities rapidly and rationally to consumers.
The resolution I submitted yesterday evening outlined the Corporation as we intend and wish to create it, and also defined its purposes and aims. The Corporation, it says, is created with a view to increasing the wealth, political power, and well-being of the Italian people. These three objectives are conditional each on the other.
Political power creates wealth, and wealth in its turn strengthens political action.
I should like to call your attention to the third objective expounded: the well-being of the Italian people. It is essential that the institutions we have set up should, at a given moment, be felt and perceived by the masses themselves as the means by which those masses may improve their standard of life.
At a given moment the worker, the tiller of the soil, must be able to say to himself and his family: “If I am actually better off today, I owe it to the institutions created by the Fascist Revolution.””
The fact that you use as a basis a quote that is likely not real and misconstrue Mussolini’s use if the word corporation in any if it’s forms makes your whole argument moot.
It’s not semantics. Based on the numerous factual errors and misrepresentations in this essay, which appear to be driven by ideology or polemical sport more than anything, I won’t be back. I will remind you of something Giovanni Gentile said in a speech “Fascism is a form of socialism, in fact, it is its most viable form.”
This is a great essay - like your stuff a great deal. Amusing how an “agrarian traditionalist” or whatever I am finds so much in common with a socialist. I agree completely that the USA is now a corporatarist nightmare, but I’d suggest this started with railroad lawyer Lincoln, and was the actual war aim of the USA in that particular conquest.
I am not a pure socialist, I believe more in the social democrat society that took root in Western Europe after WWII, when the US was worried about influence from the USSR.
Alas, that great Western European model of a democratic socialist society went away once the US "won" the Cold War, and Neoliberalism became "the only game in town".
“…. 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.
Thanks for the excellent feedback! I used Reagan because of personal experience, but you are right, especially about that cross-dressing psychopath, Hoover.
Added a couple of links too
Good summary. However, I continue to be a bit surprised that the role, and the name, of the Project for the New American Century is not brought up in critiques of how we got to be in the dismal place we're in right now. One small bright note was in the graphic symbol of the fascia in Ukrainian colors. We are now fighting to "defend democracy" in a country that immediately shut down opposition parties and media after the US financed and organized coup, and went about using artillery to subdue the parts of the country which opposed the neo-Nazi battalions providing the muscle for the regime until the US could load it up with NATO weapons.
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.
I was writing from personal experience. My first job out of college often took me to Torino, where my company's Italian engineer would take me to his favourite restaurant. Upon entering, one was met with a giant bust of Mussolini, and the restaurant itself was festooned with fascist regalia. When I asked about the strange decor, I was told that the owner and his family were unrepentant and unreconstructed fascists. More recently, in my local bar on Lake Como, I knew of at least two people who openly said they were fascists, and several others who had nothing but good things to say about "Il Duce" - long paeans of praise that went well beyond the old wag about making the trains run on time.
Ah. Yes. The north. I am in Tuscany - where we commies chased the Nazi scum out. Still, under Italian law, these fuckers are illegal. I find it interesting that the fascists - by whatever name they refer to themselves, are led by the merchant oligarchy.
Excellent post! I have been trying to tell people this for decades.
Great substancial info article. Thanks for your magnum opus! Be well!
“a government that represents the perfect “marriage” between the powers of the State and those of corporations, means, by historical definition, that we have a “fascist” system of government.”
You may want to go back and study the meaning of corporatism as it was in the 1930s and earlier vice today. In corporatist theory, workers and employers would be organized into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation. It has nothing to do with corporations as defined today thus your entire essay is bunk
I think you need to go back and re-read my article. I am aware of the Corporatist movement in the 1930's but seems to be more of a way to put lipstick on the pig of fascism. There is also the movement by the intelligentsia to put forth an alternative to socialism which would emphasise social justice without the radical solution of the abolition of private property - and they called THAT "Corporatism".
My article clearly adheres to the definition of fascism that Gramsci and Mussolini adopted. I am not conderned with the "Corporatist" movement to which you refer.
For example, you will not find the word "Corporatism" anywhere in my article.
Yep, read it again, same conclusion. The gist of your essay is that the U.S. is a fascist state and as evidence you refer to Mussolini’s statements about corporatism. Thus it is not whether or not you are not concerned with the “Corporatist” movement to which I refer but to what is Mussolini referring.
You begin with a quote from Mussolini as the basis for your essay
“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power”
The problem is that while many have attributed this quote to Mussolini no one has ever actually found said quote. In most attributions for this quote refer to the 1932 Enciclopedia Italiana however the quote does not appear in the Enciclopedia Italiana.
“Where the quote comes from remains a mystery, and while it is possible Mussolini said it someplace at some time, a number of researchers have been unable to find it after months of research.
It is unlikely that Mussolini ever made this statement because it contradicts most of the other writing he did on the subject of corporatism and corporations. When Mussolini wrote about corporatism, he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.”
https://politicalresearch.org/2005/01/12/mussolini-corporate-state
So you have based your argument on a suspect quote.
To wit:
“Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which diverent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State. (p.15)”- Benito Mussolini, 1935, The Doctrine of Fascism, Firenze: Vallecchi Editore.
On 13 November 1933, Mussolini gave a speech “On the Corporate State” in which he made the following points:
- Define Corporations as the instrument which, under the aegis of the State, carries out the complete organic and unitarian regulation of production with a view to the expansion of the wealth, political power, and well-being of the Italian people;
- Establish that the general staff of each Corporation shall include representatives of State administration, of the Fascist Party, or capital, of labour, and of experts;
Thus we see that the corporations Mussolini refers to are subservient to the State, unlike your statement where you claim the State is run “by and for the corporations” and unlike the corporations you refer to Mussolini’s corporations consist of equal representation of the State, the party, the owners and the workers. More a kin to socialism than capitalism. Keep in mind Mussolini was a socialist and a union organizer in his earlier years.
The following day in another speech he presented a critique of capitalism and further laid out the purpose of a corporation neither of which agree with your statement :
“Yes, Mussolini sought to combine corporate power with state power, but that is only because corporations were the face of Capitalism at that time, and they represented the power and wealth of Capital in Italy.”
Mussolini:
“In my opinion Italy should remain a country of mixed economy, that is, a strong agricultural organisation at the root of everything (so true is this that the slight revival in industry witnessed of late is due, in the unanimous opinion of all who are acquainted with these matters, to the fairly good crops of the last years); a sound small and medium-sized industry; banks which do not speculate; a trade system fulfilling its proper task of supplying commodities rapidly and rationally to consumers.
The resolution I submitted yesterday evening outlined the Corporation as we intend and wish to create it, and also defined its purposes and aims. The Corporation, it says, is created with a view to increasing the wealth, political power, and well-being of the Italian people. These three objectives are conditional each on the other.
Political power creates wealth, and wealth in its turn strengthens political action.
I should like to call your attention to the third objective expounded: the well-being of the Italian people. It is essential that the institutions we have set up should, at a given moment, be felt and perceived by the masses themselves as the means by which those masses may improve their standard of life.
At a given moment the worker, the tiller of the soil, must be able to say to himself and his family: “If I am actually better off today, I owe it to the institutions created by the Fascist Revolution.””
The fact that you use as a basis a quote that is likely not real and misconstrue Mussolini’s use if the word corporation in any if it’s forms makes your whole argument moot.
Thank you for reading and re-reading, I appreciate your feedback. I hope you can enjoy some of my other posts without being distracted by semantics.
And do let me know if you ever get around to posting something yourself.
It’s not semantics. Based on the numerous factual errors and misrepresentations in this essay, which appear to be driven by ideology or polemical sport more than anything, I won’t be back. I will remind you of something Giovanni Gentile said in a speech “Fascism is a form of socialism, in fact, it is its most viable form.”
Thanks again for reading.
This is a great essay - like your stuff a great deal. Amusing how an “agrarian traditionalist” or whatever I am finds so much in common with a socialist. I agree completely that the USA is now a corporatarist nightmare, but I’d suggest this started with railroad lawyer Lincoln, and was the actual war aim of the USA in that particular conquest.
I am not a pure socialist, I believe more in the social democrat society that took root in Western Europe after WWII, when the US was worried about influence from the USSR.
Alas, that great Western European model of a democratic socialist society went away once the US "won" the Cold War, and Neoliberalism became "the only game in town".