Global Financial Crisis 2008 – Article No 19
by Humphrey McQueen
Fascism
Shouting “Fascist!” at the television whenever Howard appeared was a comfort, but neither effective nor accurate. The threats from WorkChoices and the anti-terror laws are part of the normal functioning of any dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, and continue to be so under the ALP.
The legal and cultural restrictions implemented by the Coalition were not fascism, or even a drift in that direction. They were examples of how a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie operates in a liberal democracy. Pointing up the reality of bourgeois democracy is more radical than bleating “fascist” at every right-wing parliamentarian.
Historical materialists attend to the balance of class forces at each phase in the accumulation of capital. We ridicule “universals” such as “power” when investigating social relationships just as we spurn “Ideal Forms” as the criteria for deciding what is or is not fascism. (My talk - “If it’s not fascism, what is it?” - can be heard via a link on my website.)
Proceeding from the conjunctural, we recognise that fascisms emerged in the early 1920s to deal with a specific crisis, namely, rolling challenges to the rule of capital from a revolutionary proletariat and peasantry. (It is worth adding that defeat of the Bolsheviks would have paved the way for a Russian variant of fascism.) From the late 1920s, a rupture in capital accumulation compounded that open war between classes. The German bourgeoisie answered the intersection of upsurge and implosion with an overt dictatorship, as distinct from the covert one during the Weimar Republic.
The gulf between those forces and those behind Workchoices are clear. Workchoices was not a response to any challenge from the working class. On the contrary, Workchoices got as far as it has because of the disorganising of the labour movement through the Hawke-Keating-Kelty Accords.
From the early 1980s, monopolising competition intensified the demands on capitals to lower the socially necessary costs of reproducing units of universal labour-time in commodities. This compulsion is the reality of globalisation. Workchoices encouraged bosses to meet that pressure through longer working days and weeks, speed-ups and unpaid overtime. Since 2007, that intensifying of the production of surplus value has been disrupted by blockages in its realisation as profit.
What has changed is not the government but the structured dynamics of the crisis. That development imposes more burdens on workers. Any resistance will generate require novel measures from the agents of capital. If we are closer to an open dictatorship under the ALP than under Howard it is because of a transformation in the crisis confronting capital.
Thus far, the crisis in accumulation has not provoked mass challenges. When it does, the ruling class will not return to inter-war style fascism. Hence, scanning the political landscape for neo-Nazi insignia will blind us to the hard core of the state. Its elite squads of police and in the armed services will give the agents of capital the time to establish novel forms of overt and covert dictatorship.
Socialists never forget that, although we recognise that bourgeois democracy is a sham, it is the fascist for whom democracy is a bourgeois sham.
Next: Capitalising the banks