A significant book was published at the end of last December by Haymarket Books, authored by the renowned thinker and political activist Noam Chomsky and university professor C.J. Polychroniou, titled “A Livable Future is Possible: Confronting the Threats to Our Survival.”
In these enlightening interviews conducted by C.J. Polychroniou, Noam Chomsky once again shares his insightful views on a range of conflicts and challenges facing humanity. This book, “A Livable Future is Possible,” addresses artificial intelligence and the possibility of these programs surpassing humans in cognitive awareness; what awaits a world engulfed in a deadly climate crisis; the global rise of new fascism and why we must unite across borders to confront it; the striking similarities between Trump and Biden’s foreign policies; and several other critical issues dominating the planet.
Noam Chomsky has long been an unparalleled model of moral clarity and intellectual courage throughout decades of his work as a researcher and critic. He is the most cited living author. It is difficult to find a more influential voice than Chomsky’s in the West. This book is not only a vital and information-rich resource but also a call to action for anyone who hopes to carry the torch of one of history’s greatest minds.
-We are on the path to a form of new fascism C.J. Polychroniou: Noam, since the implementation of neoliberal policies more than forty years ago, they have been responsible for increasing inequality rates, destroying social infrastructure, and causing social despair and distress. Yet, it has also become clear that neoliberal social and economic policies create a fertile environment for right-wing extremism and the return of political authoritarianism. What is the actual connection between neoliberalism and new fascism?
Noam Chomsky: The connection is clear in the first two sentences of the question. One of the consequences of neoliberal social and economic policies is the collapse of the social system, providing a fertile environment for extremism, violence, and hatred, the search for scapegoats, and fertile ground for authoritarian personalities who pretend to be the savior. We are on the path to a form of new fascism.
The Britannica Encyclopedia defines neoliberalism as an “ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of competition in the free market” with “minimal state intervention.” This is the traditional image. The reality is different. The actual policy model has opened the doors for economic lords, who also dominate the state, to pursue profit and power without significant constraints. In short, unrestrained class struggle.
One component of these policies was a form of globalization that combined extreme protectionism for the lords with the pursuit of the cheapest labor and the worst working conditions to maximize profit, leaving deteriorating rust belt countries behind. These are political choices, not economic necessities. The labor movement, in collaboration with the now-closed Congressional Research Office, proposed alternatives that could have benefited workers here and abroad, but these alternatives were rejected without discussion, as Clinton imposed the form of globalization favored by class struggle managers.
Among the consequences associated with “actually existing neoliberalism” is the acceleration of the financialization of the economy, enabling safe fraud to achieve quick profits – safe because the strong state that intervenes radically in the market to provide maximum protection in trade agreements does the same to rescue the lords if anything goes wrong. The result, starting with Reagan, is what economists Robert Pollin and Gerald Epstein call “bailout economics,” enabling the continuation of neoliberal class struggle without the risk of market penalties in case of failure.
And the “free market” is not absent from the scene. Capital is “free” to exploit and destroy without restraint, as it always has, including – and we should not forget – the destruction of organized human life prospects. And workers are “free” to try to survive somehow with stagnant real wages, declining benefits, and the restructuring of work to create a state of increasing instability.
Class war, quite naturally, launched with an attack on labor unions, the primary means of defending workers. Reagan and Thatcher’s first steps were fierce attacks on unions, calling on the corporate sector to join them and bypass them, often in technically illegal ways, but that doesn’t matter to the neoliberal state they dominate.
Margaret Thatcher clearly expressed the prevailing ideology at the start of class war: there is no such thing as society, and people should stop complaining about the “society” that rushes to rescue them. In her immortal words: “I am homeless, the government must house me!” And so they throw their problems onto the shoulders of society, and who is society?
There is no such thing! There are individuals, men and women, families, and no government can do anything except through the people, and the people look after themselves first.
Of course, Thatcher and her associates well knew that there was a rich and very strong society for the lords, not only the state that rushes to rescue them when needed but also a complex network of trade unions, chambers of commerce, lobbying organizations, think tanks, and more. But at least they are “looking after themselves.”
Neoliberal class war has been a resounding success for its makers. As we mentioned, one indicator is the transfer of about 50 trillion dollars to the pockets of the top 1%, most of it to a small fraction of them. It is a victory not to be underestimated.
And among other achievements is “social despair and distress,” with no refuge. Democrats abandoned the working class in favor of their class enemies by the 1970s, becoming a party of wealthy professionals and Wall Street donors. In England, Jeremy Corbyn almost restored the Labour Party to its downward path, turning it into “watered-down Thatcher.” The British establishment, at all levels, rallied its forces and entered a downward spiral to crush his efforts to create an authentic participatory party dedicated to the interests of workers and the poor. It is an unbearable insult to the system. In the United States, Bernie Sanders performed somewhat better, but he could not break the grip of the Clintonian party leadership. In Europe, traditional left-wing parties have almost disappeared.
In the U.S. midterm elections, Democrats lost more white working-class voters than in the past, a result of party leaders’ unwillingness to campaign on class issues that a moderate left-wing party could have highlighted.
The ground is perfectly prepared for the rise of new fascism to fill the void left by ongoing class struggle and the surrender of the dominant political institutions that could have fought the plague.
The term “class struggle” is no longer sufficient now. It is true that economic lords and their servants in the political system have been engaged in a very brutal class struggle over the past forty years, but the targets go beyond the usual victims to now include even the criminals themselves. And as class struggle intensifies, the basic logic of capitalism becomes brutally clear: we must maximize profit and power, even though we know we are racing against time toward suicide by destroying the environment that supports life, not saving ourselves and our families.
What is happening reminds us of a story often repeated about how to catch a monkey. Cut a hole in a coconut of the perfect size for the monkey to insert its paw, then place a delicious morsel inside. The monkey will reach in to grab the food but then be unable to release its clenched paw, and it will die of hunger. That is us, at least we are running this sad scene.
Our leaders, with their clenched paws as well, continue their suicidal pursuit without restraint. At the state level, Republicans are proposing legislation called “Energy Discrimination Elimination” to ban even the disclosure of information related to investment in fossil fuel companies. This is unfair persecution of respectable people who are simply seeking profit by destroying the prospects of human life, adopting sound capitalist logic.
For example, Republican attorneys general have urged the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to prevent asset managers from buying shares in American utility companies if those companies are participating in programs to reduce emissions – that is, to save us all from destruction.
Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, one of the most prominent figures, calls for continued investment in fossil fuels for many years to come, while also showing himself to be a good citizen by welcoming investment opportunities in still-fictional ways to dispose of the toxins produced, and even in green energy – as long as profits are guaranteed.
In short, instead of allocating resources to escape the catastrophe, we must bribe the rich to encourage them to help us do so.
These clear and stark lessons contribute to energizing popular movements seeking liberation from the chaos of capitalist logic, which is brilliantly evident as the neoliberal war against everyone reaches its final stages of tragicomedy.
This is the bright and promising side of the emerging social system. With the rise of Donald Trump to power, the tendency toward white supremacy and authoritarianism has returned to the political scene. But isn’t it true that the United States was never immune to fascism?
What do we mean by “fascism”? We must distinguish what is happening on the streets, clearly, from ideology and politics, far from direct observation. Fascism on the streets is Mussolini’s black shirts and Hitler’s brown shirts: violent, brutal, and destructive. The United States was never immune to that. The dirty record of “Indian removal” and the transition from slavery to Jim Crow laws does not need to be recounted here.
“Street fascism” reached its peak in this sense before Mussolini’s march on Rome. The period of the “Red Scare” following World War I, the Wilson-Palmer era, was one of the most violent and brutal periods of repression in U.S. history, apart from the two original sins. Adam Hochschild tells this terrifying story in detail in his insightful study “American Midnight.”
As usual, blacks suffered the most, including major massacres (Tulsa and others) and a heinous record of extrajudicial executions and other atrocities. And immigrants were another target in the wave of xenophobic “Americanism” and fear of Bolshevism. Hundreds of “subversives” were deported. The active Socialist Party was virtually destroyed and never recovered. And workers were devastated, not just by the “Wobblies” but by others, including the breaking of fierce strikes in the name of nationalism and defense against “Communists.”
Finally, the level of madness reached such a degree of absurdity that it destroyed itself. Attorney General Palmer and his assistant J. Edgar Hoover predicted a Bolshevik-led uprising on May 1, 1920, with heated warnings and mobilization of police, army, and security forces. The day passed with a few parades. But the widespread ridicule and desire for a “return to normal life” ended this madness.
It was not without effect. As Hochschild notes, progressive options for American society suffered a painful blow. A completely different country could have emerged. What happened was popular, vengeful fascism.
Moving to ideology and politics, the great Filipino political economist Robert Brady argued eighty years ago that the entire industrial capitalist world was moving toward some form of fascism, with strong state control over the economy and social life. On another level, regimes differed sharply in their overall impact on politics (effective political democracy).
Such topics were not rare in those years, and to a limited extent, outside the left and right circles alike.
Some argue that we are living in a historic era of protests. In fact, almost every region of the world has seen a sharp increase in protest movements over the past fifteen years. Why have political protests become more widespread and frequent in the late neoliberal era? Additionally, how do they compare to protest movements of the 1960s?
