[Peace-discuss] Brazil, Fascism and the Left Wing of Neoliberalism

Thu Nov 1 15:22:23 UTC 2018

October 29, 2018 

<https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/29/brazil-fascism-and-the-left-wing-of
-neoliberalism/> Brazil, Fascism and the Left Wing of Neoliberalism

by  <https://www.counterpunch.org/author/3abre/> Rob Urie 

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With Jair Bolsonaros electoral victory in Sundays runoff election for
president of Brazil, a global resurgence of the radical right is
indisputable. Mr. Bolsonaro is a particularly ugly representative of this
movement, both politically repressive and culturally intolerant. The
question being asked in the bourgeois press is: what psychological malady is
taking hold that could persuade voters to elect such a person?

The framing poses the resurgence as inexplicable, as the result of the
fundamental flaw of democracy: the voters. A litany of failures is
redistributed downward. Because Mr. Bolsonaro is politically repressive and
culturally intolerant, the electorate must want political repression and
cultural intolerance. Because Mr. Bolsonaro is a gender bully and
homophobic, voters must be gender bullies and homophobic.

Missing from explanations of the rise of Mr. Bolsonaro is that for the last
decade Brazil has experienced the
<https://www.denverpost.com/2017/08/21/brazil-lost-decade-recession/> worst
economic recession in the countrys history (graph below). Fourteen million
formerly employed, working age Brazilians are now unemployed. As was true in
the U.S. and peripheral Europe from 2008 forward, the liberal response has
been austerity as the Brazilian ruling class was made richer and more
politically powerful.

https://uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/dropzone
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Graph: Brazil entered recession in 2008 along with much of the rest of the
world in the global financial crisis. It re-entered recession in 2012 in
what turned into the worst economic downturn in the countrys history. The
liberal response, sponsored by Wall Street and the IMF, was a decade of
austerity. Source: St. Louis Federal Reserve.

Since 2014, Brazils public debt/GDP ratio has climbed from 20% to 75%
<https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/398061-markets-imf-send-brazil-clear-me
ssage-reform-your-economy> proclaims a worried IMF. That some fair portion
of that climb came from falling GDP due to economic austerity mandated by
the IMF and Wall Street is left unmentioned. A decade of austerity got
liberal President Dilma Rousseff removed from office in 2016 in what can
only be called a Wall Street putsch. Perhaps Bolsonaro will tell Wall Street
where to stick its loans (not).

Back in the U.S., everyone knows that the liberalization of finance and
trade in the 1990s was the result of political calculations. That this
liberalization was/is bipartisan suggests that maybe the political
calculations served certain economic interests. Never mind that these
interests were given what they asked for and crashed the economy with it. If
economic problems result from political calculations, the solution is
political elect better leaders. If they are driven by economic interests,
the solution is to change the way that economic relationships are organized.

Between 1928 and 1932 German industrial production fell by 58%. By 1933, six
million formerly employed German workers were begging in the streets and
digging through garbage looking for items to sell. The liberal (Socialist
Party) response was half-measures and austerity. Within the liberal frame,
the Depression was a political problem to be addressed in the realm of the
political. Centrist accommodation defined the existing realm. Adolf Hitler
was appointed Chancellor of Germany in 1933, the pit of the Great
Depression.

In Brazil in the early-mid 2000s, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as
Lula, implemented a Left program that pulled twenty million Brazilians out
of poverty. The Brazilian economy briefly recovered after Wall Street
crashed it in 2008 before Brazilian public debt was used to force the
implementation of austerity. Dilma Rousseff capitulated and Brazil
re-entered recession. Rousseff was removed from power in 2016. Hemmed in by
Wall Street and
<https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2018/07/11/pr18288-imf-executive-board
-concludes-2018-article-iv-consultation-with-brazil> IMF mandated austerity,
any liberal government that might be elected would meet the same fate as
Rousseff.

In Italy in the 1920s, repayment of war debts from WWI led to austerity and
recession that preceded the rise of fascist leader Benito Mussolini. In
Germany, payment of war reparations and repayment of industrial loans
limited the ability of the Weimar government to respond to the Great
Depression. Liberal governments that facilitated the financialization of
industrial economies in the 1920s were left to serve as debt collectors in
the capitalist crisis that followed.

Since 2008, the fiscal structure of the EU (European Union) combined with
wildly unbalanced trade relationships led to a decade of austerity,
recession and depression for the European periphery. In the U.S., by 2009
Wall Street was pushing austerity and cuts to Social Security and Medicare
as necessary to fiscal stability. The consequences of four decades of
financialized neoliberal trade policies were by no means equally shared.
Internal and external class relations were made evident through narrowly
distributed booms followed by widely distributed busts.

With the presumed shared goal of ending the threat of fascism:

The ideological premises behind the logic that claims fascists as the
explanation of fascism emerge from liberalism. The term here is meant as
description. Liberalism proceeds from specific ontological assumptions.
Within this temporal frame, a bit of social logic: If fascists already
existed, why didnt fascism?  The question of whether to fight fascists or
fascism depends on the answer. The essentialist view is that characteristics
intrinsic to fascists make them fascists. This is the basis of scientific
racism. And it underlies fascist race theory.

The theory of a strongman who exploits people who have a predisposition
towards fascism is essentialist as well if receptivity is intrinsic, e.g.
due to psychology, genetics, etc. Liberal-Left commentary in recent years
has tended toward the essentialist view that fascists are born or otherwise
predisposed toward fascism. Unconsidered is that non-fascists are equally
determined in this frame. If deplorables were born that way, four decades
of neoliberalism is absolved.

The problem of analogy, the question of what fascism is and how European
fascism of the twentieth century bears relation to the present, cant be
answered in the liberal frame. The rise and fall of a global radical right
have been episodic. It has tied in history to the development of global
capitalism in a center-and-periphery model of asymmetrical economic power.
Finance from the center facilitates economic expansion until financial
crisis interrupts the process. Peripheral governments are left to manage
debt repayment with collapsed economies.

Globally, debt has forced policy convergence between political parties of
differing ideologies. European center-left parties have pushed austerity
even when ideology would suggest the opposite. In 2015, self-identified
Marxists in Greeces SYRIZA party capitulated to the austerity and
privatization demands from EU creditors led by Germany. Even Lenin
negotiated with Wall Street creditors (on behalf of Russia) in the months
after the October Revolution. In a political frame, the solution from below
is to elect leaders and parties who will act on their rhetoric.

The practical problem with doing this is the power of creditors. Debtors
that repudiate their debts are closed out of capital markets. The power to
create money that is accepted in payment is a privilege of the center
countries that also happen to be creditors. Capitalist expansion creates
interdependencies that produce immediate, deep shortages if debts arent
serviced. Debt is a weapon whose proceeds can be delivered to one group and
the obligation to repay it to another. The U.S. position was expressed when
the IMF knowingly made unpayable loans to Ukraine to support a U.S.
sponsored coup there in 2015.

Fascist racialization has analog in existing capitalist class relations.
Immigration status, race and gender define a social taxonomy of economic
exploitation.  <https://www.wnyc.org/story/invention-race/> Race was
invented decades into the Anglo-American manifestation of slavery to
naturalize exploitation of Blacks. Gender difference represents the
evolution of unpaid to paid labor for women in the capitalist West. Claiming
these as causing exploitation gets the temporal sequence wrong. These were /
are exploitable classes before explanations of their special status were
created.

This isnt to suggest that capitalist class relations form a complete
explanation of fascist racialization. But the ontological premise that
freezes, and thereby reifies racialization, is fundamental to capitalism.
This relates to the point argued below that the educated German bourgeois,
in the form of the Nazi scientists and engineers brought to the U.S.
following WWII, found Nazi racialization plausible through what has long
been put forward as an antithetical mode of understanding. Put differently,
it wasnt just the rabble that found grotesque racial caricatures plausible.
The question is why?

Propaganda was developed and refined by Edward Bernays in the 1910s to help
the Wilson administration sell WWI to a skeptical public. It has been used
by the American government and in capitalist advertising since that time.
The idea was to integrate psychology with words and images to get people to
act according to the desires and wishes of those putting it forward.

The operational frame of propaganda is instrumental: to use people to
achieve ends they had no part in conceiving. The political perspective is
dictatorial, benevolent or otherwise. Propaganda has been used by the
American government ever since. Similar methods were used by the Italian and
German fascists in their to rise to power.

Since WWI, commercial propaganda has become ubiquitous in the U.S.
Advertising firms hire psychologists to craft advertising campaigns with no
regard for the concern that psychological coercion removes free choice from
capitalism. The distinction between political and commercial propaganda is
based on intent, not method. Its use by Woodrow Wilson (above) is
instructive: a large and vocal anti-war movement had legitimate reasons for
opposing the U.S. entry into WWI. The goal of Bernays and Wilson was to
stifle political opposition.

Following WWII, the U.S. brought 1,600 Nazi scientists and engineers (and
their families) to the U.S. to work for the Department of Defense and
American industry through a program called
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip> Operation Paperclip.
Many were dedicated and enthusiastic Nazis. Some were reported to have been
bona fide war criminals. In contrast to liberal / neoliberal assertions that
Nazism was irrational politics, the Nazi scientists fit seamlessly into
American military production. There was no apparent contradiction between
being a Nazi and being a scientist.

The problem isnt just that many committed Nazis were scientists. Science
and technology created the Nazi war machine. Science and technology were
fully integrated into the creation and running of the Nazi concentration
camps. American race science, eugenics, formed the basis of Nazi race
theory. Science and technology formed the functional core of Nazism. And the
Nazi scientists and engineers of Operation Paperclip were major contributors
to American post-war military dominance.

A dimensional tension of Nazism lay between romantic myths of an ancient and
glorious past and the bourgeois task of moving industrialization and
modernity forward. The focus of liberal and neoliberal analysis has been on
this mythology as an irrational mode of reason. Missing is that Nazism
wouldnt have moved past the German borders if it hadnt had bourgeois basis
in the science and technology needed for industrial might. This keeps the
broad project within the ontological and administrative premises of
liberalism.

This is no doubt disconcerting to theorists of great difference. If
Bolsonaro can impose austerity while maintaining an unjust peace, Wall
Street and the IMF will smile and ask for more. American business interests
are
<https://theintercept.com/2018/10/25/brazil-election-jair-bolsonaro-us-inves
tors/> already circling Brazil, knowing that captive consumers combined with
enforceable property rights and a pliable workforce means profits. Where
were liberals when the Wall Street that Barack Obama saved was squeezing the
people of Brazil, Spain, Greece and Portugal to repay debts incurred by the
oligarchs? Liberalism is the link between capitalism and fascism, not its
antithesis.

Having long ago abandoned Marx, the American Left is lost in the temporal
logic of liberalism. The way to fight fascists is to end the threat of
fascism. This means taking on Wall Street and the major institutions of
Western capitalism.

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