I am copying here a post I submitted to the Progressive Sociologists
List. I think it is a perspective that needs to be considered. One form
or another of tyranny is endemic to the capitalist system. (Any approach
to "democracy" is the exception, not the rule.) But it is essential that
if we are to struggle against the despotic threats at any one time and
place that we do not simplify our conception of tyranny.
*******
Subject: Re: this was predictable
Date: Mon, 29 Jul 2002 10:16:18 -0500
From: Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "[EMAIL PROTECTED]" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Timothy Mason wrote:
>
> Your constitution notwithstanding, the USA has a solid tradition of
> disregard for individual rights.
I want to take a round-about approach to this.
Imagine that in the late 1920s & early 1930s in Germany the left had
campaigned furiously against the restoration of the Kaiser, and to avoid
that horror had made alliances with the Nazis.
Imagine that in 1920 the left in Italy had focused all its attention on
a military threat from the Papacy to reestablish its rule throughout
Italy, and to avoid that danger had made an alliance with the Fascists.
Other mistakes (or just plain unavoidable working-class weakness)
allowed fascism & National Socialism to triumpth at that time. But one
of the problems of "learning from history" is that one always tends to
prepare for the last war. Suppose that in 2002 leftists fear above all
the threat of that ancient "ism" fascism, and to avoid that threat make
alliances with the Democratic Party.
The threat in the United States is not "fascism" or anything that
resembles fascism any more than Hitler resembled Louis XIV. The threat
in the United States comes from the ordinary (that is extreme)
repressive powers of the capitalist democracy. Who needs fascism when a
"leftist" president can arrange for the passage of the Anti-Terrorism
and Effective Death Penalty Act. Who needs fascism when increasingly for
50 years the NLRB has failed almost completely to control illegal
firings of union supporters in companies large and small all over the
U.S.
This is still the U.S. that tolerated (i.e., encouraged and defended)
Jim Crow & lynching in the south for 70 years and in which extreme
police brutality (torture) was laughingly referred to as "the third
degree."
It is the U.S. in which a president, while masterminding the deaths of
two to three million Vietnamese, could assert that if one wished to
understand u.s. policy abroad all one needed to do was to examine u.s.
policy at home.
Carrol Cox
******
We are, I think, gravely underestimating the threat of _other_ kinds of
tyranny, some now unimaginable as fascism was unimaginable in 1920-1930,
if we continue merely to cry "fascism" at every tyrannical act of the
dictatorship of the capitalist class.
Carrol
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