To:-- Socialist Worker.Org
Re:-- The Spots on Obama's Leopard
Is Obama a Crypto Progressive??? Of course not. The real question is whether he is a fascist. I hope he is.
Has the insta-rage died down? Good. It's about time Americans got their lexicon straight and stopped using "fascist" as the equivalent of "pig" "asshole cop" and "bloody tyrant". Of course fascists have done some nasty things; so too Stalin, so too just about any monarch and certainly Rome, which did a lot of vile things. Fact is the human race is not very nice, fascism or no fascism.
Moving on to politics as such, fascism represents a middle state between rank liberalism and budding socialism. Fascism preserves private ownership of the means of production, but mandates "class cooperation" regulated business and social responsibility of Capital for "the labor soldier" as the Bismarck put it. Both Bismarck and FDR were fascists, although FDR was as lite as they come, and inclined more toward National Capitalism than any real State Socialism. That said, and given that structural definition, both the German Grundeszeit and the New Deal showed that "fascism" does not necessarily imply loss of individual rights and usually does entail tangible gains in social security.
Now, it may probably be that any politics on the ground will be superseded by the impending ecological, agricultural and consequently global economic collapse that will occur somewhere around 2030. That collapse will bear its own "electoral" impact.
But apart from that and before then, I would be contented (albeit hardly enthused) if Obama turned out not to be another neoliberal and proved himself to be as "progressive" as Bismarck
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