Climate, technology and chaos Blog

Some degree of planning is probably useful when facing challenges, even granted the limited predictability of complex systems. Businesses need to plan all the time. However, as argued in the previous post, free market advocates attack government planning, especially planning for general welfare and protection from the market, as “a denial of freedom.” The only essentials of freedom are said to be “free enterprise and private ownership” (265). This could be said to be ‘Class War’ because it guarantees

the fullness of freedom for those whose income, leisure, and security need no enhancing, and [gives] a mere pittance of liberty for the people, who may in vain attempt to make use of their democratic rights to gain shelter from the power of the owners of property.

265

These objections to action means that the State becomes useless in facing challenges, particularly those challenges generated by the economic system. It may even privatise some of its operations, making itself and its people more vulnerable to the illth of the market. Polanyi argues that the “victory of fascism was made practically unavoidable by the [free marketeer’s] obstruction of any reform involving planning, regulation, or control” (265).

Freedom cannot flourish in a complex society without support for everyone to be free, or without enabling people to use their freedom. This requires law, regulation, and spending – without spending to help the ‘lower classes’, only the richest are free. It is not freedom to be at the beck and call and whims of a boss, to be the victim of plutocratic corporate planning, or to have no future.

Polanyi points out, that despite the free market ideology, no society is possible in which power and compulsion are completely absent, nor is it possible to have a world in which force has no function. What the free market people appear to want is not a world without power, but a world in which only corporate force can exist, democracy is pointless and the powerful can avoid responsibility for the consequences of their actions. For them the market is absolute good, and the democratic State is bad. The authoritarian state which protects the market is far better. Hence their sympathy to the idea of fascism, which might otherwise be hard to explain.

This [reluctance to plan for freedom] leaves no alternative but either to remain faithful to an illusionary idea of freedom and deny the reality of society, or to accept that reality and reject the idea of freedom. The first is the liberal’s [free marketeer’s] conclusion; the latter the fascist’s. No other seems possible.

(266)

In keeping with the implicit arguments of free market people, fascists protect the market economy and society from collapse, through the “extirpation of all democratic institutions, both in the industrial and the political realm” (245).

Essentially, the defense of free markets, and the diminution of democracy and government planning for general welfare, provides the situation for the rise of fascism.

While people may want to explain fascism by factors such as cultural history “there was no type of background — of religious, cultural, or national tradition — that made a country immune to fascism, once the conditions for its emergence were given” (246).

While fascism aimed at getting a mass following, it is not remotely a democratic or popular movement. Its strength

was reckoned not by the numbers of its adherents but by the influence of the persons in high position whose good will the fascist leaders possessed, and whose influence in the community could be counted upon to shelter them from the consequences of an abortive revolt, thus taking the risks out of revolution

(246)

This means that “fascist tactics were invariably those of a sham rebellion arranged with the tacit approval of the authorities who pretended to have been overwhelmed by force” (238). Fascists were invited in, to save the anti-worker forces and boost the conservative and pro-corporate, counter revolution (248). The elites pretended they had yielded to the people, to give the changes legitimacy.

In the fascist rebellion, the anti-democratic anti-egalitarian authorities preserved and “the bulwarks of democracy and constitutional liberties were stormed and their defenses found wanting in… spectacular fashion” (247), through being weakened by ‘free market’ politicians.

In Prussia, in July 1932, the legal government of the Social Democrats, entrenched in the seat of legitimate power, capitulated to the mere threat of unconstitutional violence on the part of Herr von Papen. Some six months later Hitler possessed himself peacefully of the highest positions of power, whence he at once launched a revolutionary attack of wholesale destruction against the institutions of the Weimar Republic and the constitutional parties. To imagine that it was the strength of the movement which created situations such as these, and not to see that it was the situation that gave birth in this case to the movement, is to miss the outstanding lesson of the past decades.

(247)

Summary

Polanyi argues that the fascist takeover comes about because free market supporters depower the State, de-democratise the State, imperiling freedom and organisation for most people, and destroying the capacity of the State to face challenges. This produces insolvable problems, as no planning or discussion can be allowed. Fascists with the support of the desperate elites (conservatives and free marketeers), resolve these challenges by asserting their power over the State and destroying non-corporate freedom completely. We can also suspect that fascism gave a morality of heroism, co-operation and self-sacrifice to the Nation, which people found more satisfactory than the self-interest of free markets.

I think that Polanyi ignores the importance of scapegoats and hatred to fascists. They were struggling against evil leftists, evil academics, artists, Jews, immigrants and so on. Those creatures were responsible for the troubles ordinary people faced, and so there was no need to challenge the real power elites, who could relax, knowing anger was being displaced elsewhere.

Relevance

This is relevant today because the dominant neoliberals on both sides of politics inhibit government action to help preserve freedom and general welfare, or to act on climate change and ecological destruction, because this might impinge on the ‘freedom’ of the market, to pay low wages, siphon off profits to the elites, or pollute.

The problems are accumulating. Hence neoliberals are shifting to support authoritarian leaders who will (in turn) support corporate action, freedom to pollute, freedom to discard staff, and freedom from having any responsibility for the damage they have caused.

Republicans have basically handed their party over to Trump and authoritarianism. People in the UK seem to be trying for a less leader-focused lack of responsibility in the elites. In Australia the media has promoted the more corporate friendly parts of One Nation, and the Coalition. Everywhere it seems like people are fed up with ineffectiveness, but having their anger displaced onto vulnerable scapegoats and voting for authorities.

The binary options seem to be restore democratic, active and responsible government that can face challenges, or get in the authoritarians who will purge people, protect business, and generate new challenges.

Tags: fascism, neoliberalism

This entry was posted on March 17, 2024 at 4:16 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.