Re: Jim Crow Fascism (was Re: bullying)

[Lisa Stolarski]

Title: Re: [PEN-L:30870] Jim Crow Fascism (was Re: bullying)

Hi Tom,

I just want to repeat something I said earlier.  Maybe you missed it, it is easy to do that on this prolific list.  Fascism is a concept as well as a word with historical-polical meaning.  You can take the overall intent and structure of fascism and abstract it from its historical context to come up with a concept of "fascism" which can then be used to describe other historical phenomena with the same overall structure and intent.  This is done all of the time both in ordinary and theoretical discourse.  I don't understand what the problem is unless someone simply is afraid that the word is too controversial.  In that case we are arguing about the connotation rather than the applicability of the descriptor. There are a few ways to go with that.  You can either change your word, as in communist who might call herself a socialist to distance herself from association with the CP and the USSR, or you can use the word so as to take it back, as the anarchists have begun to do with the term "libertarian" which has traditionally been a word used by anarchists until the right wing libertarians lifted in for their own purposes in the US.  I have already argued against the first course of measure and for the second.  We might want to qualify this unique-to-our-historical-moment brand of fascism with another descriptor, but we should recognize the difference between fascism the concept and fascism the historical phenomenon so that we don't keep calling a concept anachronistic, which it really can't be.  That would be like saying every contemporary expose on virtue ethics is anachronistic since Aristotle wrote about virtue ethics 2500 years ago.  Virtue ethics has an overall structure which can have many variants, not just the one Aristotle constructed. And though virtue ethics is an old concept popularized by Aristotle, it is not anachronistic to expound today upon the overall structure of the concept.

I have not read the numerous comments in this thread so I apologize if I have duplicated someone else's point. I am reading them backwards to the last time I posted.  The email is so busy I drown in it sometimes.

Sorry to split hairs, Tom, but it is important for us to be able to agree upon the language we will use to discuss this very heavy shxt. As far as qualifying the term for our historical moment, I don't think "Jim Crow Fascism" has staying power. How about "Corporate Totalitarianism," or "Corporate Fascism?"

Lisa S.

P.S.  Courtesy of the American Heritage Dictionary, Third Edition:

fascism  (noun) 1.  Often Fascism.  a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.  b. A political philosophy or movement based on advocating such a system of government.  2. Oppressive dictatorial control.  

fascist  (noun) 1. Often Fascist.  An advocate or adherent of fascism.  2.  A reactionary or dictatorial person.  [my italics].

fascist  (adj)  1.  Often Fascist.  Of, advocating or practicing fascism.  2.  Fascist.  Of or relating to the regime of the Fascisti.  

Fascisti  (noun, plural)  1.  The members of an Italian political organization that controlled Italy under the fascist dictatorship of Benito Mussolini from 1922 to 1943.  

...

totalitarian  (adj)  Of, relating to, being or imposing a form of government in which the political authority exercises absolute and centralized control over all aspects of life, the individual is subordinated to the state, and opposing political and cultural expression is suppressed:  "A totalitarian regime crushes all autonomous institutions in its drive to seize the human soul."  

totalitarian (noun)  A practitioner or supporter of such a government.  



on 10/03/2002 2:06 PM, Tom Walker at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

> I welcome Melvin P.'s corrective to my own forgetting, which is itself
> systematic. Indeed, the overthrow of bourgeois democracy in the United
> States has always been founded on a *southern strategy* of anti-democratic
> terror that predates European fascism. To call it fascism is anachronistic,
> but to not call it fascism leaves it without a name.
>
> "Jim Crow" perhaps carries too much of a connotation of mere discrimination
> and too much of illusion of containment -- as if it is something whose
> political consequences were confined to the south and whose historical
> dynamic has somehow been attenuated by civil rights legislation and Brown v.
> the Board of Education.
>
> Maybe if we call it Jim Crow Fascism, we can open up a space to recall that
> this is not some exotic import or faded relic. In my post, I talked about
> the anti-labor policies of the National Association of Manufacturers. It's
> important to add that the "southern strategy" was from the outset a key
> element of the N.A.M. campaigns. This is very clear in the rationale and
> symbolism put forward at the N.A.M.'s 1903 convention, held in New Orleans.
> The below quote, although not from an official N.A.M. document, evokes the
> sentiment expressed at the N.A.M convention:
>
> "Having lived for some years in a Southern State which has made remarkable
> progress in manufacturing, especially in metal production and in mining, I
> contemplate with dread the effect there of a possible eight-hour system for
> labor. A great proportion of Southern labor is negro labor. To turn loose
> every day the hordes of negroes that would be idle so much of the day as the
> eight-hour system would give them would visit on the South nothing short of
> calamity. The negro problem is grave enough at best. It is vexing the calm
> of our greatest statesmen and baffling already the efforts of our most
> strenuous intellects. Who is going to provide entertainment, profitable and
> wholesome entertainment, for our negroes in their hours of ease? Who is
> going to guarantee that the passions of the blacks-the millions of
> blacks-will conform themselves to the invocations of the lyceum and the
> library? It is a matter of record that the towns and urban communities
> throughout the South show that there is most crime among negroes on days on
> which they are not at work, their few whole holidays and their once-a-week
> half-holidays. The eight-hour system would give them some holiday every day
> and the race would either degrade every community in the South or have to be
> exterminated. The negro is not the only human creature to whom enforced or
> optional idleness is a bane. The best gift of our institutions is in the
> chance of manful, self-reliant independence. The law should foster it and
> not hamper and degrade it."
>
> Melvin P. wrote,
>
>
>> It is remarkable that the second most brutal period in all of American
>> history has been wiped from the consciousness of the progressives. Talk
>> about "bad American history."  To this very day political reaction is
> based
>> in the South and this includes the structure of our political democracy.
>> Bush - Texas and Bush Florida and throughout the South into the heart of
> the
>> old plantation areas is the current basis of the political reaction in
>> America. How can this not be understood?
>>
>> The political South Controls the nation and Wall Street controls the South
>> was pointed out by Dr. Dubois and others many many decades ago. The
>> monumental bloodletting and murder that ushered in the counterrevolution
> and
>> the overthrow of the bourgeois democratic Reconstruction governments was
> not
>> a fascist movement in the mind of many but the result of the inferiority
> of
>> the Negro - according to the "right" and the "meanness" of white people -
>> racial antagonism, according to the "left."
>
>
> Tom Walker
> 604 255 4812
>