[p2p-research] Prospect Magazine: After Capitalism

Sun Apr 12 10:34:03 CEST 2009

Hi Andy,

I can see you have given considerable thought for this, and most of what you
say about what is happening is  true, I just have a problem with calling it
neototalitarianism. Even in the UK I see a thriving civil society, and yes
certainly Muslim movements are targeted, but in real democracy it has never
been the case that no minorities have been targeted ...

A totalitarianism that gives us such large amounts of free speech,
organizing power, seems not very totalitarian to me, even with the predicate
neo, and differing with you, I don't think it will be able to descent intro
real totalitarianism without a real social defeat. The miner's defeat was
serious but nothing compared to the defeats leading to fascism and Nazism,
and neoliberalism was never able  to abolish all the welfare state
achievements, at least not ont the continent ... But even the UK, the NHS
and state education still stand, and the public's perception of them has
vastly improved in the last 10 years.

Surveillance state yes, relative authoritarianism yes, danger for eventual
totalitarianism at some point, perhaps ...

but totalitarianism, neo or not, I disagree,

I also think it's counterproductive because when the real thing comes, we'll
have lost all our conceptual ammunition,

Michel

On 4/9/09, Andy Robinson <ldxar1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Michel,
>
>
>
> Well, this discussion might have to wait till we both have time to discuss
> it properly.
>
>
>
> But I’m inclined to think the statement (about China), “many alternatives
> are possible, as long as you not directly challenge the rule of the party”,
> would be true most of the time in post-49 China, in Russia after the death
> of Stalin in 1953, in most of eastern Europe most of the time, in Franco’s
> Spain and Mussolini’s Italy.  But with qualifiers which also apply to
> China today:  that the definition of what constitutes a “challenge” lies
> with the rulers, and can include pretty innocuous peaceful societal
> activities (Falun Gong for example, or waving a Tibetan or Taiwanese flag);
> that the risks involved in being deemed to be “challenging the rule of the
> party” or the state are extreme, the punishments severe; that the space for
> alternatives is far less if one is deemed part of the “anti-nation”; and
> that the alternatives are possible only at the level of ideas, and are
> suppressed the moment any attempt is made to realise them.  So if this
> typifies authoritarianism and not totalitarianism, then totalitarianism
> becomes almost nonexistent in history, referring to only two cases – Nazi
> Germany and high Stalinism in Russia.
>
>
>
> Has there been “a severe social defeat of popular and democratic forces”?
> I think this would be a fair depiction of the situation in Britain (recent
> resurgence notwithstanding), predicated first on the Miners’ Strike and then
> the recourse to highly repressive policing of the Mayday protests.  There’s
> been a dearth of any kind of widespread resistance or protest from about
> 2002 to the present day.  And the remaining dissident forces – numbering a
> few thousand perhaps, and very much demonised – have been attempting to
> recompose in a climate where any public dissident activity faces instant
> repression.
>
>
>
> I’d similarly argue that there was never an *absence *of dissenting forces
> during any of the other totalitarian regimes, from contemporary China (the
> resurgence of urban unrest and persistent Tibetan and Xinjiang separatism)
> through Francoist Spain (persistent anti-regime protests and counterculture)
> to high Stalinism (peasant resistance and insurgency from marginal
> nationalities) and Nazism (movements like White Rose, Edelweiss Pirates, the
> early AFA, etc, not to mention resistance in the occupied countries).  It’s
> more a difference in *status *of the dissenting forces – in all these
> regimes, the dissenting forces operate as “dissidents” in a hostile climate,
> at considerable risk and outside the social mainstream, whereas in a
> democratic regime (even a degenerated/authoritarian democratic regime) they
> would normally be safe unless they were accused of particular acts.
>
>
>
> The boundary between totalitarianism and authoritarianism is contentious,
> but I’d associate the term “authoritarian” with a kind of regime found
> commonly in the global South and historically in Europe, in which the
> political ruling elite is part and parcel of a wider social Establishment
> composed of conservative/reactionary classes (landowners, comprador or
> extractive capitalists, military elite, judiciary, civil servants,
> professionals) and in which the political regime exercises power mainly to
> maintain and administer the broader social rule of the Establishment.  Establishment
> power, as distinct from political power, is composed mainly of “concentrated
> informal sanctions” and is exercised through patronage, unequal control of
> resources, prestige, and cultural conservatism.  In contrast, I’d
> associate totalitarianism with rule by a political class which has separated
> itself from other social forces to a substantial degree, connected to a
> “modernising” project which is more bourgeois than “quasi-feudal”.  It
> gets more complicated I think.  There are cases where the two come very
> close to one another (Franco’s Spain for instance, and several of the Latin
> American dictatorships), but there are clear differences of type.  There
> is an intermediary case of “army-states” where the military holds extensive
> power in the state and intervenes in politics, where it is a social as well
> as a political power (not simply a political class), but where it is
> coextensive with a wider elite rather than accountable to it (Russia,
> Turkey, Pakistan).  There are also times when some authoritarian regimes
> may be crueller, less tolerant, and worse in human rights terms than some
> totalitarian regimes.
>
>
>
> But the point here is whether ‘authoritarian’ is a better designator than
> ‘totalitarian’ for a certain group of regimes.  I don’t think that what
> I’m calling neo-totalitarian regimes fit with this model at all.  For one
> thing, Peter Oborne’s book “The Triumph of the Political Class”, from
> someone with clear affinities to the Establishment, would seem to debunk the
> view that the Establishment still holds political power in Britain.  For
> another, the social composition behind authoritarianism is typical of
> “quasi-feudal” societies, exhibiting slow economic growth or stagnation, in
> which established classes impede or channel capital accumulation to
> reinforce their own power and prevent instability.  I would also expect an
> authoritarian regime to contain substantial “checks and balances”, but of a
> kind which hand power to the Establishment classes and elites.  And I’d
> expect elite groups outside the state to be given considerable immunity and
> official respect.  The traditional British unwritten constitution actually
> conforms to an authoritarian model quite closely – checking the power of the
> political elite by means such as the unelected House of Lords, extensive
> judicial power using common law, local autonomy of each police authority
> (implicitly connected to local elites), a large interpretive role for the
> civil service with its inflexible appointment procedures, independence of
> schools, universities, doctors, etc.  A contemporary example might be
> somewhere like Thailand, with an elite-linked judiciary able to dismiss
> governments, the army periodically intervening in politics on the side of
> the elite, and police chiefs as concerned to represent elite interests as to
> obey their political superiors.  Yet, what we have seen recently in
> Britain, America and elsewhere is a corrosion of all checks and balances,
> including those which hand power to the Establishment.  Indeed, the
> Establishment as a social force seems to be decomposing.  The professions
> are not at all shown respect, quite the opposite – they are subject to
> increasingly severe surveillance and micro-regulation (proposals in Britain
> for doctors to be re-tested every five years and certified by the state
> instead of the BMA being a case in point).
>
>
>
> Your point that things could get even worse is certainly valid.  But I’d
> question whether things would need a qualitative change to reach the depths
> of the most extreme kinds of totalitarianism.  I feel it would only need a
> quantitative change, a more systematic, even crueller application of
> existing categories and “powers”.  For instance, the proscription of
> dissident organisations, the periodic arrest and harsh sentencing of
> dissident “leaders” and a portion of the membership, mistreatment in
> custody, arrest for expression of opinions, systematic denial of all rights
> while in prison or even on release (“control orders”), extensive
> surveillance, constant vulnerability to pretext or suspicion raids, are
> already suffered by the radical Muslim political movement in Britain.  It
> would only take an executive decision, not a change of regime or even of
> law, to extend this to other categories of dissidents.  If that happened,
> anyone who professed (say) anarchist or Marxist views could be locked up, or
> at least purged.  There’s very little limit, too, to what could be done
> with the ASBO regime in regard to banning and harshly criminalising any type
> of social activity the executive decided to target.  In America, an
> equivalent would be the use of the “enemy combatant” designation, or of
> already existing powers to strip citizenship for political reasons.  Which
> doesn’t leave very much they CAN’T do.  They could probably even set up
> death camps if they wanted (though not being racialist regimes, I doubt they
> will – they’re quite happy with detention/torture camps such as Guantanamo).
>
>
>
> There are a few things that, at present, they don’t do.  They don’t
> execute, they don’t usually open fire on protesters, they don’t carry out
> mass arrests, they don’t generally detain in camps (actually China does
> execute on a huge scale, and America too; and both also detain in camps, but
> let’s stick with Britain for now).  But I think this is because they’ve
> found more publicity-friendly variants of the same practices.  For
> instance, instead of executing, they give “indefinite” (life) sentences, or
> keep people on “control” regimes which could lead to re-imprisonment at any
> time.  They don’t open fire, but they extensively abuse “less lethal”
> weapons, sometimes fatally.  They “corral” as an alternative to mass
> arrests.  They use detention centres instead of camps.  And there are also
> things that neo-totalitarians can do, which classic totalitarians cannot.
> For instance, the surveillance regime is far more intrusive now, and the
> former limits on the frequency of things like ID card checks are being
> eliminated by technology.
>
>
>
> bw
>
> Andy
>
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