Understanding New Forms of Fascism in America

Understanding New Forms of

Fascism in America

Change is upon us, and it can’t be managed by reforming one or another aspect of the atrocities we are experiencing.

Many American people, especially young people, have shown they are willing to take to the streets. The effectiveness of the tens of thousands who are demanding change is increased by understanding what they are up against, who the enemy is and what the possibilities are.

There is a growing recognition that the U.S. government is developing into a fascist apparatus, that more openly represents the interests of the corporations than the people of the country. This merger of the corporations and the government exposes the ongoing construction of a fascist state, veiled by the misleading term “privatization.” Privatization in the U.S. takes the form of paying private corporations with public money to carry out what was once a government responsibility. Legal, environmental, and labor legislation beneficial to corporate interests puts the corporations beyond public accountability.

Chiara Cordelli, brings this to light in “Why Privatization Is Wrong” (Boston Review), asking, “Can justice ever be achieved, and can democratic legitimacy ever be secured, in a privatized state?” She elaborates, “What about access to health care and welfare? Although governments may fund most of these services, they also contract out to private corporations an increasingly large part of their provision, and with it the de facto authority to decide who should be eligible for these services. Some thirty-three thousand private U.S. organizations are under a total of some two hundred thousand government contracts for social services delivery, including education, health care, child care, and unemployment benefits. In some U.S. states, nonprofit organizations control up to 90 percent of overall social service delivery.”

The entire world is undergoing a leap from one economic base — production with human labor — to another without human labor. New tools introduced in the last stage of electromechanical industry have created a break from the past development of the economy. New tools, new forms of automation using no human labor, have begun to replace the old. A new epoch of human history is upon us, brought by the microchip, computer, and robot.

A new class of workers is being created as successive waves of work go out of existence. It is being pushed out of the economy, as it cannot work for wages needed to buy the necessities of life. This creates a problem for the ruling class. The new class must fight for access to food, homes, and water, even though it has no money to secure those things. It is compelled to transform society into public ownership of the new tools of production.

The ruling class is reorganizing the government to attempt to stabilize the situation and protect their interests by merging the state, and all its financial, political, and military power, with the corporations. That objective base of fascism allows the corporations to shift the burden of the crisis onto the backs of the workers. These are the economics of fascism. As the burden becomes intolerable and the people begin to resist, the state will clamp down, destroying what little democracy exists and attempting to prevent any struggle of the people. This is the social face of fascism.

With the end of communal, primitive communist societies and the establishment of private ownership of the tools (means of production) and the economy, the dominant class was essentially a ruling class. They owned the primary means of production, at first land and natural resources and slaves, then machinery and industry.

During the last 10,000 years, special bodies of armed men became indispensable for the dominant class to maintain control over the exploited class. A power necessary to the ruling class arises out of society to keep the opposing classes from consuming themselves and society in fruitless struggle. It places itself above society so that the clash between conflicting classes is kept within the bounds of “order.” This power is the State: police, a standing army, prisons, the system of courts, and institutions of coercion of all kinds. As in anything else financing, administration and structure are required to develop and uphold this special power. The officials also stand “above society” protected by special laws and immunity.

Today the corporations use the State apparatus to guarantee their interests and their profits, whatever it takes. The relationship between capitalist and worker, that is the basis of capitalism, is being destroyed. But the class representing those who own and run the corporations as private property intends to guarantee that they retain their power, wealth, and privilege, under whatever new form the economic system takes. The State continues to grant corporations, which extract wealth from society for the owning class, unlimited rights, and powers.

The role of the state apparatus in society today is the same as the slave-owning class of the U.S.: as historian Kenneth Stampp put it, “To Make Them Stand in Fear.” Force is the leading aspect of control of the new fascist reorganization of the State.

You can find examples of this throughout history, but you can also find many changes taking place today to develop a “new” fascism. The fascism needed today is to control a growing mass of people who are marginalized and cast aside as unnecessary and “useless” in a fully electronic, digital, AI-oriented economy. Today the ruling class is making the changes needed to use a highly aggressive, militarized fascist state to control a population fighting just to survive.

A thorough discussion and a good understanding of the development of the State and the fascism of the 21st century will help us in our daily practical work.

There are concentration camps in America. More than one in 500 Americans has died of Coronavirus. Thousands of children have been confined at our border apart from their families, their lives changed forever. Over 10,000 Haitian immigrants were stranded under a Texas bridge, with the government flying them back to Haiti, which has become uninhabitable for much of the population. Police have killed over five thousand Americans between 2015 and 2020, with 936 more in the past year. Police in at least 98 cities used some form of tear gas against Americans protesting the killing of George Floyd. Local governments as well as the federal government are passing laws suppressing the right to protest, vote, and file lawsuits against corporations.

The ruling class works to consolidate a new fascist society, aiming its fire at all who no longer add to their profit. Our new class has a leading role in transforming society. Today, there is the ability to have an abundance of food and housing and have quality education and health care, to live a cultured life. We can fight forward with the understanding that robotic, digital production can be publicly owned, and the abundance it creates can be distributed to all without money. RC

November.December 2021 Vol31.Ed6 
This article originated in Rally, Comrades!
P.O. Box 477113 Chicago, IL 60647 rally@lrna.org
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