The far-right populist Alternative for Germany party rejects a values-based foreign policy, just as much as it rejects NATO and the US. That approach has attracted the attention of Beijing.
Well, they are right. Fascism was very much predicated on state enforced privatization. That’s what ‘Corporatism’ means. A political ideology where society is organized like a body - corpus - and each part is sovereign. Private Companies would thereafter be the lords of their respective sectors. Fascism isn’t defined by close relations between the Private and the Public sectors because that’s actually true for all forms of industrialized societies. Even and in many ways especially the early adopters of industrialization. British free trade ideology was limited to the United Kingdom, while India was run as a resource and tax farming colony for the benefits of British Capital. The State, with its armies and political supremacy, is no less important there.
This is an important distinction to be made because Fascism was invented to enforce social harmony in face of class struggle. It is meant to subsume all political discourse of clashing interests between bosses, employees, landlords, farmers, urban workers, service workers, and so on into the body of the nation. In a fascist society you’re not supposed to question the political order, as, for an example, bankers know best about the banking system which is why the State enforces their rights and power over their employees, and ensures that as much economic power is privatly held as possible.
It depends on wether you’re working with a conception of history or if you’re working with present-day definitions of common american political parlance. Corporatism did not straight up mean privatization. Only it was a political project with the aim to promote and secure private sovereignty over each sector of the economy. A society organized as a body - corpus. That is what Corporatism meant. You have the head, you have the arms, and the legs. Each part autonomous, and sovereign over it’s sector. Just as the fingers don’t tell the brain what to do, the employees must not contest the employer’s ownership of their labour. If one knew what to do with finance or production, one was a factory owner or a banker. These last elements were to be empowered and secured by the Fascist state, an entity born entirely to subsume class struggle into nationalist fervour. Hence Corporatism.
The reason why Corporatism was not defined by the interdependence of State and Private Corporations is because it couldn’t have been. As that would have been no different from Liberal or Socialistic States. All Industrialized economies are predicated on the state, on it’s monopoly of violence, on it’s ability to enforce property, contracts, to secure the money supply, and to galvanize social economic efforts. This even moreso true in the time period, as all the Liberal states of Europe were predicated on colonialism, just as the United States was predicated on manifest destiny. There’s no capitalism or industrialization without state action. Corporatism’s innovation - which is really an echo of early modern political thinking - was in ideologically subjugating civil society to the wishes of the private.
Nowadays people are too quickly to call any state they dislike ‘corporatistic’, ‘corporativistic’, or something along those lines because, ultimately, we live in society that is organized around those ideas. Every country from the liberal west to the post colonial east at one point played along Corporatist rules. Even when those Corporatist states were dismantled - early in the US, after the 80s oil shocks elsewhere - we continued to conceptualize the economy and our roles within it according to what the fascists had in mind. So the word loses all meaning. People will say the US is corporatist now because the State intervenes in the economy. Except it always did, and the hopes that the government would stop caring about social harmony and welfare, and limited itself to enforcing contract and property only, was always there. We merely live in a post Soviet acceleration.
Wasn’t fascist corporatism basically inspired by functionalism? I vaguely remember reading about how Durkheim rejected materialism and class conflict in favor of a form of corporatism.
It’s a wide discussion, you can see arguments of all sorts. You can estabilish where it came from, what were it’s contemporary philosophical and aesthetic influences, what were the material conditions that led to it, and how far back you wish to place each of them. One can go so far as to say that Corporatism is an echo of pre capitalist Europe, and the guild economies of centuries past.
you’re
Well, they are right. Fascism was very much predicated on state enforced privatization. That’s what ‘Corporatism’ means. A political ideology where society is organized like a body - corpus - and each part is sovereign. Private Companies would thereafter be the lords of their respective sectors. Fascism isn’t defined by close relations between the Private and the Public sectors because that’s actually true for all forms of industrialized societies. Even and in many ways especially the early adopters of industrialization. British free trade ideology was limited to the United Kingdom, while India was run as a resource and tax farming colony for the benefits of British Capital. The State, with its armies and political supremacy, is no less important there.
This is an important distinction to be made because Fascism was invented to enforce social harmony in face of class struggle. It is meant to subsume all political discourse of clashing interests between bosses, employees, landlords, farmers, urban workers, service workers, and so on into the body of the nation. In a fascist society you’re not supposed to question the political order, as, for an example, bankers know best about the banking system which is why the State enforces their rights and power over their employees, and ensures that as much economic power is privatly held as possible.
Privatization is absolutely NOT what corporatism means.
It depends on wether you’re working with a conception of history or if you’re working with present-day definitions of common american political parlance. Corporatism did not straight up mean privatization. Only it was a political project with the aim to promote and secure private sovereignty over each sector of the economy. A society organized as a body - corpus. That is what Corporatism meant. You have the head, you have the arms, and the legs. Each part autonomous, and sovereign over it’s sector. Just as the fingers don’t tell the brain what to do, the employees must not contest the employer’s ownership of their labour. If one knew what to do with finance or production, one was a factory owner or a banker. These last elements were to be empowered and secured by the Fascist state, an entity born entirely to subsume class struggle into nationalist fervour. Hence Corporatism.
The reason why Corporatism was not defined by the interdependence of State and Private Corporations is because it couldn’t have been. As that would have been no different from Liberal or Socialistic States. All Industrialized economies are predicated on the state, on it’s monopoly of violence, on it’s ability to enforce property, contracts, to secure the money supply, and to galvanize social economic efforts. This even moreso true in the time period, as all the Liberal states of Europe were predicated on colonialism, just as the United States was predicated on manifest destiny. There’s no capitalism or industrialization without state action. Corporatism’s innovation - which is really an echo of early modern political thinking - was in ideologically subjugating civil society to the wishes of the private.
Nowadays people are too quickly to call any state they dislike ‘corporatistic’, ‘corporativistic’, or something along those lines because, ultimately, we live in society that is organized around those ideas. Every country from the liberal west to the post colonial east at one point played along Corporatist rules. Even when those Corporatist states were dismantled - early in the US, after the 80s oil shocks elsewhere - we continued to conceptualize the economy and our roles within it according to what the fascists had in mind. So the word loses all meaning. People will say the US is corporatist now because the State intervenes in the economy. Except it always did, and the hopes that the government would stop caring about social harmony and welfare, and limited itself to enforcing contract and property only, was always there. We merely live in a post Soviet acceleration.
Wasn’t fascist corporatism basically inspired by functionalism? I vaguely remember reading about how Durkheim rejected materialism and class conflict in favor of a form of corporatism.
It’s a wide discussion, you can see arguments of all sorts. You can estabilish where it came from, what were it’s contemporary philosophical and aesthetic influences, what were the material conditions that led to it, and how far back you wish to place each of them. One can go so far as to say that Corporatism is an echo of pre capitalist Europe, and the guild economies of centuries past.
Thanks for the reply; I’m not all that well-versed on the subject, so I definitely need to read more about it!
Damn you really got him kind gentlesir with this scathing correction, I tip my fedora to you