Comment by cyberdick
3 months ago
> incredibly fascistic.
What do you mean by this? Is its some feeling you have or do you have any objective measure?
3 months ago
> incredibly fascistic.
What do you mean by this? Is its some feeling you have or do you have any objective measure?
Since fascism is more a political philosophy than an economic one, it is hard to define an "objective measure" for this type of thing, but the formal merging of corporate interests with military interests by commissioning C-suite officials is probably as close as we could get.
It might help to contrast it with an authoritarian left-wing approach to this same problem of private and state collaboration. In a system like that, we might expect these companies to be nationalized. But a right-wing system would generally be against that. They would instead keep those companies private, but the company could effectively still become state controlled by intertwining leadership such as we see here.
A free and open society should generally be against the merging of corporations and the state as it allows for too much concentrated power which can lead to both corruption and tyranny. These two sides will of course be aligned generally on the well-being of the nation, but having leadership literally splitting time between the two functions goes way beyond that as it creates problems like inherent conflicts of interest and allows for the circumvention of laws and regulations around how both the government and corporations should work. For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter. The corporate side can do the data collection to find who needs to be imprisoned and then the state does the dirty work of rounding people up. This would be much easier to implement and hide when it can all be orchestrated by a single person delegating their desires down whatever chain of command can legally accomplish the specific subtask at hand.
And wrapping this all up under the general banner of patriotism is doing them no favors here either as it comes off like the nationalistic propaganda that often accompanies fascism.
Unfortunately, Corporatism is well established as the status quo. Typically the failures of this system are attributed to the market, rather than the hazards of interventionism. This allows further interventions to be applied as "fixes".
Rather than attributing it to right or left, I would characterize it as a synthesis of illiberal ideas. Under Corporatism, even union and worker movements merge with the state. UAW is just as relevant here as state adjacent corporations like Palantir, GM, VW, Airbus or Boeing.
>For example, the government might be prevented from spying on its people such as collecting internet histories and corporations might be prevented from exerting physical power over people like imprisoning them. But if the two groups are acting as one, this distinction doesn't matter.
We saw a similar strategy under the previous administration. Social media companies took direction from the White House to censor user content. Proponents claimed that this didn't violate civil liberties because of the voluntary nature of the collaboration.
It isn't hard to find parallels if you look hard enough. There will always be a nexus of power around the state. Whether it is nationalized corporations or public private partnerships, malign incentives will always exist in these cases. The variation is only in degrees.
However, I think the ultimate distinction for Fascism would be in Mussolini's open call for the state to become an all-encompassing, collectivist force. There is still a contrast to the extent that the US at least plays some lip-service to liberal individualist ideals. Overall, it retains some laissez-faire elements in comparison to other major economies.