Seven decades since fascism was resoundingly defeated it is suddenly resurgent. Vladimir Putin’s regime in Russia and Donald Trump’s stunning victory in the United States are its most glaring and dangerous manifestations, but there are now plenty of wannabes across the Western world, too, from Marie Le Pen in France to Nigel Farage in the United Kingdom . – just as there used to be numerous fascist regimes across Europe in the 1930s.
But if Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini are alive and well – at least in spirit – so is Karl Marx. But not because Steve Bannon, Trump’s early pick for his White House, has declared himself a Leninist. In fact communism, in the murderous and harebrained form it had been implemented in Lenin’s Soviet Union, was a dead end. On the other hand, with the emergence of the international class of the superrich and destruction of jobs around the world, Marx’s economic analysis is suddenly spot on
At a time when historians were chiefly concerned with great kings and major battles, Marx proposed a fundamental vision of world history as a history of technology: the way society produces goods and services determines the structure of the economy on which in turn the social structure is based.
Thus, slavery and serfdom were the best way to organize society when technology was primitive and production relied mainly on human labor. With the advent of the Age of the Machine, production became more efficient but machines had to be operated by trained workers. Industrial factories, steel mills and mines which emerged in Europe and North America in the course of the 19th century, along with transportation, communications and distribution networks, required large, well-educated and highly organized workforces. That brought about universal public education and an unprecedented spread of human rights and freedoms to broad circles of society.
The golden age of liberal democracy came in the 20th century. The industrial economy became highly efficient at producing goods and services and it needed rich markets to be able to sell them. That was the reason for the emergence of economic democracy in the West after World War II. Society became largely egalitarian and a great majority of citizens in the Western got access to material goods, education, healthcare, etc. in a system that became known as the welfare state.
Stalin’s economic system in the Soviet Union had nothing to do with Marx – except for the notion that it abolished private property, market forces and free enterprise. In fact, it was anti-Marxist in the way it adapted slavery to a much higher level of technological development. The system worked – rather poorly at that – for heavy industry and armaments, but failed miserably when it came to providing consumer goods and services or developing new technologies.
The emergence of a welfare state economy in the West during the Cold War made Marx with his thesis of the working class becoming impoverished and lumpenized as technology became more and more efficient, seem completely irrelevant. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Marxism was promptly pronounced dead – ironically, just as the high tech revolution was making his predictions come true.
Over the past two decades, new technologies solved the age-old challenge of producing sufficient quantities of goods. Manufacturing, which 50 years ago was still the most prestigious and profitable economic activity, suddenly became a race for the bottom, with falling wages and paper-thin profit margins. Prices were falling even faster than production costs.
Moreover, technology now allows society to produce goods and provide a broadening range of services with a minimal input from labor. The United States today produces the same number of motor vehicles as two decades ago, but it does so with one-third fewer workers. Many more of them can be replaced with robots at a moment’s notice – which puts severe downward pressure on wages and benefits.
We’re now on the brink of another major disaster for the global labor force: the development of the self-driving car. Over the next couple of decades tens of millions of driving jobs around the world will be eliminated, permanently depriving of work people who are trained to do little else and who are currently able to eke out a halfway decent living by driving cars, buses, trucks and trains.
Large strata of society have suffered not just a loss of income but of focus, hope and self-respect that a steady, meaningful job provides. The economic situation is actually far worse than we realize. The past eight years have been a period of historically unprecedented monetary stimulus. Central banks, led by the US Federal Reserve, have been printing money without restraint. This created a bubble economy that is employing a large number of people at a variety of service jobs – selling, delivering, serving, cleaning, etc. if – or rather when – stimulus ends, the bubble will burst and these jobs will be decimated. How fast? Look at the stunning job losses suffered by the US economy after the 2008 financial crisis. Unlike manufacturing jobs, these ephemeral service positions will be eliminated at a rate of a million per month.
At the same time, in line with Marx’s analysis, an international superrich class has emerged, the proverbial one-percenters controlling assets on par with the French aristocracy before the revolution and American captains of industry before the introduction of income tax in 1913.
The superrich are, above all, the owners of technology: high-tech entrepreneurs, top managers of large corporations and those who are involved in financing the economy through banks, hedge funds and private equity firms. They include traditional business people, corrupt politicians, especially in the Third World, global celebrities, etc.
There have always been wealthy people, and there have been periods in history when obscenely large fortunes were made in a similarly short time. But they were not accompanied by such wholesale destruction of the life prospects of so many others. .
The question arises what to do with a massive number of those who are falling out of the economic process. Marx proposed socialism – turning productive assets to society so that everyone works for a living wage which comes from the division of super profits. But Marx couldn’t have imagined a world in which there is so little work for humans. Nor could he have conceived that the world population, which measured 1.2 billion in 1850, would rocket to 7.5 billion today.
In any case, except for Bernie Sanders, meaningful socialist movements are nowhere to be seen. But an alarming variety of fascist solutions are popping up around the globe.
In Russia, such system emerged among the first and it therefore bears closer examination – especially in light of the Kremlin’s support for right wing movements, including the version of fascism known as trumpism in the United States
Russia developed a class of rich oligarchs at the end of the Cold War, as a small group of enterprising people privatized state-owned assets. They then hired an unassuming KGB man Vladimir Putin to safeguard their fortunes.
Putin, however, turned the tables on them, installed his own people as oligarchs and, when record-high oil prices started to drown Russia in petrodollars, he and his clique diverted much of that flow into their own pockets.
Russia was never a high tech Mecca. However, it faced the same problem of a vast superannuated industrial workforce when it’s manufacturing collapsed in the 1990s and it became a commodities exporter in the 2000s. With oil at over $100 per barrel, it made perfect economic sense to export it and use the money to import pretty much everything the country needed. Russian economists have long been talking about an “excess” (or unemployable) population that measured at least 20%.
Then, around 2012, faced with demands for more democracy and greater accountability, Putin hit upon a clever response. Ironically, it also came from Marxism – from Marx’s followers who in the 1920s and 1930s described fascism as a bulwark that capitalism was trying to erect in the face of an imminent communist revolution.
Basic ingredients are painfully familiar. It is a strong national leader, a benevolent father figure uniting the nation and struggling against foreign enemies and their domestic agents, who are trying to undermine his authority with calls for democracy, human rights, rule of law, limits on his power and other such trash. It is a government-controlled propaganda machine which glorifies the national leader and touts his achievements, both real or imagined. It is a national business establishment that is willing to sell its conscience and, ultimately, independence, because it is afraid of the dispossessed. It is an army of venal actors willing to play parliamentarians, judges and loyal citizens for scraps from the oligarchs’ table. Since fascism appeals to the angry underclass that feels it had been robbed of what they were due, it is a myth of past greatness, betrayal and defeat. And, first and foremost, it is resentment and hatred that is directed against “the other” – Chechens, Americans, Ukrainians, gays, the democratic opposition, whatever.
If you want to chart the course of the US government for the next four years you can’t do any better than look at Russia, for we’ll soon see Trump follow in the footsteps of Vlad. Putin has “raised Russia from its knees” the same way Trump will be making America great again.
Actually, subtly and almost unnoticeably, America is already more than halfway to its rediscovered greatness, Putin-style vote suppression is under way in many states, what with gerrymandering, voter ID laws, closed polling stations and voter list purges. The media has been Trump’s lapdog this entire election cycle. Politicians are already fawning on Trump as Republicans jockey for jobs in his administration and the Democrats hasten to fall into line too to save their seats. The rich – those of them who failed to support the Orange Buffoon during the election campaign – are swearing allegiance now. As to hatred – why, Putin himself may envy the skill with which Trump has stirred the hatred of minorities, immigrants, Muslims, Jews, women and the Democrats among his followers.
Just as in Russia, where money for education, healthcare, pensions, science and culture has dried up completely, so Trump’s government will get rid of Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid, privatize Social Security and abolish the departments of education and environmental protection.
In Russia, the cost of building roads is higher than if they had been built on Mars. Infrastructure budgets are pilfered and nothing gets built. If you hope to see Trump provide economic stimulus in the form of money for infrastructure, just take a look at the bunch of greedy scum he’s stuffing his administration with. And look at his own sleazy spawn who are using their father’s election to hawk their products.
Back in 1928, Stalin declared: “We have caught up with and moved ahead of leading capitalist nations in terms of establishing a new political system.” It turns out we had to wait almost a century for his words to come true.
