Internationale Politik George W. Obama: Das Ende einer Hoffnung

CounterPunch, August 06, 2013
America, Monopoly Capital, and Advanced Industrialism
Toward a Definition of Fascism
By NORMAN POLLACK -> http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/08/06/toward-a-definition-of-fascism/

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Is this fascism? I leave that for the reader to decide, provided, however, he or she does not focus on Tea Partiers, Fox News, Republican intransigence, but rather, probes systemic wrongs, of which those cases are secondary to the structure of power, the integration of the military into the governing system of political-corporate elites. Look to Obama, the Democrats, present-day centrists and progressives, for there lies sophisticated corporatism itself, capable of an international policy of confrontation with China and a domestic policy which adds to the militarization of capitalism also its financialization, together as perhaps a New Autarky as the rest of the world has second thoughts about American leadership. In terms of analysis, one’s definition of fascism might turn from Nazi Germany as the archetype to one resembling more the phase of US capitalist development in the last century: dynamism of productive forces (although this is lessening), nonbudging capitalist internal structure—industrial growth encased in the Old Order. That is exactly the situation of postwar Japan, where interpenetration has proceeded so far as to indicate the very structural characteristics of hierarchy and class stratification, the Old Order, as departure point for monopolistic industry and banking. All that is lacking is militarism and exorbitant defense outlays—and, if America is any indication, that may change as advanced capitalism progresses further. I recall here the phrase of the respected Japanese political scientist Masao Maruyama, when he described Japan’s version of interpenetration (which also disturbed him about its implications for the future). He termed the business-government relationship the “close-embrace” system. Following the usage of Barrington Moore in his brilliant comparative history of the principal political-economic modes of development, now specifically with relation to Japan, which he termed “Asian Fascism,” I note, from his Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy a phrase which best captures the definition of fascism I have been seeking: “modernization from above.”

NORMAN POLLACK is the author of “The Populist Response to Industrial America” (Harvard) and “The Just Polity” (Illinois), Guggenheim Fellow, and professor of history emeritus, Michigan State University. His new book, “Eichmann on the Potomac”, will be published by CounterPunch/AK Press in the fall of 2013.