Right wing populism or the marriage of corporations and states?
Congradulations: You’re married!
I am going to suggest that we are living through a process whereby there is a marriage of the state and private special interests through corporations. Today the reality is that big corporations are partners with, and/or became exclusive monopolies of the state. Whether in the sectors of banking, agriculture, housing, energy, transportation, manufacturing, or nearly any other facet of the economy it is a public/private collusion. The relationship between the state and corporation becomes indiscernible. Almost the entire British (and American) public sector have now been carved out and sold to different corporations which have links in the state governance; think the Royal Mail or the UK blood bank as just small examples… Less well known corporations run huge slabs of our public sector discreetly, for example Serco and Sodexo, just to name two…
Now ask yourself some questions…
Why can Goldman Sachs, the largest investment bank, speculate in markets using newly printed government money that has been borrowed virtually for free?
Why does Westminster/Congress write laws that are longer than the Old Testament with obscure, impossible to understand language, that more often than not restrict our freedoms and legalise further privatisation of public institutions built by tax payers money?
I suggest that what we are witnessing is the privatisation of the public sector, de-unionisation of the entire labour force, and violent austerity. This has brought about the rapid decline of political and economic conditions for the middle-class and the economic underclass, coupled with the rapid accumulation of wealth and profit for the ruling class, structured through huge corporations.
Meanwhile workers are working more and more for less and less pay. The jobless are either searching desperately for work or simply have given up because there are hardly any options except taking “self employment” contracts which are, more often than not, even worse than the dreadful and meagre, declining benefit system.
I’ve heard some naive speculation, mostly from uninformed Green Left activists saying the system will collapse. Yet corporations are not collapsing, they are taking over and merging with the functions of the state, and therein lies the secret of the system’s ability to sustain and grow in the midst of deteriorating conditions for the majority of the population.
Corporations adjust to our changing socio-economic reality and even flourish because they can create consumption even out of increasing levels of poverty by carving the population into niche groups and markets. These can also be played one against each other to distract and consolidate this system of exploitation, far from eroding or undermining it.
I’ve already elsewhere outlined examples to this, how the state has been transformed into a creditor essentially for corporations and asset management groups, and that’s just one aspect.
This hidden reality does not only effect the above but also has our planet in a destructive ecological course that many climatologists and biologists say is an irreversible global warming or even heating (think dystopic books/films like, Children of Men, Code 46 or the Hunger Games). The possible and very probable near future population decline, and conflicts due to loss of agricultural and habitable area, are just another issue corporations and their elites need to adjust to, rather than fear collapse of their control.
In order to maintain order and control of mass impoverishment and deteriorating living standards for the majority of the population, a climate of jealousy and fear is being encouraged. This functions to distract people from seeing the transformations, of which some we have discussed above.
No jobs? It’s the immigrants fault who came here, allegedly taking opportunities and lowered pay. Decline in living standards? Well you are supporting through your hard work “lazy” people on benefits costing the state billions and burdening its ability to help you advance in social mobility… That’s the kind of the consensus in most mainstream parties in the UK or USA, the difference is only by the degree of vehemence such lies are propagated.
The reality is that the economic conditions that are undermining you are also pushing you to see the world through a distorted lense, all that is needed is to repeat lies and exacerbate the conditions to accentuate and further consolidate this process.
In most developed Western states the media and civil society acted as a magnifying glass - providing a space for debate, accountablity, respresentation and transprancey between the interests of the state, economic organisations and corporations and citizens. The media itself is either privatised and/or eroded due to worsening economic conditions and the drying up of income revenues. This in turn consolidates control of them by bigger and bigger coporations and/or along with state intervention. Even NGOs, most charities and human rights (and leading LGBTI rights) organisations are going down that path, like the media, and no longer can be wholly trusted to monitor and act as a balance to the system - quite the opposite in fact. The average activist in one of the big LGBTI NGOs not just deals of a CEO like salary (and gets it once they become prominent enough) but becomes part of the system (local civil service, G20, UN, etc...). The role of unions in our society is increasingly minimised and weakened, their traditional linkage to parties that aimed to represent the intersts of the workers eroded or dropped in favour of connections between parties and corporations.
Such institutions increasingly become networks of aspiring inividulas that wish to serve the interests of corporate-state elite. This inevtiably leads to a culture of clientism, nepotism and self intersts, the work for better causes of the groups they proport to represent is incidental, their loyality is by far to their sponsors, the state, corporations, or both. This diminishes the ability of accountability, transparency and critical thinking in society. This in turn contributes to social antagnims, opportunism and mistrust. Mechanisms that acted previously to porvide a balance and check for the interest of the public are themesleves being corrupted or outright absorbed by the the marriage of corporate-state interests; We no longer have a maginifying glass but a distorive one - acting for self-interests of the elite, of which they are apart (check the pay rolls of the CEOs of must of such organisations).
In order to further protect and insure this continues more and more “threats” are created or provoked to scare the population (think of Al-Qaeda, ISIL, Iran and now increasingly DPRK and Russia). These threats are then used as excuse for legislation that signs off more and more of our civil liberties in order to “protect us”, but in reality they are designed to protect corporate interests above all, think DRIP, RIPA and TTIP.
The perverse marriage between corporations and the state is exactly what is pushing real wages down, creating a workforce that fears so much joblessness, poverty, imprisonment, and homelessness, that they’ll be prepared to do jobs for less and less pay and accept passively worsening living conditions, or blame it on scapegoats.
People don’t see each other as people, rather they see each other as competitors or means to an end, that erodes the ability for empathy, solidarity and therefore resistance to the processes described above. These are the material forces that breed fear and competition amongst the majority of working people, keeping them in check of through antagonism and dehumanisation. One could call it “interanlised consumerism”.
In this situation the population doesn’t even notice the slide of political realism to fabricated fear, threats, dehumanisation and social paranoia.
UKIP is not an exception but a symptom
UKIP, sadly, isn’t an “aberration” in this situation, something you can wake up from, or see through: what some of my rather lofty fellow activists fail to see is that it is the LOGICAL CONCLUSION of this process, a new kind of corporate-state driven fascism. UKIP of course, as I explained elsewhere, isn’t an alternative, that is plain to see. Rather, it is the just another manner to consolidate the same coporate-state interests, with the Conservative and Labour parties following closely behind but to the same end.
Most of the UK and U.S. citizens are taught in school that fascism and totalitarianism are a ruthless one party dictatorship, the most popular example being Nazi Germany, and more recently the DPRK, China, and Putin’s Russia. This is a misconception: Fascism is a political economy, not merely a political system that existed in one moment of history.
We are at a stage where there’s a near complete control of the state by monopoly capital, which Marxists would remind us is the logical conclusion of capitalism; a point where the relationship between the state and corporation becomes indiscernible.
The use of holding to us counter examples of despicable regimes, fanatical organisations (sometimes deliberately provoked and even engineered) as examples of evils of fascism, or antithesis to our own growing corporate-state fascism is simply to distract us from what is happening here and now. Naturally it doesn’t mean that Putin, the DPRK and others are any better, far from it.
Illustration above: A picturesque view of the state of the nation for February 1778 - A cartoon shows America (represented by a man with feathered cap) cutting the horns off a cow (representing British commerce) which is being milked by a Dutchman, two men (representing France and Spain) are standing toward the rear of the cow holding bowls of milk. In the foreground, on the right, lies the British lion asleep, a small dog is standing on the lion’s back urinating. A distraught Englishman is standing to the left of the lion. In the background, across an expanse of water, is a city labeled “Philadelphia”, to the left of the city is a ship, the “Eagle”, laid-up in dry dock, Admiral Howe is sitting at a table, out of sight of his flag ship, with his brother General Howe, a keg is on the ground to the left and wine bottles on the ground to the right of the table.
