Fences

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, ‘I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.’ To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: ‘If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.’ -- The Thing: Why I Am a Catholic, G.K. Chesterton 1929

a succession of formative great moments

The formation of the political culture of the European continent is the product of a succession of formative great moments: the Enlightenment and invention of modernity; the French Revolution; the development of the workers' and socialist movement and the emergence of Marxism; and the Russian Revolution. This succession of advances certainly did not ensure that the successive “lefts” produced by these moments would assume the political management of European societies. But it did form the right/left contrast on the continent. The triumphant counterrevolution imposed restorations (after the French and Russian Revolutions), a retreat from secularism, compromises with aristocracies and churches, and challenges to liberal democracy. It successfully induced the peoples concerned to support the imperialist projects of dominant capital and, to this end, mobilized the chauvinistic nationalist ideologies that experienced their greatest glory on the eve of 1914.

The succession of moments constitutive of the political culture of the United States is quite different. These moments are: the establishment in New England of anti-Enlightenment Protestant sects; control of the American Revolution by the colonial bourgeoisie, in particular by its dominant slave-holding faction; the alliance of the people with that bourgeoisie, founded on the expansion of the frontiers that, in turn, led to the genocide of the Indians; and the succession of waves of immigrants that frustrated the maturation of a socialist political consciousness and substituted «communitarianism» for it. This succession of events is strongly marked by the permanent dominance of the right, which made the United States the “surest” country for the unfolding of capitalism. -- Empire and Multitude, Samir Amin

Empire

[...] all major parts of the U.S. establishment (Democrats and Republicans) make no secret of the objectives of their plan: to monopolize access to the planet’s natural resources in order to continue their wasteful mode of life, even if this is to the detriment of other peoples; to prevent any large or mid-sized power from becoming a competitor capable of resisting Washington’s orders; and to achieve these aims by military control of the planet.

The liberal ideology specific to capitalism places the individual in the forefront. It does not matter that in its historical construction during the Enlightenment the individual in question had to be an educated and property-owning man, a bourgeois capable, as a result, of making free use of Reason. This was an indestructible liberating advance. As a movement beyond capitalism, socialism cannot be conceived of as a return to the past, as a negation of the individual. Bourgeois democracy, despite the narrow limits in which capitalism encloses it, is not “formal,” but quite real, even if it remains incomplete. Socialism will be democratic or it will not be. But I add to this phrase its necessary complement: there will be no more democratic progress without calling capitalism into question. Democracy and social progress are inseparable. The really existing socialisms of the past certainly did not respect this requirement and thought they could achieve progress without democracy or with as little democracy as in capitalism itself. But it is also necessary to add that the great majority of democracy’s defenders today are hardly more demanding and think that democracy is possible without any visible social progress, let alone calling into question the principles of capitalism. -- Empire and Multitude, Samir Amin

fingerprints

Fascism, for [Gaetano] Salvemini, meant setting aside democracy and due process in public life, to the acclamation of the street. It is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion. We should not use the term fascism for predemocratic dictatorships. However cruel, they lack the manipulated mass enthusiasm and demonic energy of fascism, along with the mission of «giving up free institutions» for the sake of national unity, purity, and force. -- The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton