|
Comment
The Progress of Creeping Fascism
Owen Logan
In the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard an ill-fated hack
writer accidentally finds himself in a gothic Hollywood mansion. At first the
mysterious and supercilious mistress of the house wants to throw him out but
the writer pauses, “Wait a minute… I know your face … you used
to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!” The ageing star, played
by Gloria Swanson, straightens her back and replies witheringly, “I am big.
It’s the pictures that got small.” The same might be said of the
relationship between Fascism and nations, without any sense of the deluded
grandeur which marked the character played by Swanson. Nationalism did get
smaller, to the point where the very concept of national sovereignty is now
widely regarded in international relations as the relic of a bygone era. If
anything, Fascism got larger by disposing of its early romantic stars, leaving
many of their followers to go about peddling their somewhat revised ideas about
human affairs. As the economist J.K. Galbraith implied when he lamented Albert
Speer’s undeserved reputation as an industrial “genius of production”1,
the new men of power in various countries post-1945 were not disinterested.
Very little attention is given to the positive reputation enjoyed by men like
Speer. In countries that were not ill-treated by dictatorships with their made-to-order
folksy nationalism, anti-Fascists tend to be preoccupied by the overt manifestation
of Fascist Parties and politics. The skinhead squad-member from a run-down
estate who dwells spiritually in imperial nostalgia and trots out racist hate-slogans
might be an enduring characterisation, but this ironic persona is a deceptive
icon, as those who have lived through a Fascist State know; its brutish foot
soldiers quickly and willingly become its cannon fodder. The disenfranchised
and demoralised people who become Fascist supporters make inadequate targets
for democrats because the visibility and aggressive popular style of Fascism
conceals a far more subtle ethos at the heart of the ideology. It is the subtle
aspects of Fascist ideology that remain standing and develop their forms and
continue their onward march despite all the military defeats suffered by Fascism’s
historic regimes.
The corporate monopolisation of markets is the symptom and outcome of this
onward march, but not the cause, which is the monopolisation of public reason.
For Benito Mussolini this depended on stealthily “plucking the chicken
one feather at a time.”2 His preferred name for the system was corporativism
and a fuller understanding of this so-called ‘friendly Fascism’ and
its pre-history provides a vital means to oppose the whole Fascist phenomenon.
Fascism ought to be understood as an ideologically sophisticated and creeping
set of political relations that undermine free contest and the full expression
of different material and class interests within society at large. From this
perspective, the general geopolitical failure of Fascism only marks the end
of various formally authoritarian States and certainly not the end of authoritarian
State politics at a number of levels. Fascism’s more subtle progress is
the true ‘clear and present danger’ to the development of democratic
society or to whatever integrity democracy might still possess. The danger
arises partly because one of the historical preconditions of Fascism, as theorised
by Mussolini, has now been achieved thanks to the adventurism of the U.S. empire.
The war on terror has given us the state of permanent, unbounded war originally
dreamt up by the Italian dictator to bring about a specific economic and ideological
order at home and military expansionism abroad.
That the Italian Republic, supposedly founded on the defeat of Fascism, has
re-embraced the ideology under the guise of “Post-Fascism” within
a parliamentary democracy is alarming. But, perhaps more alarming is that elsewhere,
with no mention of any sort of Fascism, we also see the triangulation of policy
towards “single purpose government”, as it is now called in Scotland.
This widespread and neo-totalitarian sense of purpose favours corporations
by gearing all policies towards existing markets or their creation where they
do not already exist. In return, States are blessed with various stamps of
approval from big business and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
Despite their reputation for imposing deadly market orthodoxies across the
world, the power of these controversial institutions appears to be unassailable.3
These developments are connected to the progress of Fascist ideas and opposition
to them is a matter of great urgency.
A Living History
Mussolini envisioned the corporative nation in biological terms as a body of
non-competing and co-operative functions. In 1934, Fascists from different
European countries agreed that this was the defining element of their international
movement. As Francis Mulhern notes in ‘Culture/Metaculture’, the
functions of corporativism, or corporatism as it is now known, are all imagined
to make “their necessary, mutually non-exchangeable contributions to the
health of the whole. It is accordingly anti-individualist in temper (the notion
of competition between parts of the body is absurd) and also anti-socialist
(the notion of a struggle between the hands and the head is equally absurd – as
are democracy and equality).”4 While this mythic idea of the nation as
the body coincided with the racial policies pursued by the Nazis, the bodily
doctrine cannot be reduced to its most murderous convulsions. In Nazi Germany, Gleichschaltung also
aimed for the co-ordination of the life of the nation and it is the deep-seated
ideology of enforced co-operation and managed national solidarity which provided
the underlying logic of Fascism.
Although independent trade unions were politically disabled and outlawed in
Italy, top-down organised labour and welfare policies were reborn in the image
of Fascist corporatism, which, if nothing else, adhered to the aristocratic
ideal of noblesse oblige. According to Gaetano Salvemini, an exile from
the Italian system and one of its most sensitive critics, the impact of this
policy to disorganise and manipulate the autonomy of labour was to effectively
nationalise it, making labour into the State’s bargaining chip in its
dealings with capitalists. Imagine being threatened by your boss for using
the word “ballot” in communicating with fellow trade unionists because
that word alone was an incitement to industrial action. Sadly this is not an
example of legalised bullying under 1930s Fascism but the experience of a member
of the Public and Commercial Services Union in Britain today. One only has
to think for a few moments about nation-States with their normalised anti-labour
laws and activities and see these policies in the context of international
capitalism to begin to see the triangular outlines of the renewed repression.
In Fascist Italy of the 1930s, public institutions called corporations were
to support co-operation and consultation between different interest groups,
between labour and capital and between various economic sectors. In reality
they were unrepresentative talking shops, the real function of which was to
dignify a range of coercive policies. Followers of the Marxist, Antonio Gramsci
would call this passive revolution, whereby “in lieu of attaining support
for what it is doing, a government instead decides to act as if it alone were
the origin of social change.”5 Yet the rhetorical element of co-operation
and consultation remained central to Fascist practice. So attractive was the
ideal of corporatist State to its proponents that they wrote admiringly of
its company-like functions before the public corporations were even brought
into dubious existence. Perhaps the reality is best summed up by Salvemini
in his 1936 book ‘Under the Axe of Fascism’. For Salvemini, to find
real co-operation and genuine consultation taking place through corporatist
institutions was like “looking in a dark room for a black cat which is
not there.”6
With this history in mind the obvious question for trades unions and other
pressure groups in civil society today is how far has advanced capitalism adapted
itself to the same logic of disempowered, disabled yet highly symbolic communication?
There is a growing body of research on international development which suggests
that the outcomes of participatory processes and public deliberation about
policy are in fact preordained by the wisdom of the international financial
institutions such as the World Bank.7 It should be asked, therefore, how far
do citizens become institutionally formed and incorporated by processes that
allow us the pleasure of expressing our views, and sometimes taking action,
but only in return for the finally demoralising experience of being overcome
by the carefully structured imbalance of actual power?
But if such a bleak perspective is valid, it is too easy to lay the blame on
big business or some overly abstract notion of “the system” when
corporatism is a particular rot that can set in almost anywhere. It can be
seen in the paternalistic ethos of politicians, and in the dealings of “sweetheart” trade
unions that function more like an arm of management, or in any number of individuals
and ad hoc groups that grasp opportunities to represent or to lead the
course of policy without examining the issue of meaningful democratic accountability.8
However compelling one may find Naomi Klein’s account of the ‘Shock
Doctrine’9, shock tactics are not necessarily required to ignite the slow
burning processes of corporatism. Trying to address these difficult issues
here leads gradually towards a key distinction between freedoms of expression,
on the one hand, and how the terms of communication may or may not be defined
by the public interest, on the other. We live in an era that rather robotically
celebrates individuals: individuals as spokespeople for the ‘voiceless’;
inspired, creative and visionary individuals; individuals as over-achievers,
enlightened benefactors, and celebrity of all kinds. But has an actual individualism,
of the kind that historians and sociologists have found at the heart of Bourgeois
revolutions against feudalism, been subtly replaced by mere persona in consumerist
society? Are the beneficiaries and descendents of social and political flux
in the 1960s now at one with an entrepreneurial ideology which downplays the
new ‘feudalism’ perpetrated by a remarkably like-minded corporate
power elite?
Technocorporatism
For anyone who has been subjected to mind-numbing processes of fake consultation – in
the workplace or in civic deliberation on matters like housing, health, urban
planning or culture – Salvemini’s metaphor of the darkened empty
room minus cat has a certain poetic resonance in relation to the way the appearance
of consensus is constructed in a political and ideological vacuum. Often, this
is done with the aid of key unelected personnel who, we are endlessly told,
have expertise although they often appear to have descended upon us from another
lifeworld where everyone gets along and power goes unquestioned. Nevertheless,
it would be misleading to immediately draw a line from the original Fascist
ideology of co-operation to the dispiriting operations of technocrats and today’s
neo-corporatism. Moreover, the Fascist-spawned British National Party knows
only too well how to exploit the void opened up by the legitimate and widespread
public contempt for what passes for democratic process in Britain. The response
from mainstream parties has been to co-ordinate their campaigning to exclude
the BNP. If taken in good faith, this response from mainstream politicians,
would be more convincing if they were able to demonstrate a genuine commitment
to unfettered public reasoning.
Undoubtedly, public discussion has been substantially dumbed down by the adherence
to neoliberal ideology by all the main parties and their favourite ‘opinion-formers’.
The truth is that far-right populists have arguments that cannot be properly
answered without raising the ghost of anti-capitalist counter arguments which,
however unpopular they have become in consumer societies, remain extremely
relevant. In the face of the ongoing financial crisis, witness the media silence
about the continent-wide reforms to the financial system underway in Latin
America.10
Part of the problem of restricting public discussion along narrow ideological
lines is the way that primitive xenophobia gets branded as Fascist and racist,
sometimes as if those were quite simply one and the same. We should remember
that Italian Fascism became officially racist, it did not start out
that way. Moreover, Fascist identity politics were not quite as exclusivist
as often painted. In keeping with the history of liberal imperialism they were,
and remain, all about reinforcing a variegated, and historically variable,
racial pecking-order. More blindly xenophobic voices today are rather too hastily
ostracised for their proto-Fascist tendencies when the crucial Fascist lineage
is far more likely to be the ongoing development of coercive rationalism, certainly
not confined to matters of ‘race’. Paradoxically, when brought to
public discourse it is this branch of rationalism that would coercively exclude
the BNP. And in doing so it implicitly reduces Fascism to its most primitive
party-political manifestation and therefore misrepresents or ignores its true
philosophical scope. It is also this branch of rationalism that can be seen
adapting centrist politics to totalitarian-like policies such as torture, the
derogation of key laws, support for undue or unaccountable police powers, and
the attack on civil liberties in general. If all this is not enough to demand
that we take the philosophical basis of coercive rationalism seriously, then
polling evidence, suggesting that a majority of Britons agree with far-right
policies when they are not known to be those of the BNP, should make us pause
for thought.11
Philosophy and the Technocratic Turn
The coercive branch of rationalism celebrates the power of the mind and self-will.
It neglects the social and historic complexity of the development of modern
societies along with the most troubling aspects of everyday life in them. This
ideological vanishing trick draws us back to the key philosophical split of
the European Enlightenment: “on the one hand [there is] the Enlightenment’s
association of progress with autonomous and critical self-reflection within
a society based on the principles of equality, liberty and the participation
of independent and rational individuals, and on the other, the identification
of progress with the development of scientific/technical reason and the subordination
of society to the requirements of this process.”12 This is no abstract
philosophical matter. As Val Plumwood argues in her book, Environmental
Culture, “reason has been captured by power and made an instrument
of oppression, it must be remade as a tool for liberation.”
Both egalitarian and technocratic branches of rationalism have classical roots
in Athenian democracy and various studies describe how the latter branch (rooted
in anti-democratic Platonic philosophy) provides a “foolproof way to blame
the losers – in terms of their alleged deficiency of reason, demonstrated
by their being losers.”13 When it comes to capitalist industrialisation,
the basic truth of capitalism, namely that the system generates and gives power
to capitalists, must somehow be denied. Fascism’s modern obfuscation of
this absolutely essential truth was described by Salvemini as Homo Corporativus,
or the self-conscious corporative individual. Yet, against his/her supposedly
co-operative instincts Homo Corporativus merely substituted class struggle
with a wholly bureaucratic struggle between the offices and the categories
of his/her own authority. Nevertheless, the myth of corporativism gave a new,
entirely self-contained plane of politics its very reason for being and, with
it, a struggle over categories replaced struggles for democracy. For ordinary
citizens to participate in technocratic politics at all, demands that, to some
extent, they master technocratic rationalism and, therefore, place themselves
on the ladders of its discursive power. In many instances, this may already
be an act of submission. To summarise all this more bluntly, if the Fascist
thugs are notorious for putting the boot in when you’re down, this desk-bound
rationalism is their philosophical sidekick.
The heirs to the technically reductive version of the Enlightenment are legion!
They provided the personnel required for the upward transfer of power during
the Cold War. In many countries, widespread support for anti-imperialism, meaningful
social democracy and socialist policies was immanent in 1945. Yet, if one looks
into the working class movements internationally it is hard not to conclude
that, while they were not exactly beaten to the ground, many were ideologically
weakened and organisationally depleted by the combination of total war, the
division and betrayals within Left politics, and what may well be seen as the
technocratic turn in the Soviet Union – those repressive Russian influences
still too casually ascribed to Stalinism alone.14
By the 1950s and ’60s, U.S. sociologists C. Wright Mills and G. William
Domhoff and the economist J.K. Galbraith were mapping the rise of a neo-corporatist
system in which technocratic power and prestige was increasingly accumulated
in Western democracies. In this neo-corporatist world, decision making shifted
from the holders of political capital to a skilled technocratic class that
mediated power and ultimately shielded elites from political pressure from
below. In his study of “technocorporatism” today, Frank Fischer argues
that the nexus of technocratic expertise and corporatist ideas continues to
rest on a set of undemocratic “beliefs about how the world works, a conception
of the way it should work, and a set of tactics for changing it. […] Democracy
is taken to be an inappropriate, inferior decision-making system for the emerging
post-industrial society”.15 Indeed, in place of democratic public reasoning
the so-called advanced democracies rely on technocrats and think-tanks for
policy formation, heavily slanted consultation processes from which technocrats
extract their monies, and a system of “revolving doors” through which
formal State authority and informal political power is kept in the hands of
the same people; and finally, unsurprisingly, massive democratic deficits with
ordinary citizens playing walk-on parts in what many on the Left will regard
as the greatest show on earth: the mass media’s “manufacturing of
consent”.
Before his adaptation to the same habitat, the British sociologist, Anthony
Giddens, well described the insidious qualities of technocracy. Giddens wrote: “it
is not just the application of technical modes to the solution of defined problems,
but a pervading ethos, a world view which subsumes aesthetics, religion and
accustomary thought to the rationalistic mode.”16 The key question which
thinkers like the now ennobled Baron Giddens and many other upwardly mobile
well-wishers have failed to answer is how can superficial democracy be democratised
without any serious commitment to democratic radicalism; how can the egalitarian
values of democracy be realised with little or no cost to the ruling elites
and their order of things? For the cultural engineers who have made careers
out of technocorporatism, radical politics appears as an obstacle to “partnership”.17
Only deliberately naïve intellectuals can be blind to the way this order
is worsening and becoming more disreputable by the day. As it was under classical
Fascism, Socialism has been turned into the plaything of the rich.
The Knowledge Economy
One of the key universal justifications defined by UNESCO for the State support
of higher education is that universities are, or should be, intellectually
autonomous. To understand why, one needs to be able to appreciate knowledge
as a process of production rather than one of consumption or a mere delivery
mechanism. The ancient Greeks did this by differentiating the techne and episteme,
effectively drawing a line between instrumental or practical knowledge on one
hand, and the larger epistemological task of making sense of reality on the
other. However idealistically reasoned, the autonomy and epistemological scope
of universities is supposed to ensure that the public gets value for its money
and that these institutions serve the broad public interest. If the common
good is to be served this would of course include an holistic understanding
of labour interests. There have certainly been technocratic plots against any
such universal regulation. In a 1983 confidential report a Department of Education
official wrote: “We are in a period of considerable social change. There
will be unrest, but we can cope with the Toxteths… but if we have a highly
educated and idle population we may possibly anticipate more serious conflict.
People must be educated once more to know their place.”18
Given the extent of deindustrialisation under Conservative governments and
the conversion of Britain into a retail society with finance capital and defence
as its last great industries, New Labour’s original mantra ‘Education,
Education, Education’ might be more honestly described as ‘Training,
Training, Training’ for an extraordinarily technocratic Knowledge Economy.
Symptomatic of this are disputes over academic freedom in higher education
where the entrepreneurial mindset has become managerially enshrined. Not enough
that this skews the culture of institutions towards research and teaching in
favour of the business ethos as if that were synonymous with the public interest
(an idea which Adam Smith would have objected to) but it has even been demanded,
in at least one university, that academics demonstrate their commitment to
the new philosophy in their bodily comportment too. Less explicitly elsewhere,
individualism is increasingly measured against the development of amenable
corporate personae. In the face of mounting university bureaucracy, totally
unrealistic workloads and job insecurity, these compliant characters are expected
to exude casual efficiency and pragmatism with just the right dash of creative
individualism – an entrepreneurial balancing act no doubt reflected in
the appalling reports of mental health among academics.19
There is, however, a more eerie reminder of Fascism to be gleaned from a spasmodic
crisis of consciousness in higher education. The pervasive campaign for an
entrepreneurial economy centred on knowledge and cultural products in support
of urban renewal provides a mirror image of Mussolini’s campaign to regenerate
Italy’s rural economy and resurrect traditional peasant life. In both
cases, the first victim has been the critical autonomy required to create a
balanced economy based on social co-determination rather than fictional co-operation
and technocratic zeal. In Britain now, as in Italy of the 1930s, the actual
impact of technocratic policy creates increased dependency on corporations
and big business. Italy’s countryside became less typically “rural” and
more monopoly bound under Fascism, just as Britain’s cities have become
far more economically homogenous and indistinguishable than might have been
envisaged by New Labour’s technocrats. Like the Fascists, who believed
that Italy’s problems would be solved by regenerating a peasant lifeworld,
New Labour’s semi-independent technocracy of think-tanks and consultants
have behaved as if the regeneration of Britain’s cities along the lines
of their Yuppiefied dreams was a policy that would solve an amazing range of
socio-economic and political ills caused by neoliberal globalisation.
Of course, bolstering consumerism and a feel-good factor based on fictive capital
has been the key aspect underlying these now threadbare technocratic fantasies.
Yet in perfect synergy with Fascist philosophy, the mindset of neoliberal expertise
sees the mass spirit and self-belief as everything. Mission statements in higher
education and university job descriptions overwhelmingly reflect this marketable
logic. As many other writers have pointed out, neoliberal government directives
carried out by higher education management seek to create markets where there
is still a free exchange of ideas and knowledge, and in doing so they frequently
appear to have utterly abandoned universal standards. Rather than supporting
the broad public interest by defending criticality and free thought, their
promotional mode of address reflects the unrelenting ideology that markets
and business values are best: “Our vision is for a more dynamic, entrepreneurial
and internationally competitive Scotland”, reads the Scottish Funding
Council’s mission statement.20
Yet most people are not employers or self-employed in their possession of an
enterprise, they are instead employees and/or dependents. In a Danish international
survey in 2000, Brazil came out on top with a rate of under 17% of the population
involved in entrepreneurial activity. The UK registered around 6% of the population
gaining from any sort of entrepreneurial livelihood.21 Even if such figures
were quadrupled one would still expect higher education to be geared far more
positively towards an even-handed analysis of the interdependent relationship
between public and private interests, accountability in public services, contemporary
labour and social studies, and so on. After all, the common experience is not
entrepreneurial but membership of an increasingly flexible and casualised labour
force. Given this demographic reality, the technocratic commitment to envisaging
the public interest in quite the opposite terms is an extraordinary ideological
achievement of which any Fascist myth-maker could be proud. Nonetheless, it
should be a matter of shame in primary schools where nine year olds are softened-up
in classes that make the likes of Richard Branson into a hero comparable to
Martin Luther King, and in secondary schools where Business Studies creeps
in to replace economics classes. The response from any democrat should simply
be where’s the equilibrium? Where, for example, is that new secondary
school course on trade unions and social movements? Clearly the widespread
abandonment of social truth and a consequential unpreparedness for ‘your
place’ appears to be what ‘knowing it’ is all about.
Reining in Culture
Culture, that vague and fought over term, might be the most slippery issue
to rescue from creeping Fascism. Freedom of expression, with its interwoven
rights and responsibilities, appears to lie at the ideological centre of contemporary
cultural policy as a key human right and “pillar of democracy”. Yet
freedom of expression is contingent on freedom and equality in communication,
or what was called Isegoria under Athenian direct democracy. Although
modern representative democracies have not ignored this principle, different
studies by academics such as Clive Barnett and Roger A. Shiner show how freedom
of expression under neoliberalism has been increasingly commercialised and
steadily trivialised.22 This degradation came at the expense of piecemeal but
hard-won legislation which, in keeping with the principle of Isegoria,
promoted equalities in public discourse. Although this most democratic principle
helped to deepen public reasoning in modern democracies, that is not what politicians
seem to now want as they put their efforts into the construction of a rather
unreasonable, ill-educated and corporate friendly culture.
The difficulty of giving democratic weight to freedom of expression is only
too apparent in Scotland. In a number of announcements, politicians and cultural
technocrats have pinpointed artists as the flag-bearers of cultural freedom.
But this individualistic emphasis looks like a rhetorical sleight-of-hand trick
when compared to their insistence on a business-led approach to cultural matters
which will reduce the autonomy of the already fragile infrastructure on which
many artists and cultural workers depend. The thin end of the notorious financialisation
wedge is the imposition of loans with grants becoming only one part of a “light
touch […] funding system.”23 The policy of structural adjustment
here is being implemented by the Scottish Government’s own Frankenstein’s
monster, Creative Scotland 2009 Ltd., with a board made up mainly of ex-bankers
and businessmen.
With the typically corporatist metaphor of “Team Scotland” appearing
as their guiding ethos (the bodily metaphor wishfully reborn with a sporting
twist), Creative Scotland seems set to narrow the scope of free expression
by forming an “entrepreneurial organisation”. One doesn’t have
to take an overly pessimistic view of the future to predict the consequences
of this move as it is already apparent how little time Scotland’s new
promotional culture has for anyone who is not a card-carrying supporter of
this entrepreneurial mindset. An example very close to home was the interference
with the distribution of Variant by Culture and Sport Glasgow, in part,
for showing the city, and thereby the brand, in a bad light.24 As with the
adaptation of Higher Education to the Knowledge Economy, the project of single
purpose government seeks to blend arts and culture within an entrepreneurial “spectrum”,
to use the specific term deployed by Mike Russell MSP, the minister currently
overseeing culture and constitutional change. It would be naïve to think
that what doesn’t fit comfortably into this single purpose spectrum won’t
be squeezed out, as we have already witnessed with CSG. Essentially, the function
of entrepreneurial ideology today appears to be all about dispersing risk away
from corporate concentrations of capital – “investing in people”,
as one slogan goes. In this instance, making individuals and organisations
more fearful of the political risks that go with exercising freedoms of expression.
Perhaps it is no surprise that, in a country which pillaged much of the world,
many people still adhere to a highly objectified sense of culture. The imperially
influenced reification of culture might be detected in the often repeated words
of the Victorian, Mathew Arnold, for whom culture was “the best that has
been thought and said in the world.” Commercially revamped, it is just
a short step for politicians to begin thinking about culture not as communication
and process but something more like the best that has been done and sold, or
in the language of Creative Scotland, its “economic contribution fully
captured.” Again, this purposeful drive, under the banner of the creative
industries, brings governments to the limits of 20th century universal rights
and standards, which state that “cultural goods and services […]
cannot be considered as mere commodities or consumer goods like others…”.25
It is worth recalling the circumstances in which universal rights and standards
came into being under the auspices of the United Nations after World War II.
Undoubtedly, Fascism forced Liberal capitalism to face up to its weaknesses
and the dictatorial outcomes of its own oligarchic and imperial tendencies.
Confronted also with the threat of geo-politically backed Communist insurrection,
Liberalism appeared to require ethical reinforcement from a more genuinely
democratic script if it was to survive at all. In today’s circumstances
of capitalism’s monopolistic ascendancy, it would be foolish to imbibe
the mood of parochialism projected by so many politicians and neglect those
international legal instruments intended to provide democratic leverage for
both ordinary citizens and States. Moreover, rulings against countries such
as the UK and Austria in the European Court of Human Rights show that citizens
can sometimes make rights to Freedom of Expression work in their favour and,
in the process, reveal corruption of the public interest on the part of governments.26
This is especially important because in the absence of any serious historic
threat to capitalist oligarchy, Universal Declarations and their subsequent
conventions are being casually suborned by the political class. In the domineering
managerial spirit of Scotland’s cultural policy formation, the key distinction
between culture and commerce at the heart of the ‘UNESCO Convention on
the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions’ is
being obscured by Orwellian doublespeak. On the part of a nationalist Scottish
government, this is a supreme case of cherry-picking. It is the same convention
that lends support to policies to promote Gaelic across Scotland, yet in its
nationalistic drive the government has suborned the anti-commercial reasoning
of the convention that lends support to such a policy. In the context of globalisation,
what UNESCO recognised, against U.S. wishes, was that language is one aspect
of culture which is broadly threatened by the reification and commercialisation
of life. The formation of Creative Scotland and its business-minded pronouncements
seem to be an expression of this very problem.
Walled Gardens
Perhaps the most significant argument that nationalists may pose against their
various ideological critics is that the sovereignty of the people requires
a socially meaningful geographical/legal space for democracy to be realised.
However, this implies critical issues about how a trans-national economic system
might be made accountable to the citizens of supposedly sovereign spaces. One
would expect any sincere and nationally-minded democrats to focus, first and
foremost, on these questions of democratic process and open-ended public reasoning.
It is far too easy for opportunists to replace the complex politics of space
with the technocratic management of cultural nationalism. Indeed, it
is the manipulation of cultural identity and a commanding form of nostalgia
that characterises the vociferous neo-Fascist tendencies apparent in regional
autonomy movements in countries as different as Italy and Bolivia.27 For its
part, the Scottish Government’s tourist campaign Homecoming Scotland
2009 was an embarrassingly chauvinistic exercise in cultural assimilation
and historical amnesia that shows many of the same traits. Homecoming was
managerially constrained and commercially orientated. As such, it was an entirely
predictable expression of myopic cultural nationalism. More problematically,
for an avowedly outward-looking campaign that set its sights on people overseas
who could claim Scottish ancestry, it demonstrably blocked out the history
of Scottish participation in transatlantic slavery.
Robert Burns is said to provide the inspiration for Homecoming, yet
any full appraisal of Burns’ life shows the bard in a less romantic light
than do his words. In fact Burns took up the position of an overseer on a slave
plantation in Jamaica but was persuaded to abandon going. However, his decision
to seek such a job recalls Scotland’s development on the back of transatlantic
slavery. But Homecoming brushed over much more than Burns’ morally
ambiguous pragmatism. The campaign appears to take after James Wedderburn who
shut the door in the face of his mulatto son who had travelled from
the Caribbean in 1779 to announce himself on these shores – likewise the
promotion of Homecoming treated Scotland’s African-Caribbean relatives
as nothing more than the nation’s bastard offspring. In a highly advertised
racial pecking order they were made all but invisible. This may have something
to do with the fact that Scotland officially takes its lead from Ireland in
defining “who belongs” to its diaspora.28 So why the mismatch with
Scotland’s history? The answer seems to lie in a long running desire of
Scotland’s political class to replicate the business networking of Ireland’s
now defunct boom time. In the words of a Scottish Government summary which
deals with this policy development, “Scotland has already made significant
progress in connecting with its diaspora and has been cited by the World Bank
as an exemplar of best practice in the area of business networks”.29 From
this angle, the true inspiration for Homecoming looks more like the
World Bank than Robert Burns.
As Stephen Mullen reveals in this issue of Variant, the Scottish Government’s
promotion of Homecoming, in its neglection of duties under the Race
Relations Act, would, no doubt, give succour to BNP supporters. Homecoming’s narrow
historical construction also suggests a thinly veiled contempt on the part
of the political class for broad-based knowledge. Evidently, this is what happens
when commerce and culture are merged.
Disposing of the Body
Scotland’s ad hoc cultural agenda has developed from a long and
typically costly technocratic process which easily started as early as 2000
and took in the year-long Cultural Commission in 2004-5. Why is it that, after
years of consultation, debate, deliberation and report writing, a government
is cynically suborning UNESCO conventions and is very likely breaking the law?
Overall, the answer to this question is creeping Fascism and, specifically,
the Scottish Government’s denial of well-founded differences over key
matters of the public interest. Instead of acknowledging complexity and the
negative influences of commerce (as is still possible in Scandinavian cultural
policy), governments which have completely given way to creeping Fascism gush
out vacuous promotional pronouncements that overwhelmingly favour big business.
We live in the era of a hyper-mobile global money-making machine and, on the
balance of probability, this machine will devour us and our planet if left
to its own devices. Of course, old-fashioned Socialists and radicals would
argue that this is precisely the nature of capitalism, and those politicians
who, in a spirit of moderation, allude to “an arc of prosperity” and “sustainability” are
indulging in hubris and selling their fatal fantasies to the public.30 But,
in place of ideological diversity in debating and co-determining how the broad
public interest is served, we are ruled by the directives of a new Homo
Corporativus. He or she comes in all shades, from all classes, speaks in
many languages and accents, and has any number of high-sounding liberal beliefs.
But just like the original Fascist prototype, the new Homo Corporativus cares
nothing for real accountability and bottom-up democratic organisation although,
of course, the masquerade of public engagement is absolutely crucial just as
it was in the classic Fascist State. Indeed, in perfect continuity with classical
Fascism, our Homo Corporativus bestows upon the public the wholly bureaucratic “struggle
of the categories” as a substitute for more rigorous and meaningful debates
about how the common good can be pursued.
Our new Homo Corporativus is the present-day ideological outcome of
the absurd metaphor of the nation as body that the original Fascists projected
onto the public. The body metaphor, so essential to Fascism’s coercive
rationalism, is today based on an even bigger lie about the relationship between
nations and capitalism. It is high time Homo Corporativus was buried
once and for all. There is little value in opposing Fascist Parties unless
the essential core of coercive rationalism is exposed wherever it creeps in
to monopolise public reasoning.
An example of this trend was the 2008 Lothian Lecture given in Edinburgh by
Professor Tom Nairn, one of the original members of Britain’s New Left
intellectual elite, introduced by Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond,
a former Royal Bank of Scotland economist. Nairn, sporting a tartan tie, and
Salmond in his more soberly managerial attire, envisioned Scotland as a “nimble
nation light on its feet” and “possibly out-smarting heavyweights” like
the U.S. or China. A critical question that finally came from the audience
about how such an idea has any bearing on a world dominated by global corporations
was sidelined by Salmond and ignored by Nairn. Nevertheless, it’s worth
setting the record straight here. It should be immediately obvious to all that
nation states are not mobile bodies within the international juridical system
of sovereignty and, unlike corporations, banks and other businesses, which are mobile,
nations do not enjoy the option of bankruptcy. But, as outlined here, the subtler
aspects of Fascist ideology have moved centre stage. Scotland’s cultural
nationalism appears absolutely at one with the stream of neo-corporatist myths
like “UK PLC”. As in the past, the progress of Fascism is being helped
along by the opportunism of those who would like to call themselves democrats,
and the insincerity of nationalists who have no commitment to realising the
sovereignty of the people.
Notes
1. Albert Speer was Hitler’s Minister of Armaments
and War Production. Friedrich von Hayek’s explanation for Speer’s
rather glamorous reputation for technical expertise (despite the Nazi reliance
on slave labour) was that unlike his counterparts in wartime Britain and the
U.S., “Speer was a brilliant self-taught amateur…” See Gitta
Sereny’s, Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth, (1995) Picador,
p551.
2. See Philip Morgan’s, Italian Fascism 1915-1945, (2004) Palgrave
/ Macmillan, Basingstoke, p80.
3. The whistle-blower Davison Budhoo, an IMF economist, wrote in his 1988 resignation
letter that, “I may hope to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye
is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples.” Two independent
studies commissioned by the government of Trinidad lent support to Budhoo’s
accusations that the IMF fabricated statistics to enforce economic liberalisation
against the interests of developing nations. Despite many campaigns and calls
for the abolition of the World Bank and IMF, Budhoo felt these would not succeed.
See Naomi’s Klein, The Shock Doctrine, (2007) Penguin, p260.
4. See Francis Mulhern’s, Culture / Metaculture, (2000) Routledge,
London, (glossary).
5. See Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey’s ‘New Labour’s neoliberal
Gleichschaltung the case of higher education’ http://sys.glotta.ntua.gr/Dialogos/Politics/New%20Labour%20HE%20White%20Paper.pdf (Accessed May 2009.)
6. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism, (1936) Victor Gollancz
Ltd, London, p114.
7. See, ‘Stones on the Road: The politics of Participation and the Generation
of Crisis in Bolvia’, by John-Andrew McNeish, (2006), Bulletin of Latin
American Research, Vol.25, No.2, Blackwell Publishing, Oxford, p230.
8. The problem of incorporation is hardly new in representative democracy although
its contours have changed with the development of universal suffrage and the
accompanying legal twists and turns that limit the political power of the workforce. The
History of Trade Unionism, (1912) by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, recalls
the activities of the Trade Union Congress Parliamentary Committee from 1875-1885
which lobbied the House of Commons. To the Webb’s, the erosion of the
labour movement’s original demands for full democracy through this well
established lobbying group showed the “extent the thoughtful and superior
workmen had, at this time, [instead] imbibed the characteristic ideas of middle
class reformers.” p352
9. http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine
10. An exception to this silence came when the former World Bank economist
and Nobel laureate, Joseph Stieglitz, lent support to the foundation of Banco
de Sur, the Latin American bank which has set out to reform the fractional
reserve banking system and create a new regional development bank. Stieglitz
said this was “a welcome shake-up to the Western lending institutions” and
thought it will “reflect the perspectives of those in the South” and
help counter “the American strategy of divide and conquer, a strategy
trying to get as much of the benefits for American companies,” and “little
for developing countries…” reported by Associated Press 11/10/2007.
11. A YouGov survey in 2006 suggested that although many British people would
lend support to policies associated with the BNP once the policies were known
to be those of the far-right party support fell.
12. See, ‘Theories of industrial society’, by Richard J. Badham (1986), International
Series in Social and Political Thought, published by Croom Helm, p19.
13. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture, The Ecological Crisis of Reason,
(2002) Routledge, London, p20.
14. As early as 1920, the poet Aleksei Gastev, director of the Central Institute
of Labour in Moscow, was implementing Taylorist methods with a mass utopian
zeal that paid scant regard to the incompatibility of “scientific industrialisation” with
the independence of the Soviet Union or its workforce. Gastev’s ideas
about fusing society into a bodily machine were typically corporatist. In trivialising
any questions of working class autonomy and democracy, Gastev’s vision
was in fact proto-Fascist in character. He acknowledged that the Taylorist
transformation of the Soviet Union would depend upon foreign capital investment
and would enslave Soviet industry to capitalists – a necessary evil which
appeared not to obstruct his more poetic vision of a single-minded mass society.
Gastev was proud that Lenin had one of his Taylorist charts hung in his office.
See Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, The Passing of Mass Utopia
in East and West,(2002) MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, p107. For
a recent study of the breakdown of workers democracy see, The Russian Revolution
in Retreat, 1920–24, Soviet Workers and the New Communist Elite, Simon
Pirani, (2009) Routledge, London.
15. See, Frank Fischer, Technocracy and the politics of expertise, (1990)
Sage, London.
16. Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies, (1973)
Harper and Row, New York, p258.
17. Charles Landry, author of The Creative City, (2000) was one the
key proponents of the insidious idea that politics is a failure of true partnership,
which has been Landry’s great goal. In this Landry has been among those
who dangerously trivialise the deeply unequal politics of participation. See, Beyond
Social Inclusion Towards Cultural Democracy, Cultural Policy Collective,
p38. http://www.variant.org.uk/20texts/CultDemo.txt
18. See, Andrew Robinson and Simon Tormey, op. cit.
19. In April 2000 the BBC reported that “more than half of academics [in
the UK ] believe themselves to have ‘poor psychological health’.
And over a quarter reported that they had suffered from a ‘stress-related’ illness
in the past year.” See, ‘Academics’ poor mental health’,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/712391.stm (Accessed May 2009.)
20. Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning,
Fiona Hyslop MSP, wrote to the Scottish Funding Council on 18th of November
2008 underlining the SNP’s government’s ‘single purpose.’ Hyslop
wrote that “the Council occupies a unique position and I believe has a
vital role to play, as an agent of change, in realising our vision. There is
no other organisation, which can so significantly drive the contribution of
our colleges and universities to the delivery of economic, social and cultural
change.” For their part, the corporate friendly mission statement of the
Council says “Our vision is for a more dynamic, entrepreneurial and internationally
competitive Scotland, whose people are amongst the most skilled and educated
of any of our competitors, and whose colleges and universities are world-class
contributors to economic, social and cultural development.” http://www.sfc.ac.uk/index.htm (Accessed May 2009.)
21. Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, ‘Danish National Executive Report – 2000’ http://www.ebst.dk/publikationer/rapporter/gem/kap5.html (Accessed May 2009.)
22. See Clive Barnett’s, Culture and Democracy, Media Space and Representation,
(2003) Edinburgh University Press, and Roger A, Shiner’s, Freedom of
Commercial Expression, (2003) Oxford University Press. Perhaps the most
infamous example of the subversion of freedom of expression is the US Supreme
Court judgement on campaign finance in 1976 the Buckley v. Valeo case which
found that “money is speech.” This judgement effectively renounced
the classic principle of Isegoria which was implicitly expressed by
the findings of earlier cases and acts.
23. See ‘Culture Minister speaks about Creative Scotland, April 28, 2009’,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7dM7ykSUMg
24. Following a complaint from Culture & Sport Glasgow (CSG), Variant were
informed that the magazine had been removed from Glasgow venues managed by
CSG following the publication of ‘The New Bohemia’, an article by
Rebecca Gordon Nesbitt that critically mapped the political network of CSG.
The interference with the distribution of Variant would appear to contravene
the author’s rights to free political expression as determined by the
European Court of Human Rights in cases such as Lingens v. Austria (1986), Oberschlick
v. Austria (1991). See, ‘Freedom of Expression on Trial: Caselaw under
European Convention on Human Rights’, by Sally Burnheim, http://www.derechos.org/koaga/i/burnheim.html (Accessed
May 2009.) See also, ‘Comment’ in Variant, issue 33.
An
extract from CSG’s complaint to Variant, 23/7/08, states: “The
images you chose to illustrate the piece are in no way representative of Culture
and Sport Glasgow and the work that it does. They would appear to have been
chosen to illustrate the city of Glasgow in a negative way and thus associate
Culture and Sport Glasgow with negative imagery.”
25. From the Ten Keys to the ‘UNESCO Convention on the Protection and
Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions’, UNESCO 2007.
26. See, ‘Freedom of Expression on Trial: Caselaw under European Convention
on human rights’, by Sally Burnheim, http://www.derechos.org/koaga/i/burnheim.html (Accessed May 2009.)
27. For an example of the local or regional “democracy” that now
expresses profoundly anti-democratic and authoritarian instincts through the
manipulation of cultural identity, see ‘Spectacles of Autonomy and Crisis:
Or, What Bulls and Beauty Queens have to do with Regionalism in Eastern Bolivia,’ (2006)
by Bret Gustafson, Journal of Latin American Anthropology, Vol 11, No.2,
University of California Press.
28. http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/05/28141101/0
29. See, ‘The Scottish Diaspora and Diaspora Strategy: Insights and Lessons
from Ireland’ http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Publications/2009/05/28141101/1
(Accessed June 2009.)
30. In his classic study, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy – Lord
and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, the historian Barrington
Moore Jr came to consider the outcomes of Anglo Saxon moderation as “totally
inadequate … to make democracy work”. Based in a strong sense of
practicality, the moderate position “tries to solve issues by patently
ignoring them” (p139). Taking the long view that hindsight permits, Moore
writes: “As I have reluctantly come to read this evidence the costs of
moderation have been at least as atrocious as those of revolution, perhaps
a great deal more.” Penguin Books (1974), p 505.
|