Anatol Verbin
Communist Workers’ Party of Russia
Brussels, 2-4 May 2000
This explanation conforms to the evolution of Fascist regimes in the world at the beginning of the 20-th century. Between 1917 and 1923, governments only occasionally sought fascist help to restore ‘law and order": no more was needed to set the market system going. And as a consequence Fascism was undeveloped. In the period between 1924 and 1929, when the restoration of the market system seemed ensured, Fascism fades as a powerful force. But after 1930, when an economic collapse shook the capitalist world and the market system was in a general crisis, Fascism was retrieved by the captains of the Western economy and within a few years it became a powerful force.
As it is not our intention to adduce more examples testifying to the criminal character of the Fascist regimes of the past, but to express our view of the today’s social-economic and political situation in the world, it will be only natural to dwell on the assessments pertinent for the contemporary social-economic arrangements. The analysis of Fascism made in the anti-Communist quarters would like to equate it to and fulminate against the atrocities perpetrated by the nazi regime, turning a blind eye for the crimes committed by the fascist regimes of Italy, Japan and some other countries. In this way it is perfectly easy for them to promote the free market democracy as the God’s ultimate revelation and to portray it as looking like a paradise in the making. But this apologetic portrait of the contemporary Western democracy conspicuously fails to recognize that the Western societies have been preaching democracy and providing a decent standard of living for their peoples only, as J.-P.Sartre aptly put it in his preface to the Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon, at the expense of the savagely exploited colonial countries. Later they agilely transformed their colonial reserve into the Third World and now euphemistically call it developing world which, nevertheless, for more than half a century cannot achieve development.
Now, ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed restoration of a genuine democracy practically all over the world, contrary to the over-optimistic predictions of economic development in the former socialist countries and around the world, the economic setting and, consequently, the social conditions throughout the globe have substantially deteriorated. The countries that emerged from the former socialist camp today are in the state of economic and social regression and devastation. Japan and vast regions of South East Asia and Latin America remain in a full-blown crisis. While the US economy, according to Bill Clinton’s self-assertive statements, "is booming", his so-called job-machine generates jobs that do not pay as well as the jobs of the booming 1950s and 1960smaking Americans work longer hours for less money, while some manufacturing and agricultural sectors are, as Robert Lawrence of the Council of Economic Advisers points out, ‘are nearer recession than boom’ (The Economist, 23.10.99: 67).
All indications are that the Capitalist system has once more reached the point when it becomes unable to function. The last similar critical juncture, reached in 1929, was successfully overcome, as it is known, due to the enormous devastation of the World War II and the introduction, under the influence of the example of powerful socialist economy, of Keynesean economics. Now, that this socialist example has been unfortunately sacrificed, the captains of the capitalist world are making use of purely reactionary methods of solving their problems. The conservative revolution, started with the appearance of the first signs of weakness of Socialism in the late 1970s and 1980s, is now under way in all advanced industrial countries. Today, there are more and more signs of undemocratic ways of governance being introduced, domestically and internationally, by apparently democratic procedures (IMF adjustment programmes for weak economies, economic aid programmes for poor countries granted under specified conditions restricting national sovereignty and opening these countries to plundering by transnational corporation, etc.). In the advanced industrial countries there is a similar trend. There is a pronounced xpansion of free market arrangements supplanting the democratic ones there. Parallel to this is conspicuous erosion of democracy in these countries.
The authors of a forthcoming book (What is Troubling the Trilateral Democracies?, Prinston University Press, 2000) recently reviewed by The Economist recognize a decline of democratic procedures and attitudes in all ‘mature democracies’. Signs of this fact are citizen’s mistrust of corrupt politicians and democratic institutions, public confidence that ‘the government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking for themselves’, etc, and, consequently, a steady decline of public interest in voting.
And as for the atrocities committed by the fascist regimes in the 1930s and 1940s and often criticized by the today’s champions of Western democracy, unfortunately, they have not become things of the past. Certainly, nowadays there is no direct and brutal force employed against those unwilling to lose democratic rights achieved during prolonged social struggles of the past. There are no concentration camps managed by any of the Western democracies. But still there are tens of millions of deaths in the Third World due to hunger and curable diseases. And this is because of the economic order imposed by the First World for its own advantage. There are millions of AIDS victims in the Third World countries that are unable to buy the prohibitively expensive remedies, produced by the First World pharmaceutical companies, and unable to produce their own affordable ones because of the prohibitions imposed by the First World in order not to see its exorbitant profits somewhat reduced. There are millions of crippled lives due to the environment pollution occasioned in the Third World countries by the First World companies in their "natural" effort to reduce their costs of production and in this way make it more competitive. There are millions of "wasted’ lives of women toiling for 12 or 15 hours a day in the degrading conditions of the garment sweat-shops of the South-East Asia for only less than $1 a day, their ‘wage’ constituting less than 5 per cent of the price of the garment they produce, which is nothing but a contemporary form of slavery. There are millions of people in the Third World countries who are forced to sell their organs and in this way mutilate their bodies only due to the fact that the economic arrangements imposed by the First World make them unable to sell their labour for even subsistence wages. There are millions of young children employed as sex workers for the benefit of the First World sex tourism industries.
The numerical outcome of this highly efficient mechanism in degrading and wasting human beings has already by far surpassed the numbers achieved by Fascism in eliminating Jews, Gypsies and communists. And this infernal machine, unlike that of the former Fascism, is still at work leaving in its wake millions of deaths every year and environmental devastation. And all this is being perpetrated not by a direct brutal coercion but by means of anonymous liberal market forces. But when the people refuse to accept this First World economic "law and order’ they are immediately get treated, in the First World parlance, as terrorists, and the whole nations lapse into the category of totalitarian states, rogue-states, etc., becoming easy victims of the only super power and its allies.
And as if this devastation were not enough, the promoters of the neo-liberalism waging war on humanity and for the global resources are still looking for new possibilities for perfecting their techniques and performance. They are trying to rob the nations of their sovereignty. By means of the so called international agreements, when huge numbers of countries, due to their economic weakness and political dependence on the few advanced industrial countries, only nominally take part, and the real power shifts from the nominally elected authorities to the ‘international’ bodies representing the corporate interests of the non-elected de facto government under the guise of IMF, World Bank, WTO and G-7. This trend is now so much in evidence that the former situation which saw national governments as having sufficient autonomy to pursue national goals ‘is now seen as hopelessly passé’ (G. Epstein. ’Internantional Capital Mobility’ in: R. Boyer and D.Drache (eds). States Against Markets, Routledge, London and New York,1996: 211), while a number of writers find it appropriate to talk about post-national and post-sovereign states. It was precisely for this purposes that the MAI and the so-called millenium round of the WTO were advanced in order to slash barriers to several key industries, health care, education, banking, insurance, i.e. the areas still remaining under governmental control of the nations and in this way to divest the national governments of the last vestiges of national independence and ability to manage their own economic and social process.
As it is the case in the pseudodemocracies, there is no shortage of champions of humanism who, as Bill Clinton and Jacques Chirac do, make pronouncements about the need to put a human face on the global economy, while the anonymous genocide is still under way in the name of the profits of the anointed few of the global economy, while democratic freedoms and rights are being eroded by a pervasive advance of free market arrangements. Under these circumstances, the task of all those who seek genuine democracy is to help build a united front of all forces opposed to the corporate interests of the trans-national big business whose sprouts were so much in evidence in Seatle.