American election
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Fascism, and more precisely, corporatocracy, is the ugly off-spring of capitalism. Most, if not all of the attributes of corporatocracy are present in the US, if you cared to go through each one as I mentioned, even a one party state. After all, the Democrats and Republicans are fundamentally the same. Wall Street will not tolerate any challenge to their rule with a socialist or communist party running.
You define fascism as “… these corporations should be represented in a decision-making body as an alternative to a parliament elected by universal suffrage.” Huh? Do you not realize that government legislation in the US is completely controlled and written by corporate lobbyists? They have monopolistic powers. The US is well beyond what you are saying. You’re a victim of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, caught up in the shadows, images and stage craft of the show but not realizing what is happening. But if that’s how you define fascism, you could argue that Hitler, Franco and Mussolini were not fascist.
Btw, Trotsky knew, like the rest of the soon-to-be council of people’s commissars of the RSFSR, that gaining power (the coup) and more importantly holding power would be impossible without a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. If you read any of the works of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and studied some Russian history, you would understand the challenges the councils faced, challenges like insurrections that lasted right up to the mid 1930’s throughout Russia.
We are at risk of derailing the topic into a very big side-issue but i have to challenge this statement.
“you would understand the challenges the councils faced, challenges like insurrections that lasted right up to the mid 1930’s throughout Russia.”
Yes, what you are saying is true and it was the warnings being issued from November 1917 by the anti-Bolshevik Marxists by the choices that your Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and Lev Davidovich Bronstein were making at the time. You do not deny, do you, that there were other approaches that could be made? And that if other policies were followed they may have led to a different outcome to the ensuing civil war, the peasant revolts, the suppression of the left political opposition, the dismantling of the factory committees and the soviets?
Do you disagree that there were other possibilities during 1917 that could have been taken which may have avoided what did happen. Or are you saying, regardless of the choices Lenin and Trotsky made, the upheaval was inevitable and what they did to restore order was unavoidable?
If fraud becomes a a talking point post-election, this may be the government agency to refer to
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, part of Homeland Security.
It was created by Trump in 2018.
So far its director has declared, “I have confidence that your vote is secure, that state and local election officials across this country are working day in and day out, 24/7, that the 2020 election is as secure as possible,”
But warned to “be prepared for efforts that call into question the legitimacy of the election” without mentioning who he was suggesting.
Of course, it’s hard to distinguish fascism from a run of the mill authoritarian regime. Certainly, Hitler borrowed from American style campaigning with his sound and light shows, but he also borrowed heavily from the Bolsheviks in his methods.
I think we can look to Benjamin’s aestheticization of politics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aestheticization_of_politics) maybe as a better clue than the schematic checklist put up earlier. Certainly, the US is no mobilised dictatorship, unlike the Nazi and Bolshevik dictatorships, it doesn’t compel people to perform in ritual observances and seek to control the totality of the political practice: dissent exists, even in political office.
“it doesn’t compel people to perform in ritual observances”
Each and every morning American school students stand before the American flag and recite the pledge of allegiance.
It is not compulsory but i recall a young American telling me how continuing her opt-out from it the day after 9/11 resulted in ostracisation from fellow school students.
When it comes to sporting events, the national anthem is normally sung at only international occasions, not domestic. But as we saw with taking to the knee, such rituals are done at almost every sporting event, junior and senior in the USA
The new study, the largest ever of its kind, was carried out by the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden found a significant shift since 2000, the GOP has taken to demonising and encouraging violence against its opponents, adopting attitudes and tactics comparable to ruling nationalist parties in Hungary, India, Poland and Turkey. The shift has both led to and been driven by the rise of Donald Trump.
By contrast the Democratic party has changed little in its attachment to democratic norms, and in that regard has remained similar to centre-right and centre-left parties in western Europe. Their principal difference is the approach to the economy.
My suspicion about this research is the category described as the illiberal left which included the Bolivian MAS which as we saw was overthrown in a coup and just won an election to power.
Alan, I knew the pledge of allegiance would be raised, but it is different from mandatory attendance at parades, or compulsory voting for the regime’s candidate and other performative controls of the political process.
Of course, once upon a time the pledge of allegiance included the Roman salute…
The irony of this debate is that it is taking place in the context of an election for the chief executive of the state and to various law-making bodies, both of which are abhorrent to fascism and which in themselves show that the US is not a fascist state.
As to what is meant by “corporate state”, Leon, you are either just playing with words or naively assuming that this is the same as “Corporatocracy”.
Here is a dictionary definition of “corporate state”:
“A state governed by representatives not of geographical areas but of vocational corporations of the employers and employees in each trade, profession, or industry.“
See also this.
And here is an exposition of it by a well-known fascist:
https://www.oswaldmosley.com/the-corporate-state/
Of course all capitalist governments have to govern in the interest of the capitalist class, today mostly organised as corporations, and of course corporations lobby governments and elected bodies to make decisions in their favour — largely in the US to let them get on with profit-making with as little state regulation as possible.
The US is fascist neither in the political nor in the economic sense. That doesn’t make it good. It is capitalist and that’s enough to condemn it.
LT – “Trotsky knew, like the rest of the soon-to-be council of people’s commissars of the RSFSR, that gaining power (the coup) and more importantly holding power would be impossible without a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat. If you read any of the works of Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and studied some Russian history, you would understand the challenges the councils faced, challenges like insurrections that lasted right up to the mid 1930’s throughout Russia.”
If it was a dictatorship of the proletariat, why were they so busy suppressing that very proletariat who were leading the insurrections, Kronstadt to name but one? The Bolshevik, Blanquist, Junta didn’t even have majority support of the Russian proletariat, never mind majority support in the country as a whole. Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin’s cabal were a dictatorship over the proletariat, not a dictatorship of the proletariat.
In July 1874 Marx and his wife took a holiday in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight. Apparently there was a local election on there as Marx wrote to Engels ( who was on holiday in Ramsgate) on 15 July:
”Religion seems to thrive here among the NATIVES, but apart from that they are practical people. ‘VOTE FOR STANLEY, THE RICH MAN’, we found on posters all over the district.”
He could almost have been talking about the USA today.
LT “and more importantly holding power would be impossible without a temporary dictatorship of the proletariat.”
It was a, far from temporary, dictatorship over the proletariat.
Did somebody say “red fascism”?
A report on the ignored Green Party candidacy
https://www.dw.com/en/us-green-party-theres-more-at-stake-than-getting-rid-of-trump/a-55399856
This i didn’t know
Some states allow people who voted early to change their ballot if they show up Election Day and nullify their initial vote; many do not. Minnesota, for instance, allows voters to “claw back” their vote and change it, but the deadline for that has passed. Wisconsin allows people to change their vote up to three times, though it doesn’t happen often. Florida allows voters who received mail ballots to choose to vote in person instead, but they cannot vote more than once.
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