Report from Madison: Fascists and Unions in the U.S. North

High schoolers walk out & join Madison protest
High Schoolers Walk Out and Join Protest

A detailed report and analysis of the attack on public sector workers in Wisconsin and the response of workers and the unions.

Submitted by Hieronymous on February 22, 2011

The whole situation centered in Madison, Wisconsin has become a major class confrontation.
The university students (who may or may not be proletarian) excepted, from our side this is an almost exclusively working class event; it is the largest strictly working class action in the United States in decades and it is growing, drawing in new layers of workers with each passing day in what is effectively a strike wave led largely by students and teachers; still, its leadership and its methods are reformist pure and simple, and to this point at least so are its aims...

Under national or federal law, each juridical, political and territorial division of the U.S. State that is called a “state” is the institution from which public sector workers have wrested union recognition and collective bargaining rights. In Wisconsin, this is what is at issue.

In the last round of the electoral cycle, the Republican party swept state elections, taking the governor's office, and both bodies of a two house legislature, the lower one by a large margin.

The confrontation took it start from an announcement on Friday, 11 February by Scott Walker, the new governor, that he was introducing a bill into the legislature to increase public sector workers contributions to pensions and health care and to gut collective bargaining. On Monday, the lower house of the legislature's finance committee chair said the committee would hold hearings on the bill put forth by Walker. In his proposed legislation, Walker, a 43 year old career politician, called for enactment of several provisions, the most important of which are the following: Public workers are to pay up to half the costs of their pensions, and at least 12.6 percent of their health care coverage; collective bargaining rights will be denied to nearly all state, county and municipal workers; the same workers as public employers will be required to annually recertify preference for a union; and the state will no longer permit union dues collection by way of payroll checkoffs. All wage increases would be tied to the consumer price index, and any above it would require statewide referendum approval. The measures would go into effect on 1 July this year, and, to boot, Walker's administration has notified all unions currently holding contracts with the various levels of the state in Wisconsin that those contracts would be abrogated effective 13 March. Walker threatens to fire 6,000 state workers if the measure fails in the legislature. (By late in the week, Walker had upped the figure to 10,000.) He is confident that it won't, and there is little reason to believe that at this moment his assessment is wrong, though his administration has publicly stressed its readiness to employ bodily repression, the governor having gone to great pains to emphasize that he has put the National Guard on alert in the case where there is worker resistance (i.e., where a fightback threatens to shift the balance of forces against the class alliance he sits atop).

The governor's office has offered its own reading of some of the features of the bill, most importantly that it would grant state officials the right to arbitrarily fire workers who partake in any “organized action to stop or slow work” (such as now ongoing) and who are absent for three days or more without employer approval. Those workers immediately and directly affected by the bill include state office and state hospital wage earners (there is a large concentration of both in Madison), teachers statewide, workers employed by the University of Wisconsin (there are roughly a dozen campuses in the state) and its hospitals, childcare and home health workers who are employed in the public sector, and, perhaps surprisingly, some who are dubiously proletarian, in particular, state prison guards. Not surprisingly, some of the provisions (i.e., those eliminating collective bargaining) do not apply to front line repressive forces, local police and state troopers (and, not part of this characterization, to firefighters), though it is not at all clear whether they will not be subject to cuts in health care benefits and pensions The bill would also terminate health care coverage and pension benefits for all temporary workers so-called employed by the state, and this includes graduate student teaching assistants and researchers.

State Budgets and Capitalist Austerity

Wisconsin is one of forty-five U.S. states which have budget deficits. Unlike the national government that, under the auspices of the Federal Reserve, can and does print money endlessly to cover its debts, the states are mandated by their own constitutions to (bi)annually balance their budgets. Walker himself estimates the Wisconsin deficit at $137 million for the rest of the current fiscal year, and $3.3 billion for the next two fiscal years. (The state operates with a biannual budget.) Now, unlike the situation in many other U.S. states and capitalist countries around the world, the fiscal “crisis” in Wisconsin is largely manufactured: Walker was sworn in as governor in early January, and within days, he, together with the legislature, had enacted a series of revenue giveaways to the business classes and taxes cuts for the same. Half the projected budget shortfall is a product of this legislation. But that's okay, for the balanced budget provision in the fundamental law so-called is a mighty weapon that is periodically wielded to discipline the working class under the rubric of austerity.

Where the Wisconsin budget deficit is not engineered, it is seamlessly a piece with the global crisis of capital manifested most forcibly in the collapse of Lehman's in September 2008. Lehman Brothers was symptomatic for when the crisis broke it had the outward appearance of a crisis of the great financial capitals. The immediate reaction of capitalist states everywhere was to come to their rescue, to bail them out, to print money since, at any rate, there is nothing so characteristic of capitalism today as financial hegemony within ruling class social groups that control the states of the world. (Since September 2008 the Fed has pumped $4 trillion into great financial capitals a large number of which are not even U.S. based.) This reaction was followed by stimulus packages, again everywhere, across Europe, Russia, the Middle East, in Japan, Korea, in the ASEAN countries (Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, etc.), in Latin America (Brazil, Chile, etc.), and most importantly in China and the U.S. With financial collapse in the offing, credit dried up (for both firms and individuals), world trade enormously contracted and sites of production around the world shut down. Neither trade nor production have recovered their 2006 levels, and financial institutions are still willing to lend to only the most secure borrowers. Having triggered the financial collapse (through sale of residential and commercial mortgages packaged into convoluted securitization instruments), the burst housing bubble has as its consequence housing markets that remain deeply depressed (worst in Britain, Ireland, Spain, Latvia and the Ukraine, the U.S., and now Australia), prices still falling. The reflex response of employers to a precipitous fallout in consumption demand, expressed as we indicated in trade levels, has been layoffs and firings. Unemployment remains at historical high levels in Europe and the U.S., and at unprecedented levels in the capitalist world including the Middle East, and where employment is available it is almost exclusively casualized work.

This entire situation has led the U.S. Federal Reserve to engage (the Treasury) all over again in printing vast quantities of money in order to purchase bonds of the very same Treasury, a policy known as “quantitative easing,” in the faux hope this will stimulate lending and spending. Instead, vast sums called “hot money” (product of monies accruing from nearly thirty years of lowering tax rates on capitalist firms, of printing money to cover wars in Iraq and Afghanistan without ever generating revenues to cover these “expenditures,” and of the banking bailouts) have flowed to regions of the world where the greatest returns are available, into Brazil, East and Southeast Asia and Australia (its dollar being in part a surrogate for the Chinese yuan), and have been deployed by the individuals and institutions (e.g., brokerage houses, pension funds) possessing and managing these monies to purchase crucial commodities (oil, copper, wheat, corn, cotton, etc.) sending world prices for these commodities soaring. The fear of dollar inflation stands at the origins of the most recent hot money flows and in the immediate sense it is a real inflation that they have created.

It is in these developments in the global crisis of capital where the events in Madison come together with those in Tunisia, Bahrain, Libya and above all Egypt (much on the mind of many of the younger demonstrators in Madison): In the U.S., taking over the bad debts of the great financial institutions and the Executive's stimulus package have created a national fiscal crisis, the cutbacks in production and unemployment have resulted in a rapid, large scale drop in tax receipts of states leading in those states to their fiscal crises and to an austerity aimed directly at the public sector proletariat; in the Middle East, huge state imposed, overnight rises in the costs of subsidized fuel and food stemming from global commodities price inflation was immediate motivation for taking to the streets in protests, action that developed into mass demonstrations, and devolved into “regime change” at the very top, political revolutions or military coups depending on your perspective.

An Unfolding Confrontation

On Monday, 11 February, over a dozen union leaders has come together in Madison to plan “strategy” to deal with the governor's proposal. Meeting together with state Democratic party representation present they mapped a lobbying campaign to pressure “key” Republican legislators to commit to watering down the bill. What transpired in the following days was nothing like anyone, they or their counterparts in the other formal party of capital, anticipated. In a little noted event, an inkling of what was to come, that very day a 100 high school students abandoned classes in a small working class community, Stoughton, some ten miles south, southwest of Madison in protest over the legislation.

When the lower house committee convened on Tuesday to conduct its hearing on Walker's bill, students and public sector workers crowded into the state capitol structure. Led by graduate student teaching assistants whose union had called for an action some 1,100 students had made their way up State St. to the capitol (and, students at one local high school walked out and did the same). The committee had not expected anything like this, for it, and Walker with his Republican majorities in both the senate and assembly, looked forward to a pro forma discussion, easy sailing with a vote passing the bill on Thursday. Instead the entire building was packed, the committee taking testimony and fielding questions in both cases most of it exhibiting politely restrained hostility in a 17 hour long marathon hearing. By late afternoon, the huge capitol rotunda could not accommodate all those who attended as a crowd of roughly 15,000 flowed out into the state capitol steps and grounds. At this point, some words about the topography of Madison are in order.

Home to about 235,000 people, Madison (inclusive of the very old contiguous residential suburbs of Middleton to the north and Monona to the southeast) is the inexact sense bounded by roads and lakes. From north to south, I-94 defines an eastern boundary; from east to west, running along the southern edge of Lake Monona state highways 12/18, known as the beltline, determine a southern boundary; in the west, highways 12/14 make a sharp northward thrust from the beltline and define a western boundary; and, the northern edge of Lake Mondota, itself occupying much of the northern half of the city, forms a northern boundary. Outside these boundaries, home for the most part to the city's middling groups, vast amounts of new residential development has occurred, construction having taken place especially since the end of the Reagan-Volcher recession, particularly northeast, east and south of I-94, and southwest of the beltline. Within these boundaries, the old residential areas of Madison lie (since the early sixties transformed into mostly rental properties accommodating some 46,000 UW students, among others), the main University of Wisconsin campus occupying a good hunk of real estate along the southwestern section of Lake Mondota. The two lakes, Monona at its northern reaches and Mondota at its southern extent, are separated by an isthmus about 2½ miles long and no more than ¾ mile wide. The isthmus rises along its length in each direction to somewhere to the (south)west of its centerpoint, and it here that the administrative center of the state of Wisconsin was long ago constructed. The state capitol building lies on a very large open grounds (altitudinally, it is reputed to be the highest state capitol in the U.S.), a huge square city block, circumscribed by a multi-laned road that traverses each of four sides of the square and around which can be found a few expensive retail outlets and restaurants, lots of law offices, and state (and city) office buildings. Significantly, all the major streets in the city sweep into the square in all four directions (plus one). It is into this huge square, onto the sidewalks surrounding it and often overflowing into the streets, that the crowds of demonstrators who could not be accommodated within the capitol building or its lengthy series of steps rallied.

It was on Tuesday, 12 February, that the true dimensions of working class anger, outrage and activity began to really unfold. In the first place, actions were not simply confined to Madison; in Eau Claire, Milwaukee and Superior demonstrators gathered to demand the bill be killed. High school students in Appleton walked out of school in protest. In Madison, the crowd surged to an estimated 20,000-25,000. In the vanguard were students and teachers, students from the university and high schools around Madison, teachers from Madison, but beginning to appear in significant numbers from around the state. In Madison, Wednesday was the first day the school district superintendent was forced to cancel classes by the sheer lack of attendance. And, from Tuesday evening on a growing number of the protesters have “camped out,” as it were, in the capitol building, sleeping overnight on its floors.

From Wednesday on, student absences and teacher engaging in “sick outs” began to rapidly spread. From the high school student side, this movement was organized by word of mouth, Facebook and other social media by the students themselves. By Thursday, walkouts occurred in Eau Claire, La Crosse, Appleton, Green Bay, Madison and Milwaukee, and a host of small towns and school districts, Dodgeville, Fennimore, Holmen, Hudson, Iowa-Grant, Onalaksa, Platteville, River Falls, Tomah, West Salem, Shullsburg and Viroqua. From Thursday on, schools were closed in Madison, of course, and Milwaukee, and in small communities with a single high school, towns close to both cities especially Madison to where students headed – in Baraboo, Lodi, Middletown/Cross Plains, Wisconsin Dells, Monona Grove, Pardeeville, Randolph, and Deerfield – but also in other small towns, in Belleville, Evansville, Mauston and New Lisbon, and in Janesville. The closures did not occur as a consequence of school board or superintendent generosity, but was forced on the districts by student walkouts and teacher absences (40% of Madison's teachers called in sick on Thursday). If teachers’ motives for informally striking should be clear, high school students may not. But confronting disciplining from school authorities, their action should not be simply dismissed as a function of “cool” or mere adventure: A good deal of the high school students we talked to, in particular those from the small outlying towns have parents, who as sanitation workers, drivers, transportation workers, clerics in the towns and counties and, to be sure, as teachers, have everything to lose if Walker's bill becomes law.

Thursday saw another surge as the absences among teachers was starting to take on the character of a strike wave, a massive wildcat. While, less than a dozen school districts cancelled classes (among them though the biggest, representing at least a quarter of all students and teachers in the state), teachers were pouring in from all over the state, and when they couldn't local protests were held. At this point, on Thursday, significant numbers of workers employed by private capitals began to make their way, most from Madison, to the capitol grounds to demonstrate their solidarity and opposition to Walker's bill. We talked to electricians and painters, both members of the local trades, to retired teachers from outside Wisconsin, a couple from as far away as upstate New York, as well as to public sector nurses and firefighters. A pattern had now emerged that would be repeated on Friday. The crowds peaked at noon and in the late afternoon, as workers, especially state office workers large numbers of whom had been casualized in the last two decades, were drawn into the movement, at will employees of the state of Wisconsin who were showing up when they could do so without risking their jobs. The surging, and swelling mass of demonstrators tells a story in and of itself. On Thursday, over 30,000, on Friday, an estimated 40,000, and Saturday, when public sector workers were free not to worry about their jobs, a stunning number, some 70,000 people cramped into the square and overflowed into its side streets. By Friday, when the bourgeois reformists put on their biggest show (Jesse Jackson and AFL-CIO head Richard Trumka both appeared and spoke) buses were organized and leaving from campuses in Milwaukee, Eau Claire, Green Bay, La Crosse, River Falls, Stout and Superior. Separate rallies told place at university campuses in La Crosse, Milwaukee and Superior, and in towns without such campuses such Hudson...

Our little party numbered three, one comrade driving up to Madison from Chicago, and two others down from St. Paul. We arrived on Thursday, and met at 9:30 in the morning at a pre-arranged location, a large restaurant parking lot, on the eastside of Madison not too far east of the point where state hwy. 51 intersects E. Washington, about two miles from the state capitol grounds. Our suspicion was that parking would be hard to locate any closer in due to the numbers of working people driving into the city participation in the protest and rally. (The surmise had been correct.) We immediately set out on foot, passing through the largest of the student ghettos, for the most part two stories homes divided up into rentals, that took decided shape in the early sixties and once formed single family house stock of one of the old residential neighborhoods of Madison. We arrived at the state capitol grounds just shy of 10:00. By this time, we roughly estimated 10,000 people were present. We spoke with various workers and students for most of the next hour, then split up. Since the two St. Paul comrades had both lived in Madison at various times in the past forty years and are quite familiar with the surroundings, one stayed with the Chicago comrade and the other headed down State St., a six block diagonal that runs down to the very south end of the UW campus (to the Humanities building, Memorial Library and the student mall). When he returned from the campus area (he was fortunately able to find us quickly, since we had moved very little from the side of the square on which we were speaking with people), he was able to point back down State St. to a march still three blocks long which he had been part of and which had yet to reach the state capital grounds. These we estimated at about 2,000 university students.

Our sense of the thinking, feeling and sentiments that have guided what has and is happening (this is being written Sunday, 20 February) can be summarized as follows:

The unions with the greatest number of members have organized the formal events on the capitol grounds. These include the American Federal of State, County and Municipal Employees, AFSCME, the Wisconsin Education Association (and Madison Teachers Incorporated), and the American Federation of Teachers, AFT. Tied hand and foot to the Democratic party of capital, they are, as we indicated, intent on a lobbying effort to force a handful of Republican legislators to mitigate, from their standpoint, the most onerous provisions of Walker's bill. The provision that concerns them above everything else is the elimination of collective bargaining, for without it, they've no social power (they lose their position flowing from their informal incorporation into the capitalist state), a social power they have in this part of the country never used (as in a strike, the legal ramifications be damned, against reactionary laws effecting their members, against wage cuts and essentially rewriting the rules of the pension funds into which many of the workers on the capitol grounds have paid into for decades) and they lose their financial clout and the revenues that provide incomes to the entire union bureaucracy (they lose the dues checkoff). They have done nothing to organize what, after all, is effectively is a massive wildcat by teachers and precious little to encourage it (for here they fear legal sanctions against their persons). The paint Walker as a loose cannon, a renegade from political party civility, who needs to be reined in.

The workers, students and student workers present overwhelming see and feel something quite different. They feel, rightfully so, the unions have caved far too much and too often on austerity demands that predate Walker's election, they see this as a fight not just against wage and pension cuts, but against a whole political culture that starting at the municipal and county level and extending up to the national Executive aims to drive their living standards into the ground, and they see this, the latter in the context of a social and economic climate that has emboldened bosses – supervisors, managers and higher level administrations – in pursuit of increasingly arbitrary and authoritarian practices in the workplace, and to ratchet up the demands on them to produce more (whether producing means generating paperwork, teaching in larger classrooms, larger territories and shorter times to cover in highway and street maintenance such as in plowing snow, etc.). Significantly, large numbers of people we spoke identify themselves and their actions with ongoing workers and plebian activity in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, and they understand quite well these are dictatorial regimes fully supported by the U.S. state, the central question here being oil flows. In fact, manifested in countless handmade signs (“Hosni Walker”) there is a huge current among the demonstrators who would get rid of the current governor immediately, some no questions asked. Within this current, there is a core, say maybe 2,000-3,000 who believe that by sheer force of will, like their counterparts in Cairo and Manama, they can force Walker out of office.

In all this, and in our stay in Madison, we ran across only on a handful of unionized industrial workers (from an Oscar Meyer plant in Madison). We shall return to this...

Fascists

Scott Walker is a fascist, perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn't operate in the streets but a fascist nonetheless. And while at this moment it is altogether unlikely, whether or not he calls up the National Guard and behind it a mass of declasse elements to engaged in violent attacks on the protesters remains to be seen. Consider though, if you will, fascism has it has emerged historically.

Our understanding of fascism is based on the events of the early interwar years, though we hasten to say that we do not consider fascism an interwar phenomenon, and emphatically not merely a European event. The term had yet to be coined but the Black Hundreds that appeared in the industrial cities of Russia in 1906 were fascists. Their social basis was among the precapitalist, petty bourgeoisie and the smaller nobility. They were anti-Semitic and nativist, emphasis on the latter. In their nativism, they opposed “foreigners,” i.e., Belgian, French and British capital (financing Russian industrial construction), to which, in practice, they assimilated industrial workers who were their real targets. They operated on the ground with a penchant for lynchings (taking it over from Klan activities and even adopting the American word). Note that this entire development came on the heels of the formation of the Petrograd soviet in late September 1905 (and some thirty others in about the same number of industrial cities and towns), the winning of a free press and assembly in a revolutionary way and, in particular, the soviet's opposition to the martial law in Poland (which in the Pale combined industrial towns with a Jewish proletariat). But, for us, fascism took full form in the Po Valley in 1919, and in Bavaria, especially München, in the early twenties and then all over again in Berlin from 1929 forward. In the Po Valley, fully modernized, agriculturally capitalist firms had come into being and, backed by the Italian Socialist Party, rural laborers (braccianti), forming unions, demanded socialization of the land, and expropriation of landowners and landlords. These demands were starkly contrasted to the new peasant owners, former leaseholds and tenants, who had for the first time consider themselves to have a real stake in the social order. The overriding context was, however, crisis rooted in rationalization of production generated by competition first within the national and then with world markets, a crisis that was part and partial of a larger crisis of the Italian social order as a whole that had been precipitated by defeat in imperialist world war. The biggest owners and landlords engaged gangs of hooligans and murderous toughs (squads of fasci or squadrists) often drawn from the desperately unemployed and, with them, incited the new peasant owners to break strikes to enforce labor discipline in the fields.

In Bavaria, there was a lengthy prehistory, it also reaching back to defeat in imperialist world war and especially to the German Revolution, confrontation between organized workers and the far better armed and trained Frei Korps militias, to the Kapp Putch, the great inflation and countless workers actions between the last two events. In this, the legislative arena in which historically ruling class interests have been articulated and class alliances have been formed in bourgeois society was closed to the competing nationalist, völkische sects. These sects from which the nazis emerged played to altogether absent parliamentary-bourgeois prejudices among the Mittelstand (which they, the nazis, shared, and) who were to form the bulk of their social base. The early active-formative practice of the sectarian nationalist organizations consisted in provocations and brutalities which included street fights and brawls aimed at demonstrations by communists, socialists, workers (who may have been one or the other), at public actions, at breaking up rallies, shouting down speakers, and at beating and murdering reds. The immediate goal, achieved by intimidating workers and winning the respect of the patriotic Mittelstand, was organizational growth and consolidation. In the success of their systematic street violence, the national socialists under Hitler won admiration and esteem of these strata and achieved organizational unification of the fragmented völkische sects. Hitler was in the bourgeois legal sense a political outlaw, a kind of king of München's squares and assembly halls. The success and growing organizational strength of the nazis presupposed both generalized doubts about the legitimacy of the Weimar Republic and the toleration by the state's repressive forces, which, of course, was largely guaranteed by the fascists' paramilitary links to the Reichswehr as brothers in nationalist resistance to the French, to the Versailles Treaty, etc. All this was repeated over again on a larger scale from 1929 forward in the context of a general crisis of capitalism (the Slump).

What, then, has constituted fascism historically has been a mass movement based on the petty bourgeoisie centered middle strata. In it, the vast majority of the middle strata, declassed proletarian layers and dominant ruling class social groups see possible resolution to a general societal crisis, rooted if not always in immediate profitability then in accumulation, that has reached an impasse. Fascist movements have had a singular, historically significant outcome, namely, resolution of an enormous socio-economic and political crisis of capitalist society through atomization of the industrial proletariat, that is, through destruction of its mass organizations and the murder of its most militant elements. The resulting collapse of achieved level of working class living standards then opened up the real historical possibility of a renewal of a new cycle of accumulation, thereby reliving the crisis.

Walker is not an master, overlord or chief of political criminality in the class sense as it might be practiced in the streets. This may be explained functionally, culturally, socially and politically or however it is desired, but there is simply no need for such with control of the executive, legislative and repressive bodies at that level of the state where he operates. Subordinate to the overall objectives of the ruling class in the United States, he remains a fascist. If we are to insist that he operate in the streets as in the interwar years in Europe, we are closing ourselves to novel historical developments. He is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class, the only sector in the United States which has functioning, albeit fossilized, mass organizations, organizations whose relation to capital on the terrain of the state has institutionalized a standard of living that impedes resolution of the fiscal crisis of the state, a state of, by and for capital. To boot, the social basis of Walker's support can be found in the business classes, especially among the mass of small owners and independent contractors so-called, and in the middling layers in particular those who are employed by medium-sized and large capitalist firms. But it did not just come from this quarter, for by themselves these social groups would not have carried the electoral weight to put him in office.

Basic Industry and its Collapse in Wisconsin

In 1969, the entire eastern length of the state from Racine to Green Bay was heavily industrialized. In Kenosha, American Brass, Simmons Bedding, Samuel Lowe publishing, MacWhyte Wire Rope had manufacturing facilities, while American Motors had a large auto complex. In Milwaukee, manufacturing centered on Briggs and Stratton, Allis Chalmers, Harley-Davidson and A.O. Smith, while numerous tool and dye and machine shops dotted the industrial landscape. North along old U.S. Hwy 41, Fond du lac and Oshkosh, possessing a large shoe and a large clothing manufacturer, were characterized by countless foundries and machine shops that were oriented still further north, servicing the largest concentration of paper mills in the world, names like Kimberly Clark, Fort Howard and Charmin, some nineteen along a 26 mile stretch from Appleton to Green Bay that employed upward 90,000 workers. From the small shops to the big concerns, the vast overwhelming majority of the industrial workers were unionized. Today, in Kenosha, all these manufacturers and a half dozen large industrial firms not mentioned here are gone, some simply disappearing. In Milwaukee, manufacturing agricultural equipment (tractors and mechanized farm implements), hydroturbines, compressors, electric motors, air purification and coal gasification machinery, values and pumps, Allis Chalmers struggled with the downturn in the farm economy in the early eighties, sold off its agricultural division to Klockner-Humboldt-Deutz and its electrical control equipment to Siemans, and collapsed in 1985. Once the largest producer of automotive frames in the world (in north Milwaukee, operating inventory, stacks of auto frames six to eight high, were once crammed into a triangular area equivalent of three square city blocks), A.O. Smith has had to reinvent itself as a vastly smaller firm. Briggs and Stratton and Harley have survived, greatly downsized. In Milwaukee, Fond du lac and Oshkosh, the tool and dye stamping facilities, machine shops and foundries are gone. And, in the Fox River Valley to the north, maybe a half dozen paper mills still stand.

In the past week, only a small number of industrial workers could be found among the throngs of workers and students in Madison. Why? We could well ask why industrial private sector workers failed to join the waves of strikes and demonstrations that swept France last autumn in opposition to Sarkozy's pension “reform.” Why? Because, like in France, large industrial concerns and small basic industry producing raw material inputs and components of the mean of production have disappeared not just from the state of Wisconsin, or the United States but by and large from the entire old capital metropolises (U.S., Europe and, to a lesser extent, Japan). This is not only and not for the most part a matter of shipping industrial jobs offshore or abroad; even if, by 1995, as a World Bank report has documented, 80% of the world industrial proletariat was situated in East Asia. For, both relatively (relative to the world's populations today) and absolutely (in terms of total numbers) that proletariat is far smaller than it was in the 1960s. Mediated by the technological apparatus it sets in motion, write this down to colossal growth in the productivity of industrial labor, and thus to the enormous industrial overcapacity at the level of the world manifested in the endless production of bobbles, trinkets and junk to relieve some of that excess capacity. Yet unionized, industrial workers once represented the backbone of the Democratic party in Wisconsin and elsewhere in the United States.

There are two relevant facts here. First, it's not that industry and manufacturing, and with them industrial work, have simply vanished in the United States. Far from it: The United States, not China, still has the largest manufacturing economy in the world. But what we might call the productive landscapes of capitalism are different, novel, having undergone a sea change. Massive scientific inputs to production in telecommunications, informational, biogenetic and materials technologies (the last including composites, ceramics, nanotechnological products and micro devices) have made possible undersized capital- intensive productive units (relative to the great industrial concerns of the era of the big factory, the Fordist era) and vastly smaller workforces that are largely non-unionized and often engaged in production for export. We can offer a single example. Unlike the massive, integrated steel mill complexes based on the open-hearth furnace, or even the oxygen furnace, emerging after 1987 minimills use large electric furnaces to melt scrap steel and reshape it, rather than making new steel starting from the production of ore, dispensing with the need to mine and ship ore as part of the costs of the production of steel. A minimill can be constructed at a third or quarter of the cost of an integrated mill. Today, minimills account for 38% of total steel shipments made in the U.S; and, most importantly here, a ton of galvanized steel that takes an integrated mill 2-4.5 man hours (depending on the age of the mill) to produce takes a minimill 45 minutes. Witness, then, the enormous productivity of industrial labor we just spoke of. The second relevant fact is this: With the loss, nay hemorrhaging, of industrial work, there are simply far fewer full time, benefit and well paying waged jobs available today. In the United States, some 80 million or more workers are casualized, engaged in precarious work. Additionally, in August 2010 (the numbers have not changed substantially since that time), BLS figures indicate over 27 million people, in excess of one in every six workers, 17½ % of the force available to capital as labor power, was unemployed, desiring full time work but unable to get it, “marginally attached to the labor force,” or discouraged and no longer looking for work. In Wisconsin 7% of the workforce is officially unemployed (December 2010 figures). In a state of just under 6 million (5,687,000) and a labor force participation rate of 54.6%, the 175,000 unionized members of a public sector of 300,000 constitute 6% of the officially employed in the state, among which 1.9 million are casualized.

Among both full time, non-union workers, and particularly among the casualized, at least here in the that region of the old North with which we are familiar (Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan), with no visible alternative to the order of capital there is enormous resentment of organized public sector workers whose wages are sometimes considerably higher than non-union workers and who have access to medical and genuine (if stingy) retirement plans that non-union workers do not. Walker won the November 2010 gubernatorial contest with 52% of the vote. Since that campaign he has continued, particularly in the past week, to argue this arrangement is basically unfair to non-unionized workers. The latter appear to agree: It was their votes, those among them who bothered to vote, that, atop the vote from middling groups and business classes, that won him the election.

Role of Unions

The public sector unions at risk in implementation of Walker's bill-become-law have done nothing, nada, to counter this perverse and pernicious form of “argument.” Nowhere on Thursday could we find any union official making arguments against a race to the bottom. If some small owners pay $15,000-$18,000 in out of pocket medical expenses annually (it is this situation that fuels vast resentments), while shouldn't public sector union workers pay more, a whole lot more for their health care? Having saddled themselves with the Obama healthcare plan, now law, the unions can't make the argument for universal, free health care. At any rate, that's not politically realistic. Maybe not. Maybe this alone will require the revolutionary abolition of capital. So much the better.

In France this last fall, in Greece over the past year, recently in Spain, large public sector unions – far larger than any in the United States – have demonstrated that in open confrontations with capital, with its state, they've nothing to offer. The same goes in Madison: Late on Friday, Mary Bell, president of the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and Marty Beil, the AFSCME executive director for the state, abandoned all pretense to a fight over wages, pensions and especially working conditions... never mind that it simply wouldn't occur to these eminently practical souls to insist on the necessity that all workers are raised to union levels in compensation and benefits, since this is not possible within capitalism... Instead, they told reporters that workers, “their” workers, will do their “fair share” in closing the state budge gap, beyond exploitation daily in work, in rendering themselves further serviceable to the business classes... The Madison teachers union is now insisting that teachers return to work on Tuesday... What they will fight to preserve is the source of their power, collective bargaining and the dues checkout, and it alone: They could care less about the daily harassment and humiliations on the basis of which public employers achieve the bureaucratic norms they are oriented to (as the same harassment and humiliation is relentlessly pursued to insure the exploitation the secures profitability in private sector work). Scott FitzGerald, Republican leader in the Wisconsin senate, insists their can be no compromise because the state government, the counties and municipalities require the “flexibility” that passage of the bill will insure to balance their budgets, which, in turn, makes it possible for these agencies of the State to render the assistance to businesses and firms to make “Wisconsin competitive.” Chauvinism to the quick, loyal to State and nation (i.e., to a national ruling class) and one of its provincial expressions (“Wisconsin”), the unions can't touch this argument.

Now the authors would note that all three of us carry union cards. In daily work, it is a worker's first line of defense. Without it, there have been literally countless occasions over the past decade where any one of us would have fired for insubordination, for refusal to engage in certain dangerous or risky tasks, and for numerous other “offenses.” But we should be clear. It is sheer inertia that makes this possible: Stewards are loath to defend members, but bosses are even more loath to fight a member willing to avail herself of the cumbersome union machinery to defend herself.

The role of unions is contradictory: In a crunch, in an open confrontation with capital or the State, unions demonstrate they cannot defend workers, their “programs” patently offer nothing by way of alternative. At best unions abandon “their” workers (as experience confirms over and again, recently for us, occurring with the flight attendants at Northwest before it was absorbed by Delta Airlines), but more often than not actively subvert our efforts (the situation across Europe over the past year). In Madison, the unions are relying on their Democratic party allies in the senate who left the state Wednesday for a location undisclosed in Illinois to prevent a quorum necessary for a vote on the bill's passage. That is a defense doomed to failure. The unions are engaged in an exclusivist, purely defensive struggle effectively without perspective and strategy. It is a position that offers no hope. Sticking to it will sooner or later, and sooner than later, demoralize all those who have taken to the streets. On this basis, by themselves workers and students are going to lose. A lose here will be disastrous. A half dozen other state legislatures including Indiana, Illinois, Ohio and Tennessee already have similar enactments pending. Events in Madison are being carefully monitored.

Walker and his allies in the Wisconsin legislature can see all this. They are biding their time. The Democratic legislators will sooner or later return to the state and to their positions in the senate. Workers, teachers foremost among them, cannot continue to take day after day off from work to rally at the capitol. (It is this situation of they type that, no doubt, Walker aims to stop once and for all with his bill.) When they flag, the National Guard can be called in to remove the hard core, the 2,000-3,000 who believe that by their persistent presence alone they can compel Walker to resign. The numbers for passage are there, and the Republican leadership is certain it is just a matter of time. And, without contesting the State itself, and not just that jurdico-political layer of it as it exists in Wisconsin, this is undoubtedly the case: The State, particularly as it is constituted in the U.S., is so hardened, institutionally rigid and ossified that not even a modicum change can be accomplished without its revolutionary overthrow. And, of course, even this is inadequate precisely because the systems of states across the world are the institutionally concentrated defense of the order of capital, sustaining it, and will have to be overthrown and capital abolished.

Here and now, the only possible way forward resides in spreading what is ongoing in Madison. And, as Bloomberg and the Trotskyists at the World Socialist Website have noted, activity in Madison had resonated with other workers in the United States.

Since mid week past, in Columbus, Ohio some 4,000 state workers including teacher and firefighters have protested against a similar enactment put forth by the governor there, John Kasich.

In Detroit, several score of students walked out of Southeast High on Friday over cuts to funding of arts programs.
And, late in the week in Indiana over 600 steelworkers made their way to Indianapolis and to the capitol building to protest similar legislation that is under consider there.

This is the perspective of hope, for if events in Madison are isolated, passage of the bill is nearly certain, to be followed by demoralization and mass employer retaliation.

Will Barnes
Paul Taylor

Comments

ColdWarBaby

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ColdWarBaby on February 24, 2011

Which way?
It would seem we are at a fork in the road of history. There are two courses only; revolution or enslavement.
“None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.”
Johan Goethe

There is no way to Peace. Peace is the Way.

S. Artesian

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on February 24, 2011

Good article. Don't buy the fascism part. Fascism requires a mass movement. Notice how incapable Fox News/TeaParty were of mobilizing against these demonstrations?

Submitted by Chilli Sauce on February 24, 2011

S. Artesian

Good article. Don't buy the fascism part. Fascism requires a mass movement. Notice how incapable Fox News/TeaParty were of mobilizing against these demonstrations?

I have to say, the historian in me does always cringe a bit when the term 'fascism' gets thrown about loosely. Fascism was a specific historical movement combining a number of factors. Just because the Tea Party shares somes of those characteristics, it doesn't make it fascist.

Submitted by Schwarz on February 24, 2011

Chilli Sauce

S. Artesian

Good article. Don't buy the fascism part. Fascism requires a mass movement. Notice how incapable Fox News/TeaParty were of mobilizing against these demonstrations?

I have to say, the historian in me does always cringe a bit when the term 'fascism' gets thrown about loosely. Fascism was a specific historical movement combining a number of factors. Just because the Tea Party shares somes of those characteristics, it doesn't make it fascist.

I'd like to third this critique. I thought the piece was excellent, except for the fascism part.

It's problematic to throw that word around because of the way it's been used and misused in the past. Personally, I can't help but think of an angsty teen calling his father a fascist because he wouldn't loan him the family car.

More seriously, though, I, like Chilli, find it historically and theoretically dubious to call Walker and his ilk fascists.

Scott Walker is a fascist, perhaps not in the classical sense since he doesn't operate in the streets but a fascist nonetheless.

Such a loaded term should be used sparingly and specifically. I think if you need to add a caveat right in the first sentence it points to a serious semantic problem.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Walker and the Tea Partiers don't have fascistic-type tendencies. But I think their movement (like Nazism or Italian Fascism in their times) is highly syncretic one and, moreover, historically and geographically specific.

Rhetorically, it is more cumbersome to say something like "Scott Walker is a right-wing populist in the tradition of Father Coughlin and George Wallace who blends petty bourgeois producerism with free market fundamentalism and feeds off a small, but influential backlash movement that shades into eschatological evangelism and one-world conspiricism" or something...

But it's safer than trotting out the old tattered hobby-horse of creeping fascism.

Steven.

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Steven. on February 25, 2011

Yeah, I agree, this article looks good but the accusations of fascism are plain wrong and just unhelpful, as they damage the credibility of the whole article

ColdWarBaby

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ColdWarBaby on February 25, 2011

fas·cism
n.
1. often Fascism
a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

I'd say those who fund and manipulate the gullible tea baggers and the radical right that has taken over the Republican party fit this description pretty well.

Winstanley

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Winstanley on February 26, 2011

Great article, and, in the current of Carey McWilliams, I DO buy the fascism part. Especially since, in California, a large (and sometimes majority) segment of public sector workers are non-white. When will the property-owning, nativist, pro-corporate, pro-war, blame-the-poor shitheads be "fascist" enough to call fascist? When they start wearing uniforms and beating up immigrants? Oh shit, they already do!

But to me the best part of the article was where the author's point out the spontaneous actions of high school students and how the movement spread to other high schools, getting out of the control of either school administrators OR teachers unions. And the analysis of the new industrial jobs and how the scale, precariousness and non-organized state of these workplaces contribute to the passivity and jealousness of private sector workers.

Submitted by ludd on February 26, 2011

Winstanley, I also think this is a great article.

But I don't agree that the racist, pro-capitalist shitheads, even in uniform and beating up immigrants, are necessarily fascists. I think they become fascists when their message and organization can be confused with class struggle by white workers. Currently, they are seen as ideological politicos (and racists) by many white workers.

LBird

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on February 26, 2011

ColdWarBaby

fas·cism
n.
1. often Fascism
a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

CWB, unfortunately your definition of 'Fascism' has been taken from a mainstream dictionary.

Dictionary definitions are political, just like everything else in society. A compiler with a political viewpoint writes the entries. A publisher with an ideology determines what sort of dictionary gets to be printed.

The dictionary definition you have given is essentially a Liberal definition, not a class-based Communist one.

One critical point that is missing from the definition of Fascism that you have given is that it is an ideology rooted in the petit-bourgeoisie - that is, in the ideas of small-property owners. Oppression and racism are only effects, not causes, of Fascism.

Another missing point is that Fascism is a product of the disintegration of a capitalist economy, not just the appearance of an oppressive dictator.

We can't have a discussion of whether the events in Wisconsin are 'Fascist', without examining what we mean by 'Fascist'. We are Communists using class analysis, not Liberals just looking at appearances.

Without the two words in bold, above, it is not a Communist definition of Fascism.

I'm sure other posters can add some more essential characteristics for our definition of Fascism, to help us to decide on Wisconsin.

baboon

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by baboon on February 26, 2011

Fascism was a particular expression of capitalism at a particular time. In both Germany and Italy it was encouraged by democratic Britain as a bulwark against and executioner of the working class. It is not an aberration from but an expression of the needs of capital to drive home a defeat of the 1920s revolutionary wave and the needs of capitalism to centralise and mobilise for war. The slogan of the Third Reich was "Export or die".
The roots of fascist terror can be found in the Freicorps of Social Democracy and the rise to power of Hitler supported by Britain and France to act as Europe's continental policeman.

The historical conditions of today are completely different than that of the counter-revolution that existed throughout the world in the 1930s, conditions that even then still saw significant workers' struggles. Today, the working class has not been exhausted, crushed and ready to march off to war for the national interest anywhere. On the contrary. This makes the real danger today not fascism but democracy of which all the political parties of the bourgeoisie are a part.

LBird

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on February 26, 2011

Perhaps I should add a third characteristic of fascism:

it appears after a failed workers' movement, not before. While workers, through their struggles against 'big' capitalism, seem to offer some protection to the petit-bourgeoisie, workers can offer an alternative for the hurting 'middle class'.

But after the obvious failures of bosses' capitalism and workers' socialism, the endangered p-b look for a 'third' way out: national corporativism, autarchy; that is, Fascism.

But where are we today?

Hieronymous

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Hieronymous on February 26, 2011

One of the authors of the article asked me to post this reply:

Will Barnes

Artesian, Workers, Fascists

When we, Paul and I, wrote the piece, “Report from Madison,” the import of the discussion of fascism was patently obvious to us. If, however, it wasn't to Artesian, then it is requisite to expressly state that import.

We said that Walker is a fascist, we did not say the situation in Wisconsin is characterized by the emergence of a mass fascist movement. Walker is a fascist because, characterizing it from the standpoint of capital, his program is fascistic, i.e., aims at destruction of the mass organizations of public sector workers with the intent to atomize us in order to restart accumulation (specifically, so that the state might clear away the legally institutionalized obstacles to another cycle of the expanded reproduction of capital). The significance of this can be stated thusly: Because he is governor, he is in a position to execute that program by bringing to bear on this situation all the machinery of the state (the legislature, courts, injunctions, imprisonment, cops and, far more risky, a part-time soldiery, the National Guard). Clear enough?

But what about the relations among fascism, a mass movement and the situation in Wisconsin? I invite Artesian to explore this further by returning with me to one of the sources of our understanding of fascism.

The last possibility of a revolutionary transformation in Germany developed in August 1923 (and not in October of the same year), a “missed opportunity” that the Soviets, the ECCI, its wonderboy president, and that grand old Bolshevik-Leninist himself all played the decisive role in subverting. Shortly thereafter, Stresemann, Dawes and a committee of American bankers (no small help from Schacht) were able to stabilize the financial situation in the country, ending the Great Inflation. As a consequence, U.S. capital flowed into Germany and it was these monies that funded a vast modernization of German heavy industry. Taking place between 1925 and 1928, this modernization is known as the rationalization movement. Unique to date, that is, up to this moment in the history of capitalism at least in the most advanced capitalist countries, were high levels of unemployment... today commonly known as “chronic” or “structural” unemployment... that characterized this phase of rapid economic expansion. So that, inaugurated by the stock market crash, when the financial crisis broke... itself the mediated expression of a worldwide crisis of agricultural overproduction... Germany already had experienced years of high unemployment. At the end of 1929, it stood at 1.9 million.

But the situation was to get much worse. How much worse? Take the example of the great, cartelized steel combine, Vereinigte Stahlwerke. At the end of 1931, it was functioning at 40% of capacity, its workforce cut by over half. In these terms (i.e., with a view to unemployment), the crisis reached its nadir in Germany in January 1932, when some 6 million workers in a working population of roughly 18 million were unemployed (and this does not include, much like today, another 2 million who no longer appeared in statistical accounts because social insurance, i.e., unemployment benefits, had run out). With their years of organizational practice engaging in brutally vicious assaults on workers in the streets, the nazis where able to fully exploit the crisis. From late 1929, support for the nazis grew with each new level the crisis collapsed to in its downward spiral. But, note, this support was not expressed in the growth of street fighting or in the numbers of street fighters that the various combatants fielded.... the Social Democratic Reichsbanner, the Communist Roter Frontkämpferbund (and after it was banned, the KPD's various military defense organizations), the nationalist Stahlheim and the nazi Sturmabteilung, SA or stormtroopers; rather, it was expressed electorally.

After Brüning dissolved (or with little effort convinced Hindenberg to dissolve) the Reichstag, on September 1930 elections were held. The number of nazi deputies in the Reichstag leaped from 7 to 107. In January 1932, new elections resulted as Hindenberg's term as President of the Republic expired; in July 1932, further elections took place after it was revealed Papen, like his predecessor Brüning, could not form a parliamentary coalition to govern; and, November 1932 a final election was held as the various factions within ruling class social groups maneuvered to place one of their own in the position of Reichskanzler.

Now it can be demonstrated that the growth of nazi support moved in lockstep with the deepening of the general crisis of capitalism (which I, for one, attribute to the desperation of constantly enlarging strata of those subject to the crisis and, in this context, to years of organizational experience that permitted the nazis to exploit every aspect of this development), and that nazi electoral support peaked in July 1932, after which the crisis showed indications of bottoming out (e.g., indices of industrial production, employment and consumer goods with elastic demand had all started to turn up). But it was the passive support emanating from the Middelstand, expressed electorally, that grew, not that of the military fighting organizations whose total numbers were actually smaller in November 1932 than in January 1931. Of course, there were rallies and demonstrations that drew in elements of middling groups, but then the same could be said about the rallies and demonstrations of the Tea Party and the traveling anti-abortion circus here in the United States today. The military wings of each of these class parties were actually the mauled fist, not the social basis of support of each party. There is no precise counterpart to these groups today (unless we point to Christian Identity, Aryan Nation and militia groups, who, unlike in Germany, are not formally affiliated to any major class party of capital). That support, as I said, was passive, electoral and situated in the middling groups, in Germany in 1932, the petty bourgeoisie (retailers, shopkeepers and owners of small industrial concerns), white collar employees and managers in the enterprises and retail trades, the mass of persons making up of the civil bureaucracy, and the academically ensconced intelligentsia, strata some of which have been proletarianized since the 1960s. The core of these do have historical analogs, as Paul and I indicated, in the business classes, in owners and individual proprietors of small firms, in independent contractors, in those layers of social groups attached at the hip to the great capitals (e.g., managers, administrators, consultants, who politically and electorally are often self-described “independents”) and among the casualized proletarian population, in particular those layers that have been effectively declassed. (In Germany, it was precisely these elements that formed membership of the military fighting organizations.)

I would further note that the Machtergreifung did not begin until after Hitler was duly appointed Reichskanzler within the framework of Weimar constitutionality, assuming office in late January 1933. (On 4 February demonstrations, rallies and publications by nazi opponents were banned; on 17 February, Göring, as Interior Minister, ordered police to shoot communists on sight; on 8 March, SA and SS troops occupied SPD affiliated trade union and socialist newspaper offices; on 9 March, communists began to be shipped off to concentration camps; on 23 March, the Reichstag transferred parliamentary powers to the nazi cabinet; etc., etc.)

We, Paul and I, never asserted a mass fascist movement had emerged in Wisconsin, and we never stated that this fascist impulse was autonomous (to the contrary, we said it was subordinate to the U.S. ruling class at the national level). That situation neither bears a mere close resemblance to or is strikingly coincidental with the historically paradigmatic case of fascist ascendancy in society briefly described above; rather, starting from the social class basis of that impulse, the electoral dimension of its development, and, above all, the likelihood of the attempted implementation of the essential feature of the fascist program, the two otherwise historically distinct situations are, with a view to the existing societal totality, the requirements of capital, entirely homologous. While we were, and remain, dubious that any of the developments in Wisconsin would, or will, spill over into large scale extralegal activity (precisely because a fascist holds the position of executive within state government), most importantly, in this regard the original piece was designed to exhibit the intimate historical connection between the potential explosion of defensive mass worker activity and a dramatic increase in a fascist presence in society as a further indication of the seriousness of the situation in Wisconsin.

If Artesian wishes to further engage me on these issues he is welcome, but in doing so I fully expect him to exhibit a more nuanced and a more substantial understanding of fascism than that revealed in cryptic remarks about the absence of a mass movement.

Will Barnes

Postscript

I have presented a summation of a much, much fuller discussion that is embedded in a manuscript in which I have examined Germany circa 1870 to 1938. For anyone who is interested, I'll extract the relevant sections from this manuscript and forward them by e-mail. I can be reached at wwbarnes [at] yahoo.com.

LBird

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on February 27, 2011

Will Barnes (via Hieronymous)

We said that Walker is a fascist, we did not say the situation in Wisconsin is characterized by the emergence of a mass fascist movement. Walker is a fascist because, characterizing it from the standpoint of capital, his program is fascistic, i.e., aims at destruction of the mass organizations of public sector workers with the intent to atomize us in order to restart accumulation (specifically, so that the state might clear away the legally institutionalized obstacles to another cycle of the expanded reproduction of capital). The significance of this can be stated thusly: Because he is governor, he is in a position to execute that program by bringing to bear on this situation all the machinery of the state (the legislature, courts, injunctions, imprisonment, cops and, far more risky, a part-time soldiery, the National Guard). Clear enough?

To me, this makes it 'clear enough' that the situation has nothing to do with Fascism.

Barnes admits that there is no 'mass movement of the p-b'.

The destruction of workers' mass organistions can be carried out by a state not based on a fascism movement, eg. Stalinist, Theocratic, Liberal democratic states. So these attempts by Walker in themselves don't make him a Fascist.

And these events are not happening after a failed workers' movement.

Will Barnes (via Hieronymous)

We, Paul and I, never asserted a mass fascist movement had emerged in Wisconsin, and we never stated that this fascist impulse was autonomous (to the contrary, we said it was subordinate to the U.S. ruling class at the national level). That situation neither bears a mere close resemblance to or is strikingly coincidental with the historically paradigmatic case of fascist ascendancy in society briefly described above; rather, starting from the social class basis of that impulse, the electoral dimension of its development, and, above all, the likelihood of the attempted implementation of the essential feature of the fascist program , the two otherwise historically distinct situations are, with a view to the existing societal totality, the requirements of capital, entirely homologous. While we were, and remain, dubious that any of the developments in Wisconsin would, or will, spill over into large scale extralegal activity (precisely because a fascist holds the position of executive within state government), most importantly, in this regard the original piece was designed to exhibit the intimate historical connection between the potential explosion of defensive mass worker activity and a dramatic increase in a fascist presence in society as a further indication of the seriousness of the situation in Wisconsin.

This just seems to me to display even more confusion about what Fascism is.

The appearance of "the essential feature of the fascist program" is not enough to characterise it as Fascism.

Plenty of states aim to smash workers' movements. The definition of Fascism must include how it comes about, not just its program when in power. Otherwise, this is just a liberal description of how things appear in the political arena, and not socio-economic class analysis.

Based on this, I would not characterise the events in Wisconsin as 'Fascist'.

Ataxia

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Ataxia on February 28, 2011

The university students (who may or may not be proletarian) excepted, from our side this is an almost exclusively working class event;

Students are not working class because they do not wear blue overalls (sigh)

S. Artesian

13 years 1 month ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on February 28, 2011

Last first: I don't really care what Barnes "expects" when I, or anyone else, "engages" with him on issues. Subtlety is not my strong suit, and there was nothing cryptic about my remark.

Barnes says:

"What, then, has constituted fascism historically has been a mass movement based on the petty bourgeoisie centered middle strata. In it, the vast majority of the middle strata, declassed proletarian layers and dominant ruling class social groups see possible resolution to a general societal crisis, rooted if not always in immediate profitability then in accumulation, that has reached an impasse. Fascist movements have had a singular, historically significant outcome, namely, resolution of an enormous socio-economic and political crisis of capitalist society through atomization of the industrial proletariat, that is, through destruction of its mass organizations and the murder of its most militant elements. The resulting collapse of achieved level of working class living standards then opened up the real historical possibility of a renewal of a new cycle of accumulation, thereby reliving the crisis.

Walker is not an master, overlord or chief of political criminality in the class sense as it might be practiced in the streets. This may be explained functionally, culturally, socially and politically or however it is desired, but there is simply no need for such with control of the executive, legislative and repressive bodies at that level of the state where he operates. Subordinate to the overall objectives of the ruling class in the United States, he remains a fascist. If we are to insist that he operate in the streets as in the interwar years in Europe, we are closing ourselves to novel historical developments. He is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class, the only sector in the United States which has functioning, albeit fossilized, mass organizations, organizations whose relation to capital on the terrain of the state has institutionalized a standard of living that impedes resolution of the fiscal crisis of the state, a state of, by and for capital. To boot, the social basis of Walker's support can be found in the business classes, especially among the mass of small owners and independent contractors so-called, and in the middling layers in particular those who are employed by medium-sized and large capitalist firms. But it did not just come from this quarter, for by themselves these social groups would not have carried the electoral weight to put him in office."

Essentially Barnes is arguing that Walker is a different type, a new type, a variation on fascism. Now that may or may not be nuanced, but it most certainly is a cryptic analysis, as Barnes provides a history of the social origins, and manifestations of fascism in essence to reject them as being applicable to the situation in Wisconsin.

According to this sort of analysis, Reagan was a fascist. Thatcher a fascist. Sarkozy a fascist. Morales is a fascist. What drops out here is historical specificity, that is to say the movement of classes.

The US bourgeoisie has been on a class offensive almost 40 years now. As this offensive continues, and the burden of overproduction increases, the attacks on living standards, the need to drive the price of labor below its costs of reproduction intensifies. Capital propels, and comes to rely on, ever more vicious, reactionary formations. Not every historical moment in this is fascism, makes any representative of capital engaging in that class offensive a fascist, not that it matters. And that is the point-- it doesn't matter. Walker represents nothing new. He represents perhaps a quantitative extension, but for quantity to pass over into quality, something more is required. And that something else is exactly that social movement.

Barnes states that to see fascism only through the prism of a mass movement we are blinding ourselves to "novel historical developments." Talk about cryptic remarks, that takes the cake. What novel historical development does Walker represent? That he wants to UNDO the incorporation of unions into the mechanisms of accumulation of capital and the discipline of labor? That's not novel. That's a worldwide pattern in the advanced sectors of capitalism.

That Walker is supported by that sector of the bourgeoisie that 40 years ago, in their youth were known as "crackpot capitalists" because of their membership in the Young Americans for Freedom, that junior gas chamber of commerce?

What is critical to apprehend is that Walker, like Reagan, like the bastard-idiot love child of Reagan and Thatcher, Bush jr. represents a class that, to achieve the security of its property, must animate, support, empower a fascist movement.

Short version: I agree with LBird.

Jazzhands

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Jazzhands on March 3, 2011

Yeah, Walker is not a fascist. Just being a nativist, corporatist reactionary doesn't make someone a fascist. You need a very specific set of motifs and principles, or at least one that looks specific enough to hide the fact that the doctrine is completely bare ideologically.

Also, I really need to put this out because it's too glaring to be ignored:

he is a fascist, for his program takes immediate and direct aim at (a sector of) the working class

You do realize that makes every single American president since Abraham Lincoln a fascist, right? Your definition might be even more skewed than Glenn Beck's. Please do not ever use the term unless you're using it ultra-specifically and about something that has already been established as fascist, like the Nazi Party.

Black Badger

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Black Badger on March 3, 2011

There are no significant authentically fascist politicians in power anywhere in the USA. There are plenty of nativist anti-immigration racists, there are plenty of pro-corporate shills, there are plenty of anti-working class plutocrats and oligarchs, there are plenty of hyper-militarists (both those who want to militarize the border with Mexico and those who want to expand the foreign deployment of US troops), there are plenty of reactionaries who glorify the small-business and lower-middle class ideal, there are plenty whose answer to conflict is busting heads. But as others have said above, these characteristics of fascism are not enough to label particular tendencies "fascist." They overlap with other, less scandalous, political labels.

One of the main philosophical aspects of fascist ideology is the creation of the New Man through discipline, order, obedience, hierarchy, and violence (paramilitary or official) as expressed through statist leadership. Hell, even most of the neo-nazi boneheads don't qualify as authentically fascist. Tough guys who like throwing their weight around are not fascists; they're just bullies.

Populist politicians who eviscerate public sector workers' unions are not fascists either; they're just greedy shitbags whose class interests are pro-privatization. Privatization is not part of any fascist ideology or movement. Fascists seek to incorporate unions and unorganized workers into state-controlled formations to lessen overt (and destructive to production) class conflicts at the workplace. Horizontal unions, which strengthen the state, are the fascist model, not an end to unions as collective bargaining formations. This is one of the often overloooked characteristics of corporatism.

Hieronymous

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Hieronymous on March 7, 2011

I was asked to post this reply:

Will Barnes

This questions that whirl around the phenomenon of fascism constitutes elements of an important discussion. I would engage that discussion in the following response, and I shall attempt to keep my remarks free of polemic or abuse.

To begin, I wonder if the authors who refer to the Tea Party if this was the upshot of our piece even read the article, for the Tea Party was never mentioned nor even tacitly referenced in it. As criticism, comments of this sort are not germane.

Then, there is the concern of above “throw[ing] the word fascism “around,” its “use” and “misuse” “in the past,” the alleged fact that it is “plain wrong and just unhelpful.” What might have been helpful would have been a substantial criticism that addresses what fascism is. If this is a “problem,” it is not our problem: We were quite specific and, altogether unlike our “critics,” we expressly based ourselves on the paradigmatic historically determinate situations from which the term rose.

Our critics never offered a socially and historically grounded determination of the meaning and significance of fascism, unless, of source, the reference to “a number of factors” amounts to a delineation of this phenomenon.

Schwarz did present an alternative to our view, but, then, Walker is not a right populist in the “tradition” of Coughlin or Wallace, there is little or no “petty bourgeois producerism” among the layers of the business classes he appeals to… I live in St. Paul now and spent twenty-seven years of my life living in the state of Wisconsin, and I am telling you the small owners and independent contractors there, and elsewhere in the states, do not pride themselves on the quality products of their firms or the workmanship of their own activities, nor they do establish themselves as models of hard work; rather what they whine about, what they pursue and what they are intent on is extracting as much absolute surplus value, in exploiting waged labor, as they can… that “free market fundamentalism” (instantiated, for example, in demands for business tax relief) takes a backseat to handouts from, demands on, the state for incentives for hiring waged labor, for training the same, for private health credits and to state measures aimed at eliminating the sources of resentments, the “unfair treatment” that has them paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for medical expenses while public sector workers have minimalistic health plans that in part cover these expenses. Read the flurry of bills that Walker got the legislature to approve in January and this becomes patently manifest… that “shades of eschatological evangelicalism” are not featured elements of Walker’s pitch while, in fact, Walker’s discourse is remarkably free of rightwing religiosity, he makes none of the tacit appeals to the concerns of those looking forward to the “final days,” but instead, and, this requires knowing something about Walker, he points to his record as Milwaukee County Executive, 2002-2010, where he balanced the county budget on the backs of public sector workers. He's enormously proud that property taxes in the county did not rise for 8 years under his regime. He did this by cutting public sector jobs in excess of 20% and by dramatically lowering county contributions to the employees' pension plan.

The program... we called it fascist... that is incarnate in Walker's bill in the Wisconsin legislature had its trial run in Milwaukee, where it was not fully realized (i.e., unions were not effectively decertified and crushed) due to the calculation that, with AFSCME at the state level arrayed against him, he couldn't pursue and realize his full program without occupancy of the state of Wisconsin's executive office, i.e., the governorship.

This brings us back to our determination of fascism.

Based on the black hundreds in Russia in 1906, on the Italian Po Valley in 1919, in Bavaria in 1922-1923 and in Berlin from 1929 through 1932, we stated:

Barnes/Taylor

"What, then, has constituted fascism historically has been a mass movement based on the petty bourgeoisie centered middle strata. In it, the vast majority of the middle strata, declassed proletarian layers and dominant ruling class social groups see possible resolution to a general societal crisis, rooted if not always in immediate profitability then in accumulation, that has reached an impasse. Fascist movements have had a singular, historically significant outcome, namely, resolution of an enormous socio-economic and political crisis of capitalist society through atomization of the industrial proletariat, that is, through destruction of its mass organizations and the murder of its most militant elements. The resulting collapse of achieved level of working class living standards then opened up the real historical possibility of a renewal of a new cycle of accumulation, thereby reliving the crisis.”

No one, at least no criticism based on a class characterization (say, instead of one that is bourgeois and sociological), has disputed this.

Thus, we come to Artesian, whose discussion is conducted well above the level encountered to this moment.

He tells our position, though he aims his remarks at me, is problematic because we provided ”a history of the social origins, and manifestations of fascism in essence to reject them as being applicable to the situation in Wisconsin.”

First, it is important to note that Artesian does not reject the historically grounded determination of fascism we offer. Second, while I did not abandon the very analysis we deployed, it is necessary that for Artesian to assert that I did in order to construct a facile argument, namely, “According to this sort of analysis, Reagan was a fascist. Thatcher a fascist. Sarkozy a fascist. Morales is a fascist. What drops out here is historical specificity, that is to say the movement of classes.” I only wish Artesian would have produced a historically specific discussion of the movement of classes. But never mind, I shall.

What I do argue that there are historically novel features… actually they start from absences… that characterize the situation in Wisconsin. Artesian obliquely recognizes this in stating that “essentially,” I am “arguing that Walker is a different type… a variation on fascism.” And there is nothing cryptic about it, since we stated, it is necessary not to close ourselves off to “historically novel developments.”

Having apparently been stung by the remark that his reference to a “mass movement” was cryptic (i.e., its sense masked because unexplicated, a pronouncement without content)… Artesian could have avoided the characterization merely by doing what he at least attempted (unsuccessfully) to do here… he tells us that we exhibited real hubris in warning about blindness to such developments. "Talk about cryptic remarks, that takes the cake. What novel historical development does Walker represent?” Walker? None. But, then, what does he expect since we are not engaged in psychological, socio-psychological or sociological analysis?

So what are these developments? There are three. Two refer us back to a genuinely novel historical development, while a third only seems novel.

The first is that these assault on workers carried out on the basis of a fascist program is not aimed at industrial workers, where in point of fact in all the previous paradigmatic cases of the appearance of fascism we cited they did. Instead it is public sector workers, none of which in Wisconsin are engaged in industrial activity. No one, no critic, has disputed this, and no one has argued that in principle a fascist assault could not be carried out against public sector workers simply because they are not engaged in industrial activity.

The third (I shall come to the second momentarily) concerns the mass basis of fascism, and its absence in Wisconsin as Artesian would have it only seems to be a novel development. All the critics who appear to accept the validity of a class analysis have indicated fascism rests on the petty bourgeoisie. This is a considerably narrow determination. In point of fact, detailed historical examination demonstrates that this base is formed in the middling groups in society… specifically, in our contemporary characterization, small owners, individual proprietors and independent contractors so-called together with administrative and managerial layers attached to the big capitalist firms… and declassed proletarians, the desperate because chronically unemployed or, again in contemporary terms, largely declassed elements of the casualized. This determination is important, and I shall return to it briefly…

Artesian does not contest this. His criticism is that in the Wisconsin situation there is no discernible fascist movement (his term) that has been built up out of these social layers and strata.

In this regard, what is common in all the criticisms put forth is the complete absence of historical analysis from which effectively the criticisms arise. Consider the situation with respect to mass movements in the cases we summarized in the original article: The black hundreds were drawn from the precapitalist, petty bourgeoisie and the gentry, but in the Russian industrial cities of 1906 there was no “fascist movement” because there was no mass movement whether in support of their nativism and anti-Semitism or the autocracy; in the Po Valley in 1919, thugs, fasci or squadrists were employed directly by the great landlords and large agricultural capitalists, but Artesian’s fascist movement that put Mussolini in power did not appear until 1922; in Bavaria, in 1923, supported by Luddendorff (with Hindenburg head of the German military and de facto rulers of Germany during the imperialist world war), and together with Herbert Kriebel, former chief of staff of the disbanded Bavarian militia, Hitler rallied the various tiny memberships of the völkische groups and "patriotic leagues" around himself for a march on Berlin. The march was a pretext for a "national revolution,” i.e., a political coup aimed at achieving the fascist led secession of Bavaria. But on 9 November it took merely the police loyal to the Bavarian government to break up the assembling marchers in the center of München. When fascist contingents opened fire the police returned machine gun bursts. Hitler, Krieber, and other leaders and their troops fled. The fascist putsch had collapsed. This situation, too, was not distinguished by a mass movement, but a small group of open fascists which were easily dispersed. In all these cases, one might legitimately query, “Where was the mass movement?”

Let’s proceed. What about Germany from 1929 through 1932?

What is most characteristic of the whole period? It is the deteriorating socio-economic situation together with the most immediate forceful response it invoked, the open, organized paramilitary confrontations between KPD and nazi fighters. It is not the constitution of a “fascist movement,” at least not in the streets, that we see in demonstrations, rallies, in armed fights over occupancy of neighborhood taverns, apartments, parks and squares, and in revenge assaults. The mass base, the small owner centered Mittelstand, largely expressed itself passively, i.e., in its growing electoral commitment to the nazis (in the four national Reichstag elections held in this period, as we indicated), and far less noticeably in joining the nazis as a political party. It was these electoral victories that mightily encouraged nazi belligerency in the streets; and, if we carefully examine the period, it is far, far more the case that workers were in the streets (e.g., the May Day activities in Berlin in 1929 where the repressive forces of the state, i.e., Berlin police under a Social Democrat, crushed workers in a running three day battle, the notorious “red referendum” rallies of August 1931, the confrontation with brownshirts in Altona in July 1932. Available simply on request, I offered a detailed, class analysis of this whole range of social phenomenon in Germany situated with a view to Soviet and Comintern interventions, but there was just a single taker.) The specific KPD response to the fight in the streets, the orientation toward organized paramilitary struggle, “hart gegen hart,” was a policy disaster that effectively helped to built nazi support manifested electorally. This is the second novel development, for the provocations and brutalities are largely (not entirely) missing here in the United States and, in particular, in Wisconsin. (Not entirely, what I called the whole anti-abortion circus has engaged in looting, trashing and burning clinics and in murder, the shooting of the medical doctor, Peter Gunn, for example. But you say these are religious bigots, not fascists. I shall come to this shortly.)

So what conclusions can we draw? Artesian, and other critics like him who insist on the necessity of a mass movement for the historically significant appearance of fascism (i.e., for the initial assault on workers’ organizations) are simply mistaken: He and others confuse the presence of a tiny current of organizationally bound fascists with that of a mass social movement. They have failed to master the historical sources, and instead on the textbook Marxist assessment which does not stand up to historical scrutiny. (Had the case of Chile in late summer-early autumn 1972 been considered, Artesian could have made an argument for the presence of a fascist movement as he calls it centered there around the CIA backed independent truckers. But then, he would have to explain the Pinochet’s military dictatorship based on a fascist program. The point is that his discussion, though better argued, is like the others’ not dialectical, i.e., it does not rise from historical contents, but is abstract, merely an ungrounded logical argument, one without evidence, lacking real historical referents, which, of course, embodies altogether more basic comprehension of dialectic than the mechanical, formalized understanding that is incarnated in notions such as “quantity passing over into quality.”) Artesian, and others, are doubly mistaken if this mass movement is determined as “fascist”: In point of fact, when it has appeared it has primarily been nativist, nationalist, anti-Semitic, racist, etc., and then anti-proletarian.

I’ll summarize: The activity and the programmatic objective that characterizes fascism…. an assault on the mass organizations of workers aimed at overcoming a social crisis in order to restart accumulation…. can and has often appeared in advance of a mass movement… which is only conventionally and mistakenly called “fascist” but which de facto is nativist (as, for example, in the Klan) and nationalist, often anti-Semitic or racist or both and just as often illiberal and anti-proletarian, and, here in the U.S, religiously fundamentalist, and is narrowly canalized by open organized fascists into an assault on workers’ organizations in order to ease and then surmount the crisis of capital. A mass movement may or may not appear in advance of this assault, but its appearance has far more often than not been passive and electoral. Yet the seizure of power depends on its appearance. The successful seizure further depends upon a leader and, above all, on openly fascist organization. The stronger, more disciplined the organization, the better the chances of the seizure of power, and the more likely that, starting from the destruction of mass proletarian organizations and the murder of militants, the full fascist program, including the dismantling of the institutions of bourgeois democracy and systematic assaults on ethnicities, non “natives” and oppressed minorities, will be carried out. So, I’ll reiterate my initial response: While I'm “dubious that any of the developments in Wisconsin would, or will, spill over into large scale extralegal activity,” that “situation neither bears a mere close resemblance to or is strikingly coincidental with the historically paradigmatic case of fascist ascendancy [Germany, 1929-1932] in society… rather, starting from the social class basis of that impulse, the electoral dimension of its development, and, above all, the likelihood of the attempted implementation of the essential feature of the fascist program, the two otherwise historically distinct situations are, with a view to the existing societal totality, the requirements of capital, entirely homologous.”

There is a final consideration here, that of historical causation. Artesian states that, “the US bourgeoisie has been on a class offensive almost 40 years now. As this offensive continues, and the burden of overproduction increases, the attacks on living standards… intensifies [sic]. Capital propels, and comes to rely on, ever more vicious, reactionary formations.” This claim is polemically determined by opposition to my position, and it is seriously flawed. First, it is flawed because it does not comprehend Artesian’s own requirement, the dynamic, “the movement of classes,” in and through which this offensive has grown (and growing with it, casualization and the collapse of Fordist industry). Here, in the United States as elsewhere, this offensive has been determined by the failure of the reformist union efforts to successfully mount a real challenge to the ascendancy of neo-Right ruling class social groups (on the terrain of the state this is hardly possible), thus marking the end to the last international cycle of struggle (a period that began in 1964 and ended in 1978, manifested most forcefully in the U.S. in the stalemated outcome of the coal miners strike of the same year), and, second, it is a product of the string of defeats… not 40 years, but beginning with PATCO in 1982, Greyhound, Dodge-Phelps, Hormel and Eastern Airlines, and closing with defeats in the Decatur, Illinois “war zone,” first Caterpillar in 1992, then Bridgestone/Firestone and finally Stanley… that over the period of a decade constituted a defeat of major proportions of industrial workers led by the ossified, bureaucratic unions, resulting in acceleration of the ongoing collapse of the big factory and the precipitous decline in private sector union membership. (LBird can see in this a “failed workers’ movement” if she or he so wishes.) This is what the dynamics of capitalist development, specified by Artesian in terms of the “need to drive the price of labor below its costs of reproduction,” resolves itself into. Second, Artesian’s claim is flawed because it is a unilinear account of the intensifying crisis of capital. The crisis of capital (that, though outwardly, phenomenally, “overcome” and behind us, is still determinate for developments within capitalism today and) that broke openly with the Lehman bankruptcy in September 2008 is neither a cyclical moment in capital’s development nor merely a crisis of capital in the crude “economic” sense of a contraction endemic to the business cycle, but is a crisis of capitalist civilization as such, a crisis in the entire fabric of society (one that reaches back and directly involves our relation or metabolism with nature), and represents, contrary to Artesian, a rupture with the movement and development of capital as it has unfolded since the end of the last imperialist world war and, especially, from the end of the last international cycle of workers’ struggles.

So where does this leave us with regard to the situation in Wisconsin? Little or nothing if we primarily relate to revolutionaries who are not immediately and directly part of the working class (in which case, the entire foregoing discussion appears distinctively academic, one side of personal struggle between individuals, egoism); if we are, however, as workers actually and daily oriented to other workers, especially toward those who activity tends toward class action such as in Madison, in the state of Wisconsin and elsewhere, then spelling out the characterization of Walker as a fascist, i.e., his bill embodying the fascist program, permits us to make visible to these workers the mediations linking the global crisis of capital to the fiscal crisis of the state of Wisconsin; to exhibit the necessary connection between capital and the state; to render transparent what the state is, not a neutral arbitrator of social conflict but through its agencies and its constitutive institutions… the legislature, courts, prisons, cops… the fundamental institution through which workers are disciplined, regimented and repressed; allows us to fully expose the pernicious and treacherous course the union bureaucrats are pursuing; and makes all these tasks qualitatively easier.

Will Barnes

LBird

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by LBird on March 7, 2011

Re Will Barnes' second exhaustive (or should that be 'exhausting'?) reply.

Isn't brevity a virtue?

Given that this medium is an online discussion, short and to-the-point answers are best, even at the risk of missing some detail.

Why can't Barnes just highlight (a) his points of disagreement with the broad analysis of classical Fascism which I think the majority of posters here have outlined (ignoring minor differences of emphasis); and (b) any novel features of his idiosyncratic analysis of Fascism?

Perhaps someone else has got the time and inclination to produce a similarly long-winded reply, to do it justice, but I haven't.

Schwarz

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Schwarz on March 8, 2011

Hieronymous, thank Barnes for his reply. He should sign up to Libcom himself so that you can drop the baton as message runner between us and him. :p

It is indeed quite long, but I'll respond to his response of my comments as soon as I get the time. I'm sure Artesian will respond too since he seems to thrive on these back-and-forths.

Submitted by S. Artesian on March 26, 2011

Nah... not really. Mostly, because mostly I can't follow what H. is arguing, and what I do follow, as little as that is I think is pretty good. And also because the more I follow these Walker-type clowns, and their actions, the more fascist-like, I think their "motivations" are.

Latest I read was that a bill has been introduced in the US HOR to deny food stamps to any and all members of a family if any single member of the family participates in a labor action or strike.

And here's what makes it so interesting, or not, is that periodically in the past legislation like this was introduced in Congress to do just these sorts of things, by one or two "nut job" representatives, but now, I guess, there's that old transformation of quantity into quality relation, as the nut jobs number close to 100.

However, on the "economic" issue, I really try and avoid the word "crisis," as Marx had a very specific meaning and use for the word, the "crisis" being defined practically not only by its intensity but by its short duration.

I don't think this is a "crisis" because this is not, has not, and will not be of short duration. We are four years into this, and the amount of non-performing debt to be burned off still exceeds the amount that has been written off. And believe me, at a certain point burning off has to replace writing off.

However, this in no way makes it a rupture with the the predicament [my favorite word for this] of capital over the last 40 years, which saw a peak in the rate of return on industrial investment, the decline in rates of growth, the coming to the fore of the "deregulators"-- actually the asset-stripping and liquidationist bourgeoisie, and the determination to maintain accumulation through the transfer of previously accumulated wealth, and current income shares up the social ladder.

S. Artesian

13 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by S. Artesian on March 26, 2011

Anyway, I've gone through the H/Barnes post again and here's what I think they are saying that I agree with:

fascist programmatic attacks on the workers can and do precede the development or mobilization of the fascist movement.

The content of the assault is not determined or only determined by the "extra-legal" movement in the streets.

If I got that right, then I think they're right.

Now on the matter of the duration of the bourgeoisie's offensive-- is it 30 or is it 40 years, etc. I mark the onset of that offensive from 1973 when 2 significant events occur: Pinochet, and OPEC 1. Both indicate the bourgeoisie's need to make the working class pay in blood, through the nose, etc. for the decline in profitable accumulation, and the need to transfer wealth by driving wages, living standards down.

Doesn't mean the offensive is a simple straight, descending line. Doesn't mean there isn't resistance; doesn't mean there isn't a counter-"rotation" in capital. Of course there are. The US strike wave actually peaked in 1974; we have the attempted revolution in Portugal; upheaval in the UK.

But there is little doubt that capital is on its "new course," even with the interludes, upheavals, and counter-rotations which IMO are analogous to the boost the influx of petro-dollars into US banks etc provided to the economy, and the lending/borrowing spree that led Latin America, and the world, into the "lost decade" of the 1980s.

So no.. this current moment is no rupture within that trend. We haven't seen nothin' yet, but we should be able to see what's coming.

Hmmh... I guess Schwarz was right. Maybe he knows me.