The Independents and the Fascists: Corporatists without Policies

There’s been much shouting this week by the Labour defectors – Chris Leslie, Chuka Umunna, Gavin Shuker, Joan Ryan, Lucian Berger, Angela Smith, Ruth Smeeth and the Blairites inside the Labour party – Tom Watson and John Mann, about how anti-Semitic the Labour party is. But the Independents themselves share at least two features with Mussolini’s Fascists.

Firstly, they both started out claiming not to have any set policies. Mussolini started off as a radical Socialist, and the 1919 Fascist manifesto was as radical as that of the Italian socialists. Later, Mussolini opportunistically moved to the right, taking money from big business and attacking organised labour – the free trade unions, and socialists and anarchists. He began his tenure of power by proclaiming that his policies would be pure Manchester school. In other words, absolute free trade. In fact, within a few years of his seizure of power, Mussolini had set up the classic features of the Italian Fascist state: his personal dictatorship, autarky and a rigidly controlled economy, and the replacement of the Italian parliament with a Chamber of Fasci and Corporations. The corporations were industrial organisations containing representatives of management and the unions, as well as members of the Fascist party to represent the people. Mussolini then sat down to write his own account of the principles and policies of Fascism, The Doctrine of Fascism. Which he then had recalled and pulped the next year, because, he declared, Fascism had no doctrine. And in fact many Italian intellectuals had voted for the Fascists because they believed that. The Fascists stated that action preceded theory and philosophy, and so they would simply whatever was necessary to solve Italy’s problems without worrying about a fixed political programme or underlying ideology.

And now we have the so-called Independents, who also claim not to have a fixed programme or ideology. They also claim to be flexible, and that they will be doing things in a new way. The party is a corporation, so they don’t have to reveal their donors, as required by electoral law. At the same time, while they claim to be receiving many inquiries for membership from the public, they don’t actually seem to have a mass membership. Rather like Mussolini later declared that the Fascists didn’t want to be a mass party, and limited the number of party members to the sansepolcristi, those who were present at the party’s foundation. But whereas Mussolini tried to limit party membership, the Independents have gone one better, and don’t seem to have any members at all.

And they also stand for corporatism, albeit of the Thatcherite/Reaganite kind. This is when private corporations determine policy through donating to political parties, which then act in their interests and frequently give staff from those same corporations posts in government. As the Blair government did, and which is extensively documented in George Monbiot’s Captive State. So far, Umunna, Leslie and the others haven’t yet adopted the cult of the infallible leader, as that remains firmly around Margaret Thatcher. Nor are they greeting each other yet with the Fascist salute. But nevertheless, despite their fine verbiage about free institutions, parliamentary democracy and a free media, they are very antidemocratic.

Like Mussolini’s Fascists, they are a party for the rich against the poor and working people. They should be recognised and discarded as the danger to the British people they are.

Raheem Kassam Knows Zilch about Fascism, Imperialism, Nationalism or Socialism. And Definitely not History

In my last piece, I discussed a twitter argument between Raheem Kassam, one of the most vehement leaders of the ‘Leave’ campaign, and James Melville on Twitter. The row had erupted when Kassam started moaning about how left-wingers were reporting his comments to Twitter in the hope of getting him thrown off social media. Melville had no sympathy for him, telling Kassam that he was reaping what he sowed after Kassam had put up a piece himself telling his supporters to pile onto Melville’s own account and hound him off the Net. And when Kassam put up a picture of Churchill in a yellow vest, Melville rhetorically asked him if he knew that Winnie had been an opponent of far right extremism. Which brought forth the following tirade from Kassam:

Lol now this guy who had a meltdown yesterday is going through my feed picking out tweets he thinks he can argue with. Churchill defeated imperialistic (opposite of nationalist) National Socialism (opposite of right wing) which wanted a united Europe under Germany (EU)”.

Which was followed by

“Fascism is an ideology. Conservatism is a philosophy. There’s your first problem in attempting to link the two. Fascism concerned itself with a corporate-state nexus (like socialism, and indeed our current pro-EU system does). Your understanding of philosophy is poor”.

Zelo Street commented on the relationship between Nazism and imperialism by pointing out that the Nazis were nationalists, far right and had zero relationship to the EU. Melville himself pointed out that Hitler and the Nazis were Fascists and right-wing extremists.

Kassam’s views on Nazism, the EU, Fascism and socialism are bonkers, but they’re a staple part of much Libertarian and ‘Leave’ campaign ideology. They follow Jonah Goldberg, the author of Liberal Fascism, in believing that the Nazis were socialists because, er, the Nazis said they were. Despite the fact that Hitler staunchly supported capitalism, did not want to nationalize any firms except in emergencies, smashed the trade unions and put their leaders and activists in the concentration camps along with leaders and members of the mainstream German socialist party, the SDP, the Communist KPD, and anarchists, as well as other political opponents. Kassam also doesn’t seem to realize, or doesn’t want to admit, that the Nazis and Italian Fascists were very much nationalists. The full name of the Nazi party was the National Socialist German Workers Party. And unlike the ‘socialist’ part of their name and programme, they took nationalism very seriously. Only ethnic Germans could legally be citizens. German industry, values and identity, or rather the Nazi version of them, were aggressively promoted.

The Italian Fascists were exactly the same, although they retained the trade unions, but incorporated them into the machinery of state government and control and made them subservient to the state and private industry. At the same time, private industry was aggressively promoted. The Fascists also aggressively pursued a policy of italianita – Italian national identity. Ethnic minorities within Italian borders, such as those communities which spoke German or one of the Yugoslavian languages were to be forced to become Italian and made to speak Italian. At the same time the party absorbed much of the ideology and finally the party of the Italian Nationalists, which was merged with the Fascists in 1922.

Kassam is right about Hitler wanting a united Europe under Germany. However, he did not want anything like the EU. The EU supposedly is a union of democratic states with equal status. It is not an empire nor an occupying power, although fanatics like UKIP have claimed it is. The claim that the Nazis were the founders of the EU is based on a piece of Nazi ideology devised later during the War when they were losing to Stalin and the Soviet Union. They weren’t enough blonde, ethnic Germans to fight the Russians, who were showing very clearly that they definitely weren’t the ‘subhumans’ of Nazi racial doctrine. So they tried to gain support from the occupied countries by spuriously claiming that Nazism stood for a united, capitalist Europe against the Communist threat. It was a piece of propaganda, nothing more. The real origins of EU lay in the 1950s with trade agreements between France and Germany and the establishment of the customs union between Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg – the ‘Benelux’ countries.

Then there’s Kassam’s claptrap about corporativism equals socialism. By corporativism they mean state control or regulation of capitalism. The hardcore Libertarians believe that only an economy absolutely run by private enterprise without any state regulation is really capitalist. But this situation has never existed. Governments since the Middle Ages have regulated industry to a greater or lesser degree, and industrialists, merchants and entrepreneurs have always sought state aid. For example, before Adam Smith wrote his Wealth of Nations promoting laissez faire free trade, the dominant commercial ideology in Britain was mercantilism. This was a system of regulations governing British international trade. This included tying the colonies in North America and the Caribbean into a very constraining relationship with Britain and each other in which their exports were rigidly controlled in order to keep them serving the commercial interests of Britain.

From the ’50s to the end of the ’70s there was also a form of corporativism in Britain, in which the economy was subject to state planning in which the government consulted with both the industrialists and the trade unions. It was somewhat like the Fascist version, but within a democratic framework and pursued by both Labour and Tory governments. The current form of corporativism, in which private industry dominates and controls Congress and elected politicians through political donations and sponsorship, in return receiving government posts and determining government policy, is very much in the sole interests of private industry and capitalism.

But I’m not surprised Kassam doesn’t know anything about this. He is, after all, a hack with the extreme right-wing news organization, Breitbart, and has appeared several times in articles by the anti-racist, anti-religious extremism organization Hope Not Hate because of his vicious islamophobia. As for his distinction between Conservatism and Fascism, this also doesn’t work. Fascism is notoriously fluid ideologically, and is therefore extremely difficult to define. In many ways, it was whatever line Mussolini thought was a good idea at the time. The Duce wrote a book defining it, The Doctrine of Fascism, but contradicted himself the next year by declaring that Fascism had no doctrine. It was a movement, not an ideology. As for Conservatism, while the Tory philosopher Roger Scruton in his 1980s book on it stated that it was largely ‘mute’, it is also ideological. As it stands now, it promotes private enterprise and attacks state involvement in industry and welfare provision. And a recent academic study quoted in the new edition of Lobster, issue 77, states that Conservative parties in the West are becoming more ideological and are increasingly resembling the authoritarian parties of the former Communist bloc.

Kassam is therefore utterly wrong. Socialism is not corporativism, and the modern form of corporativism is very definitely capitalist. The Nazis weren’t socialists, they were nationalists and imperialists, and were in no way the founders of the EU. But such distinctions clearly don’t matter to the extreme right-wing propagandists of Breitbart. And especially those, whose own islamophobia is shared by real, overt Fascists in the Alt Right.

For further information, go to the Zelo Street article at http://zelo-street.blogspot.com/2019/01/raheem-kassam-fails-history-101.html