The invisible hand defended from its enemies

I’m probably not going to make too many more forays into economics and politics, but this book review by Terry Eagleton seems to get so many little things right along the way to its general conclusion that fascism and capitalism can work exceedingly well together that it at least, I think, deserves a brief consideration of the charge once again. Consider this passage, from near the beginning:

“Exactly what fascism consists of, however, is far less clear. In some leftist circles, the word is lobbed loosely around to vilify anyone in the cramped space to the right of Conrad Black. Yet fascists are radicals, unlike right-wing conservatives. Conservatives believe in God, tradition, the monarchy, civilisation and the individual, whereas fascists are pagan, primitivist, collectivist state-worshippers who prefer jackboots to crowns. Fascists admire productive workers (including productive capitalists) and denounce effete aristocrats and the idle rich; conservatives tend to champion both groups, among whose ranks they themselves can frequently be found. Ezra Pound was a fascist, but T S Eliot was a conservative. Fascists strut, while conservatives lounge.”

There are obviously some problems with this as a general description; for one thing, it seems a lot more descriptive of conservatives in Britain, where they are no longer a very viable political force, than in America, where this brand of conservatism is being more and more taken over on that end of the political spectrum by religious fundamentalism, which can be extremely radical in its own right, given that it is not fundamentally tied to any of the existing pillars of social organization except scriptural literalism. But in any case, few I think could argue deeply with the fundamental distinction between conservatism and fascism made here, especially as a description of the early part of the century, when the identifiably fascist movements were most prominent in the West. I especially like this little closing touch:
“Fascism is an anti-political kind of politics, which elevates national unity over class distinctions, gut prejudice over ideological debate, and race over reason. Its leaders tend to be grubby lower-middle-class yobbos with unstable mentalities and criminal records.”

I even think the author’s definition, which he approvingly cites, is one of the better summaries one could think of to define fascism as a movement:

“he sees fascism as a mass-based form of militant nationalism, one working in uneasy alliance with the usual elites, which pursues policies of internal cleansing and external expansion so as to unify and regenerate what it regards as a victimised, humiliated nation. It springs from a major crisis of the liberal capitalist order, and elevates cultural particularism over democracy, individualism and universal rights.”

Probably most readers of this site at any time will find the development of this definition more troublesome, however:

“Paxton admits that “fascism is inconceivable in the absence of a mature and expanding socialist left”. Bankers and manufacturers may have baulked at shaking hands with a ranting, off-the-wall runt like Adolf Hitler, but this book concedes that the two social forces co-operated fairly well once they had struck their Faustian pact.

If fascism claimed to be radical, it was a bogus revolution that never once put its anti-capitalist rhetoric into practice. Instead, it set about efficiently exterminating the political left. For all their crafty appeals to lower-middle-class grouses, fascist regimes left existing patterns of property and social class largely intact. The disgruntled petite bourgeoisie were taken for the longest ride in their unenviable history. With breathtaking insolence, the fascists used aspects of their ideology to prop up the very state that they found so oppressive.”

And even more so this:

“It remains to be seen whether the world will revert to fascism. But there are certainly signs that a planet well stocked with authoritarian capitalist regimes is on the cards. Liberal capitalist nations are becoming more authoritarian under the threat of terrorist attacks, while societies which were already authoritarian, such as China, are turning capitalist. The two systems are meeting each other, so to speak, coming the other way. Meanwhile, the globe is well furnished with capitalist set-ups that were never liberal in the first place, as well as with regimes whose former colonial proprietors exported market forces to their shores while forgetting to include democratic institutions in the cargo. The assumption that the free market and political democracy go naturally together was always pretty dubious, and fascism is one dramatic refutation of it. But we might now be moving deeper into a world where the two go together like a horse and cabbage.”

The ultimate message seems to be that capitalism is at the least not antithetical in practice to pregmatic fascism, and furthermore that the two may co-exist very well together, the point being to challenge the dogma that capitalism is somehow itself a guardian against creeping totalitarianism. I suppose the point is that Eagleton, who made a name for himself decades ago as a Marxist literary critic, wants to imply that capitalism is at the least insufficient as an ideology to reject authoritarianism. But given that in the article he seems to implicitly claim that Stalin was a fascist, and that the fascists themselves sold out their principles to gain power in Europe (as well as access to the financial resources of the bankers and the industrialists), one could perhaps say with justice that there is no ideology under purview here that is sufficient to rule out in practice the emergence of its opposite.

I am no lover of capitalism for its own sake, primarily because in my opinion the centreal ideological point of capitalism is that the maximum marginal benefit to be gained in trade is the primary goal of all agents in society, which I find to be as reductive in its own way as Marx’s philosophy. But I can at the least see the benefits of defending any idea from a slander on it. I can easily see that the first part of that ideological point, without the caveat “through trade,” could easily justify any sort of oppression and violence imaginable. But it seems to me that real trade presupposes two conditions, transparency of information and freedom on the part of the consumer and producer to make decisions without coercion. Such conditions in my opinion make capitalism fundamentally incompatible with violence and the use of coercive force as well as, of course, lying, slander, false advertising, etc. Now I would agree that, say, Nazi Germany was relatively prosperous during most of its existence relative to most other collectivist states in its time, especially the Soviet Union, and that many of the pre-existing financial and industry institutions in Germany were preserved at least ostensibly by the Nazis, but that should blind no one to the fact that the primary sources of revenues, especially during the war, were arms procurement, resource confiscation and forced labor, somewhat akin to the slave-economy of the Roman Empire. It was in no way primarily a trade-based economy, hence it was basically un-capitalistic.

I certainly do not claim that it is impossible or even unlikely that the current creeping authoritarianism in American government and society will not rise apace with the gross national product, but when one considers how much the military budget, or the Dept. of Homeland Security, or the re-provisioning of Iraq costs each and every resident of this country every day, one should see that these two forces are at the least heterogenous, if not oppositional. Similarly, when one sees that Boeing, for example, has largely switched its production to fulfilling military contracts, or that the leading American carmakers are now lobbying for statist healthcare to alleviate their overhead, or that (perhaps) leading public utilities companies are pushing for expanded anti-counterterrorism efforts, one should bear in mind that they may in fact be pursuing the maximazation of their marginal benefits, but nonetheless they are abandoning the principles of trade to do so.