This text - https://libcom.org/library/on-fascism-bonefeld - is Bonefeld’s review of Agnoli’s book which is not yet translated into English
- “incorporating the trade unions into positions of responsibility both towards the well-ordered conduct of labour-relations in production and the bargaining over wages in terms of the so-called national interest” at least in the US this happened much earlier. I’m skeptical that it didn’t happen earlier in Germany or Italy. I know the tripartite format (rep of labor, of capital, and of the state/the public who all govern together over labor relations and do so as at least semi-public figures) was the dominant model in the US by 1902 or so. (The US turned away from that in the 30s toward more top down rule by experts and judges, demoting the reps of both labor and capital and making the process less public.) This also makes me wonder if US and British reconstruction efforts in Europe may have helped bring some specific models for incorporating unions into capitalism. I mostly know about the US but I do know there were international networks of policy and social science/social work researchers as early as 1900 - state statistical bureaus, government commissions of experts, and university researchers would collect and share reports on labor and social policy around the world in order to identify useful policies. So while efforts at incorporation were incorporating unions into specifically national economies, polities, and bodies of law, they were informed by international networks discussing collegially how to best manage capitalist social relations.
- the bits on the rollback of the welfare state and so on make this sound like it’s talking about the beginning of neoliberalism. It’s very interesting to me to think about the conflicts of the 70s in Italy and Germany as happening during the beginning of the end of the older regime and the beginning of experiments with neoliberalism, I hadn’t made that connection before.
- I can’t tell what Bonefeld means by the phrase “fascist means” and “fascist socio-economic elements.” Trying to be charitable I take the point to mean that the distance between what’s uncontroversially identifiable as fascism and democracy is sometimes overstated and democratic states can sometimes do things that are appalling and more similar to fascist states than is recognized.
- The bit on the role of the state and on capitalism in general (‘two sets of property owners’ and so on, the fascist state adopting an ethical posture) is quite good. It makes me wonder thought a bit about the specificity of fascism. I know the US adopted some more authoritarian and incorporative measures regarding union in both world wars (bans on strikes but greater government support for workers’ negotiating with bosses), and took ethical postures toward the war effort. I would bet all the combatant governments did so in both wars. That could be taken as supporting the ‘look there are elements of fascism/fascist means all over the place’ claim, but given that it predates fascism and was present on all sides in a conflict where only some governments were ‘historical fascism’ I don’t see why fascism should be the label applied. I’d prefer a kind of genus of which fascism is a species, I think that’d be clearer.
- I think some of the elements of the account of so-called ‘left fascism’ apply to Democrat responses to Trump supporters, like the bit about defending democracy may mean restricting democracy. This has been turned down lately in response to GOP voter restriction efforts but closer to Trump’s election I remember a fair bit of Democrat contempt for the participation of some people in democracy. The ‘ugh white women’ thing is in part a version of that too, and there’s an element of desires for expert rule in some of the conversation about regulation and climate change in response to Trump’s deregulation.
- the point about crisis-consciousness inhering above all in the right is *fascinating*. I think ‘crisis-consciousness’ is worth digging into at length. I’m thinking of Fraser/Jaeggi again, among other things. My impulse is to say that in the present the left/center is most conscious of political crisis (in part noticing some real developments, in part trying to constitute a mild crisis for the sake of getting the dems in/Trump out) and ecological crisis, and the right is most conscious of economic crisis. That may be wrong, it may be better to say that in the present there are multiple contending crisis-claims, and that what the/a crisis actually is partially determined by which set of crisis claims wins out.
- I think there are definitely people in the US today analyzing the world a lot like Schmitt did as Bonefeld describes, which is unsettling.
- “one national boat: the majority rowing the minority navigating.” This is great.
- “what dangers exist when the class struggle has reached an impasse where the bourgeoisie has run out of liberal-democratic resolutions to the crisis of capitalist accumulation and where the working class while resisting attacks on its conditions, does not operate in a revolutionary way.” Good points, but 1) we can take this on board while also seeing ‘historical fascism’ as the sum total of fascism and as not coming back, as long as we think there are other potential threats that would be, while different, equally bad
2) this would be better if it had more recognition of the tremendous brutality that is possible within “liberal-democratic resolutions.” Bonefeld must know this, and he alludes in this direction via his ‘elements of fascism’ and ‘fascist means’ talk but I think the majority of leftists in the US today if they read this would not pick up on that.
3) The working class in the US anyway is not particularly resisting attacks, it’s more prone and getting kicked, hence I’m not worried about fascism coming as a response to that resistance though I am really, really worried about those kicks
liberal democracies seem to have always been really brutal. I think what they've done is draw lines around what kinds of brutality are and are not acceptable (lynching used to be relatively okay, for instance) relative to various populations. Shifts in those lines are super important, I don't mean to minimize that. I think that's the force of Bonefeld's term "fascist means" in that review of Agnoli. (I probably wasn't clear, btw, that book sounds great and I wish it was in English.)
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