Understanding Fascism and Corporatism

So let's talk fascism and corporatism. Again, I had to supplement this a bit because I didn't feel it did an adequate job of understanding this. you know, it's an ideology, right wing again, the right and left thing is, if we just find right in terms of defensive monarchy, it doesn't make a ton of sense, right? Is it in terms of power, authority? It doesn't make sense in terms of this. So I'm going to talk about, it is a coherent set of ideas. It involves corporatism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Has a lot of obsession with the idea of social holes and national body, and it has a lot of occultism in it. And so they use the examples here of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party and Italy's National Fascist Party. I'll go into that in a bit. The ultra-nationalism, I guess they're arguing that it's nationalism on steroids, that there is an appropriate level of nationalism. That's like an appropriate fan, right? Fan comes from fanatic. It, by definition, means extreme. So nationalism is, again, an idea of a coherent social whole that... is largely ideological, right? So I don't know why it would be ultra-nationalist. It's just a form of nationalism. Like you, you get to eat it. Like when you come up with nationalism, you have to take all the nationalism to come with it. Sorry, that's what you do, right? Citizens as a collective sacrificing for the nation. Okay. Yeah. We'll talk about that a bit when we talk about ECHO. Belief in Aryan white supremacy. We already dealt with that when we talked about the idea of the Caucasian, right? All of these notions, again, race is not linked to phenotypical characteristics because it is malleable it emerges largely after we have to justify why we've included different bodies into christianity but they aren't fully christian and so it emerges as a concept of imperialism colonialism and it is malleable example of the jews being in and out of whiteness irish in and out of whiteness and then the categories or standards changing all the time and the fact that it can be deployed against white people as being ethnicized as ways to denigrate their whiteness. Whiteness is aspirational and incomplete, and therefore it's always going to be supplemented and filled in. It is not going to be a thing. There is no such thing as a white... Whiteness is a social location that can be deployed against others. It's not really a thing. I don't want to get into too much. Anyways, I said this is better understood as national chauvinism, the supremacy of one group because of their relationship to the idea they're the best, right? I think that makes more sense. There's some relationship to charismatic leadership that has to do with the cult of personality stuff we saw with communism, and some form of freedom. free enterprise that's coordinated by the state. So similar to state capitalism. It involves expansionism and militarism, and its use of the rule of law to consolidate and maintain power. Sure, I agree with all those things. Again, I don't think it's that we can't find a coherent set of ideals. This is from Umberto Eco in 1995 called fascism. He said, it tends to have these things. One, it's a cult of tradition. So the way things used to be. It's a rejection of modernism. that there's a problem in our society. We need to make things... better again. We need to have action for action's sake. So the idea of doing things because it's important to do so. Disagreement is a form of treason. So your treason is to the commitment to the idea. This is very similar to communism too, with the fidelity to the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you were pursuing something that wasn't what was agreed, you were a class traitor. That's how some of the first Photoshop erasures were stolen, having to... photoshop out all the people he killed because they were class traitors right it's a way to to say that treason is is um uh linked in disagreement with ideas fear of difference um so this is just any type of difference can be utilized at any time this goes back though to the ideology and the securitization where you can pick something and say it's the problem and then 10 minutes later say well it's not the problem anymore we do this over and over and over again it's a persistent issue in the absence of political policy we get this emerging in political processes where we'll say that this is this thing this is the real ill this is the real problem and then 10 minutes later forget all about it right um Appeal to social frustration. Okay. Obsession with a plot. Yes, so there's an idea that someone's plotting against you. There's always, you know, it's this person trying to do this or it's this group is behind. I'm not using good examples here because I honestly don't want to platform fascism, so I'm not gonna do it, right? And so the enemy is both strong and weak. This is, I think I have this one, Schroediger's Immigrant, right? Where is it here? schroediger's immigrant simultaneously stealing your job and too lazy to work right it it doesn't work both way like it's it's there right both strong and weak at the same time um pacifism is trafficking with the enemy so like if you don't believe in militarism and let's be clear this is linked to nationalism because nationalism is a ideological coherence to the national security of the state national security and that security then justifies us going to war and fighting people and doing all the rest of that and the idea of traitorous comes out of the idea that you wouldn't want to go to war. So this has always been the Rand Paul version of libertarianism in the US. They've been largely against foreign wars and intervention, because they say they're not implicated in it. Now, we don't need to unpack that too much. But it is framed as weak, as weakness to do this. And so we have contempt for the weak, because they aren't strength, because we're valorizing strength. or the idea of a strong unified body, right? There's a lot of weird kind of bodily politics. It's very modernist, especially Nazi Germany. It was very much about this kind of German modernism, that this is the highest element. Remember Heidegger, the political theorist, or the philosopher, was a proponent advocate, was implicated fully, thoroughly in the Nazi party. They believed that this was... This is the end of kind of high modern ideology was that high modern ideology produced the Shoah, the Holocaust, the massive eradication of a majority of the Jewish population across Europe, of which many of those states participated because they were anti-Semitic as well. I'll get into that maybe later. We'll get into that, I think, in two weeks of anti-Semitism. So we'll bring it in back there. But then frame does this. And so everybody is educated in heroism, heroism and masculinity and militarism. are strongly linked together and so there's always the danger. I've just been doing some research recently on kind of the heroic masculinity and this idea, you know, 300, right, this idea of heroic masculinity as being like this nostalgic longing for the way in which men were men in the past, right, these weird machismos, right, and obsession with weapons and weaponry, being the strongest with the best tools, selective populism and fascism new speak, you know. I'm sure that these radical ideas are what, this will go away, but this is the woke mind virus of the moment, right? So fascism did not disappear. It did not only emerge and disappear post-World War II. You know, Spain under Franco, they argue the Rwandan genocide. I think it's a little more complicated. I get it. It's kind of fascists, but it really was, I don't know if this is... We'll get into how we view ethnic conflict later in the course. But the idea here is that that ethnic conflict, I mean, I've always argued, can you see World War II as an ethnic conflict, right? Was it a competing set of cultural ideals that were fighting against one another and against minorities? So remember the Kurds and the Roma, or sorry, the Roma and the LGBTQ communities, and as well as those differently abled were all in the camps as well. They were all... part targeted as being denigrating the social whole, right, as not being strong or this. And so there is still, I just right wing, I'm sorry, like, if the leftist has to take the communists and socialists, I think the right wing parties have to take the fascists with them. Seems only fair. I don't know, maybe at a liberal. And so this idea of Europe and North America having these, I don't know if we call them resurgent, I think they've always been there. They're being platformed, right? and let's not look too far as to which platforms, Amman one, are platforming these things. And so this idea of white pride and stuff like that, anti-immigration, anti-Roma attitudes are alive and well. They've never persisted. They've always persisted. They've never abated in Europe. The European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that their disappearance is deaths, marginalization, exclusion, lack of access to resources, and... persistent prosecution and disappearance in Europe to Roma has started prior to these fascist parties and continues to the present. So let's not think that nationalism doesn't continue to do those things. We can do this. Now, I don't believe in the corporatist thing here. This is just the video I found. I think it's okay. We will find out. I'm not 100% on this. If I platform something... Yeah, we will unpack it. I assume if it's on YouTube, I can't make that. I just argued the opposite. We'll see. I'm just talking about the relationship between corporatism and fascism because there isn't any analysis of this in the text. And so it doesn't really have a coherent understanding. But in the theories of corporatism, class conflict will only make the country and economy unstable and inefficient. So this is why fascism and... The fascists and communists have always fought, literally street right. I've been at protests where they've literally fought. The communists believe that they cannot, because of the dictatorship, the proletariat stuff, there is no reasonable debate with fascism. They just have to destroy them. It's the punch of fascist stuff that was happening with the rise of the right in the U.S. Because they have fundamentally different views. The coherent social body. is one that says that as all Canadians, we need to be Canadians together. It's a form of nationalism, which then says class conflict is divisive. The class conflict, Marxist crowds say this stuff is trying to eradicate, is in the defense of the rulers, and that it's not materially going to benefit everybody. And so they just fight. They literally fight because they both believe that their positions are okay in advocating violence. The liberals do not. As these classes struggle for power over the other, corporatism believes that in order for an economy to be stable, there needs to be harmony among the working classes with all three working together in order to ensure prosperity for their nation. Okay, so economy to be stable. This goes back to the capitalist argument, and this is... why it's so important to do capitalism first. So capitalism distinguishes the economy from politics, from society, from culture, and says it's something distinct. And then it becomes something we obsess over. Is there enough GDP growth? Are we moving fast enough? Are we developing properly? As if that's distinct from the social and political context in which it comes. And then it becomes, especially in a nationalist framework, a thing that we have to defend. You can't do that because it'll wreck the economy. Don't protest. It'll wreck the economy. Don't argue for that. It'll wreck the economy. Don't do these things, it'll wreck the economy and make us an unattractive investment destination. They're all bound up together because they're all advocating for specific ways of viewing how we should understand our relationship to one another. Let's say, for example, you have construction workers and architects. The architects make sure to lay out the plans on how a building should be constructed, and the construction workers are the ones who build the building and the foremen supervise their work. If there is conflict between these groups, the building will certainly never be able to be built, or at least will take much longer. So, this is a good example of how nationalism is supposed to smooth over all the conflict in society. Coherent social body, right? Now, the problem, of course, is you're like, but I'm not getting paid as much as that architect or that foreman. Well, you're a traitor to our cause, and then you can be the one... who literally is jailed or imprisoned. Remember Antonio Gramsci, that framework from earlier when we talked about hegemony? He was in prison under the fascist regime in Italy and those are his prison notebooks that we have because he was arguing this stuff. He was imprisoned for arguing for class conflict over national coherence. Without the architects, the construction workers will not know the layouts and how to build. While the architects, despite having the blueprints, can never build the building on their own. It is only when both the groups learn and realize that they are both dependent on each other and choose to cooperate, can the construction project be realized. So back to Aristotle and the division of labor. Here the division of labor is seen as natural, right? Natural is used all the time, that it's naturally to divide us in division of labor. And anything that disrupts that natural body is seen as a virus, an invasion of something that has to be purged or eradicated. Same exact way organs cooperate and work together in order to keep the body healthy. So this is a classic kind of fascist corporatist idea that there's a coherent body that works in a certain way that is uniform and that doesn't, for example, have an accident where I don't have part of that body. No, that would be a deviant body. That's not the idealized body. So they idealize the social whole of the nation. And then see, remember, we only have 192 nation states and 7,000 languages. Those... Languages are going to be seen as threats to the coherence of that social body. And this is the core pillar of corporatism. Choosing to promote class cooperation rather than class conflict, where all three classes realize that they need the other classes in order to function properly and efficiently. Unlike class conflict, where the working classes are engaged in a constant power struggle. Corporatism seeks to end class conflict once and for all and bring hard-Oh, see that's the part where we should all-when everybody-whenever someone has a final solution, run. Just run! Run! Someone's dying. Absolutely someone's dying. Once and for all is-the only way to establish once and for all is the death penalty. That's-otherwise you get appeals. At least-listen. Liberal democracy has its problems but- emerged long before the rise of extreme right-wing and fascist states in Europe. The idea of liberal corporatism emerged during the 19th century in the United States Yes, the New Deal, the Green New Deal, the New Deal was a corporatist model. It absolutely was. and has been attributed to English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill. According to his ideas of liberal corporatism, The state should not completely disregard the idea of capitalism, but rather have the higher working class focus more on recognizing the needs of their employees, rather than focus on making large profits off their backs. Off their backs probably wasn't in Mill. But the idea of having social benefit and limiting social harm does come in there. There was always this concept of... noblesse oblige, the idea of the rich being obligated to help the poor. This is one of the dangers of capitalism, right? It was that the old premise, like the knights, there was the knight's honor in the classic system. There was the idea that the monarch was at least some level obligated to their subjects. When you turn everything into market relations, then the market has no obligation to anybody. We'll get into that with... anti-homeless architecture in a bit. And then, of course, you have fascist corporatism. The vast majority of fascist regimes in the 20th century used corporatism as their main economic system, most notably the Kingdom of Italy, which was the first fascist state to adopt corporatism. However, the... You know, for everything else, he made the trains run on time, right? That was the argument that always was made with Mussolini, that he fixed the economic... problems and then that justified all the other main difference between fascist corporatism and the original idea of corporatism is that the state would incorporate every single corporate interest in the early 20th century corporatism was mainly practiced and promoted why am i being seduced by some italian music in the back by catholics as i mentioned previously the idea of corporatism emerged under the pope you And it was an attempt to integrate Catholic social teachings into the modern industrialized society. This is why the vast majority of state Catholic nations across the world had corporatism as their economic system. Even after the post-World War II reconstruction period, there were attempts to bring back corporatism in order to combat liberal capitalism. This was supported by Christian Democrats, National Conservatives, and even a few social democrats. Well, and you understand why, right? Because this creates the idea of a social obligation. There was a history in Canada of a red Tory tradition instead of blue Tories, right? So red Tories have this kind of British sense of republicanism that says that we are obligated to help Canadians all benefit together. And the idea of the liberal capitalism as coming under critique... specifically from these types of frameworks is that the liberal capital is everything's a market relation and there's no nationalism in here i mean dieffenbaker did some of this stuff dieffenbaker is the one who instituted the kind of bill of rights in canada because he saw it as a kind of an obligation of canadians to help one another so it was a form of conservatism that said that nationalism and conservatism go together to help each other um it just yeah we And so it's easier to find an external enemy It's easier to securitize than it is to to find the idea that we should all contribute more to help those who are the less Fortune yo corporatism came to be and was most prominent in the 60s and 70s There were numerous attempts to bring corporatism to the United States in order to replace the capitalist model. Yeah, okay I... The problem with YouTube is you can't check the sources, right? And so without the sources, like you can say John Stuart Mill, but show me where, and without the sources I don't really think that that's useful. So corporatism then is the arrangement of society and organizations that directly interact with the state. So this can be the tripartite bargaining. That's what the International Labour Organization was based on. The capitalists, the government, the politicians and the laborers all get together, they meet at a table, and they debate things. That's why Unifor, or the Canadian autoworkers, still has such a significant role in Canadian society, was that traditionally, it was seen as the kind of the spear point of the labor mobilization in Canada. And so it would coordinate what it coordinated, then kind of trickled down to the rest of Canada, because it set the standards, right? This is all over the place. So the Islamic Association of... China, Japan Inc., religious associations, lobbying groups. It's not necessarily about corporations. It's about corporatism as a coherent body, a corpus, right? Think of it more like that. And so it does come from the Pope in 1891 on this idea of capital labor. The Pope was worried that the Marxists were fomenting all of this strife and specifically the communists were anti-religious, right? you know, religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said. So the idea then was, in order to make both Catholicism relevant and respond to Marxism, we came up with this idea that we need to have social justice, that social justice was ensuring class harmony. It's wild now to think about social justice warriors, but this comes from the Pope specifically in a kind of quasi-somewhat fascist move. Saying that we need to have social harmony, right? That we have to have market forces, that liberal capitalism tempered by moral considerations, that we have to have things like the idea of a living wage, that unionization is good so that we don't have class conflict, that property needs to be protected, that communism is terrible, but so is unrestrained capitalism, right? And so I think that is our, the current Pope has been pretty clear. critical of kind of billionaires and capitalism. And this idea that God is on the side of the poor, which I mean, read text, that's what it's there. And so we have a bunch of these. And this goes back to the state capitalist model. The Asian model uses this strong central government's large support for corporations, forms of chosen unions, so legal and illegal unions, the exclusion of non-approved unions. Why? Because because A lot of the unions will radicalize or argue for positions outside of the social good, what is conceived of by the centre, right? Directed development strategies, so you can target a region for development, potash development in Canada, the development of the tar sands, the bitumen, development of that as a regional strategy, as something that the federal government should support. Now, in that case, it's been a long contentious process between Alberta and the federal government, which I don't have time to get into. But the idea here is that the government supports certain businesses. It was the meaty system in Japan, Sony, Honda, were all part of developing what became the consumer goods that were shipped to the US. And those brands are still very important today, because they had state support in the ways in which they did this. Now, we have the both the Asian model, and then we have the Russian model of corporatism by default. which is the transition from the Soviet system into our system, resulting in these massive oligopolies, right? These huge conglomerates of businesses that came about through this weird kind of government-directed, well, you know this business, you get to bid on it first, and now you're a billionaire overnight because we've taken something that was socialized before and we've put it in private hands. And so if you have resources or the capacity to control those resources, you automatically get these huge amounts of money. And they still, you know, you can call this kleptocracy or whatever. It's the idea that specific key figures and specific key businesses are then closely linked to the regime. And that regime is closely linked to them. And so we've got all, you know, with the Chelsea owner. And we've got all of these questions that have come out from the sanctions on Russia have targeted these specific industries and these specific individuals, which has been happening well before the Ukrainian invasion, that the foreign interference in U.S. elections. and the failure to comport themselves has resulted in sanctions on specific individuals. Because so much of what's happening in the Russian corporatist model is those individuals and firms are closely allied with the interests, and they have banks, well, quasi-state monopolies, and cabinet members on corporate boards. So business politicians and bureaucrats are heavily connected. And then the Italian fascist corporatism of that. era was about the single coordinated entity, the coordination of labor and corporate production, the nationalization of property, the dissolving of independent labor unions and national syndicalism. So we have one designated union you must be a member of, you can't have a wildcat strike, right? Corporate control over sections of the economy and the rejection of uncontrolled markets and the calls for full employment. And so we have these frameworks I'll get into. I think these are Kind of a combination of the stuff we've talked about all along, as Modi and Trump talking about populism, we'll talk about populism in the next video, that borrow from elements of those other things. Charisma, for one, which overlaps with the obsession with the cult of personality, as another one, which is a bit of the Stalinist tradition, a bit of these kind of fascist undertones, or corporatist undertones, if you want to be a more sympathetic reading. But that's why I think it is important to bring in corporatism because it's largely absent from the text.

Is it in terms of power, authority? It doesn't make sense in terms of this. So I'm going to talk about, it is a coherent set of ideas. It involves corporatism, militarism, and authoritarianism. Has a lot of obsession with the idea of social holes and national body, and it has a lot of occultism in it.

And so they use the examples here of Adolf Hitler's Nazi party and Italy's National Fascist Party. I'll go into that in a bit. The ultra-nationalism, I guess they're arguing that it's nationalism on steroids, that there is an appropriate level of nationalism. That's like an appropriate fan, right? Fan comes from fanatic.

It, by definition, means extreme. So nationalism is, again, an idea of a coherent social whole that... is largely ideological, right?

So I don't know why it would be ultra-nationalist. It's just a form of nationalism. Like you, you get to eat it.

Like when you come up with nationalism, you have to take all the nationalism to come with it. Sorry, that's what you do, right? Citizens as a collective sacrificing for the nation. Okay.

Yeah. We'll talk about that a bit when we talk about ECHO. Belief in Aryan white supremacy. We already dealt with that when we talked about the idea of the Caucasian, right?

All of these notions, again, race is not linked to phenotypical characteristics because it is malleable it emerges largely after we have to justify why we've included different bodies into christianity but they aren't fully christian and so it emerges as a concept of imperialism colonialism and it is malleable example of the jews being in and out of whiteness irish in and out of whiteness and then the categories or standards changing all the time and the fact that it can be deployed against white people as being ethnicized as ways to denigrate their whiteness. Whiteness is aspirational and incomplete, and therefore it's always going to be supplemented and filled in. It is not going to be a thing. There is no such thing as a white... Whiteness is a social location that can be deployed against others.

It's not really a thing. I don't want to get into too much. Anyways, I said this is better understood as national chauvinism, the supremacy of one group because of their relationship to the idea they're the best, right?

I think that makes more sense. There's some relationship to charismatic leadership that has to do with the cult of personality stuff we saw with communism, and some form of freedom. free enterprise that's coordinated by the state.

So similar to state capitalism. It involves expansionism and militarism, and its use of the rule of law to consolidate and maintain power. Sure, I agree with all those things.

Again, I don't think it's that we can't find a coherent set of ideals. This is from Umberto Eco in 1995 called fascism. He said, it tends to have these things.

One, it's a cult of tradition. So the way things used to be. It's a rejection of modernism. that there's a problem in our society. We need to make things...

better again. We need to have action for action's sake. So the idea of doing things because it's important to do so. Disagreement is a form of treason. So your treason is to the commitment to the idea.

This is very similar to communism too, with the fidelity to the dictatorship of the proletariat. If you were pursuing something that wasn't what was agreed, you were a class traitor. That's how some of the first Photoshop erasures were stolen, having to... photoshop out all the people he killed because they were class traitors right it's a way to to say that treason is is um uh linked in disagreement with ideas fear of difference um so this is just any type of difference can be utilized at any time this goes back though to the ideology and the securitization where you can pick something and say it's the problem and then 10 minutes later say well it's not the problem anymore we do this over and over and over again it's a persistent issue in the absence of political policy we get this emerging in political processes where we'll say that this is this thing this is the real ill this is the real problem and then 10 minutes later forget all about it right um Appeal to social frustration.

Okay. Obsession with a plot. Yes, so there's an idea that someone's plotting against you.

There's always, you know, it's this person trying to do this or it's this group is behind. I'm not using good examples here because I honestly don't want to platform fascism, so I'm not gonna do it, right? And so the enemy is both strong and weak.

This is, I think I have this one, Schroediger's Immigrant, right? Where is it here? schroediger's immigrant simultaneously stealing your job and too lazy to work right it it doesn't work both way like it's it's there right both strong and weak at the same time um pacifism is trafficking with the enemy so like if you don't believe in militarism and let's be clear this is linked to nationalism because nationalism is a ideological coherence to the national security of the state national security and that security then justifies us going to war and fighting people and doing all the rest of that and the idea of traitorous comes out of the idea that you wouldn't want to go to war.

So this has always been the Rand Paul version of libertarianism in the US. They've been largely against foreign wars and intervention, because they say they're not implicated in it. Now, we don't need to unpack that too much. But it is framed as weak, as weakness to do this.

And so we have contempt for the weak, because they aren't strength, because we're valorizing strength. or the idea of a strong unified body, right? There's a lot of weird kind of bodily politics. It's very modernist, especially Nazi Germany.

It was very much about this kind of German modernism, that this is the highest element. Remember Heidegger, the political theorist, or the philosopher, was a proponent advocate, was implicated fully, thoroughly in the Nazi party. They believed that this was... This is the end of kind of high modern ideology was that high modern ideology produced the Shoah, the Holocaust, the massive eradication of a majority of the Jewish population across Europe, of which many of those states participated because they were anti-Semitic as well.

I'll get into that maybe later. We'll get into that, I think, in two weeks of anti-Semitism. So we'll bring it in back there. But then frame does this. And so everybody is educated in heroism, heroism and masculinity and militarism.

are strongly linked together and so there's always the danger. I've just been doing some research recently on kind of the heroic masculinity and this idea, you know, 300, right, this idea of heroic masculinity as being like this nostalgic longing for the way in which men were men in the past, right, these weird machismos, right, and obsession with weapons and weaponry, being the strongest with the best tools, selective populism and fascism new speak, you know. I'm sure that these radical ideas are what, this will go away, but this is the woke mind virus of the moment, right?

So fascism did not disappear. It did not only emerge and disappear post-World War II. You know, Spain under Franco, they argue the Rwandan genocide. I think it's a little more complicated.

I get it. It's kind of fascists, but it really was, I don't know if this is... We'll get into how we view ethnic conflict later in the course.

But the idea here is that that ethnic conflict, I mean, I've always argued, can you see World War II as an ethnic conflict, right? Was it a competing set of cultural ideals that were fighting against one another and against minorities? So remember the Kurds and the Roma, or sorry, the Roma and the LGBTQ communities, and as well as those differently abled were all in the camps as well. They were all...

part targeted as being denigrating the social whole, right, as not being strong or this. And so there is still, I just right wing, I'm sorry, like, if the leftist has to take the communists and socialists, I think the right wing parties have to take the fascists with them. Seems only fair.

I don't know, maybe at a liberal. And so this idea of Europe and North America having these, I don't know if we call them resurgent, I think they've always been there. They're being platformed, right? and let's not look too far as to which platforms, Amman one, are platforming these things. And so this idea of white pride and stuff like that, anti-immigration, anti-Roma attitudes are alive and well.

They've never persisted. They've always persisted. They've never abated in Europe.

The European Court of Human Rights has made it clear that their disappearance is deaths, marginalization, exclusion, lack of access to resources, and... persistent prosecution and disappearance in Europe to Roma has started prior to these fascist parties and continues to the present. So let's not think that nationalism doesn't continue to do those things. We can do this. Now, I don't believe in the corporatist thing here.

This is just the video I found. I think it's okay. We will find out. I'm not 100% on this.

If I platform something... Yeah, we will unpack it. I assume if it's on YouTube, I can't make that. I just argued the opposite. We'll see.

I'm just talking about the relationship between corporatism and fascism because there isn't any analysis of this in the text. And so it doesn't really have a coherent understanding. But in the theories of corporatism, class conflict will only make the country and economy unstable and inefficient.

So this is why fascism and... The fascists and communists have always fought, literally street right. I've been at protests where they've literally fought. The communists believe that they cannot, because of the dictatorship, the proletariat stuff, there is no reasonable debate with fascism. They just have to destroy them.

It's the punch of fascist stuff that was happening with the rise of the right in the U.S. Because they have fundamentally different views. The coherent social body. is one that says that as all Canadians, we need to be Canadians together. It's a form of nationalism, which then says class conflict is divisive.

The class conflict, Marxist crowds say this stuff is trying to eradicate, is in the defense of the rulers, and that it's not materially going to benefit everybody. And so they just fight. They literally fight because they both believe that their positions are okay in advocating violence.

The liberals do not. As these classes struggle for power over the other, corporatism believes that in order for an economy to be stable, there needs to be harmony among the working classes with all three working together in order to ensure prosperity for their nation. Okay, so economy to be stable. This goes back to the capitalist argument, and this is...

why it's so important to do capitalism first. So capitalism distinguishes the economy from politics, from society, from culture, and says it's something distinct. And then it becomes something we obsess over.

Is there enough GDP growth? Are we moving fast enough? Are we developing properly?

As if that's distinct from the social and political context in which it comes. And then it becomes, especially in a nationalist framework, a thing that we have to defend. You can't do that because it'll wreck the economy.

Don't protest. It'll wreck the economy. Don't argue for that.

It'll wreck the economy. Don't do these things, it'll wreck the economy and make us an unattractive investment destination. They're all bound up together because they're all advocating for specific ways of viewing how we should understand our relationship to one another.

Let's say, for example, you have construction workers and architects. The architects make sure to lay out the plans on how a building should be constructed, and the construction workers are the ones who build the building and the foremen supervise their work. If there is conflict between these groups, the building will certainly never be able to be built, or at least will take much longer. So, this is a good example of how nationalism is supposed to smooth over all the conflict in society.

Coherent social body, right? Now, the problem, of course, is you're like, but I'm not getting paid as much as that architect or that foreman. Well, you're a traitor to our cause, and then you can be the one... who literally is jailed or imprisoned.

Remember Antonio Gramsci, that framework from earlier when we talked about hegemony? He was in prison under the fascist regime in Italy and those are his prison notebooks that we have because he was arguing this stuff. He was imprisoned for arguing for class conflict over national coherence.

Without the architects, the construction workers will not know the layouts and how to build. While the architects, despite having the blueprints, can never build the building on their own. It is only when both the groups learn and realize that they are both dependent on each other and choose to cooperate, can the construction project be realized. So back to Aristotle and the division of labor. Here the division of labor is seen as natural, right?

Natural is used all the time, that it's naturally to divide us in division of labor. And anything that disrupts that natural body is seen as a virus, an invasion of something that has to be purged or eradicated. Same exact way organs cooperate and work together in order to keep the body healthy.

So this is a classic kind of fascist corporatist idea that there's a coherent body that works in a certain way that is uniform and that doesn't, for example, have an accident where I don't have part of that body. No, that would be a deviant body. That's not the idealized body.

So they idealize the social whole of the nation. And then see, remember, we only have 192 nation states and 7,000 languages. Those...

Languages are going to be seen as threats to the coherence of that social body. And this is the core pillar of corporatism. Choosing to promote class cooperation rather than class conflict, where all three classes realize that they need the other classes in order to function properly and efficiently. Unlike class conflict, where the working classes are engaged in a constant power struggle.

Corporatism seeks to end class conflict once and for all and bring hard-Oh, see that's the part where we should all-when everybody-whenever someone has a final solution, run. Just run! Run!

Someone's dying. Absolutely someone's dying. Once and for all is-the only way to establish once and for all is the death penalty.

That's-otherwise you get appeals. At least-listen. Liberal democracy has its problems but- emerged long before the rise of extreme right-wing and fascist states in Europe.

The idea of liberal corporatism emerged during the 19th century in the United States Yes, the New Deal, the Green New Deal, the New Deal was a corporatist model. It absolutely was. and has been attributed to English liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill.

According to his ideas of liberal corporatism, The state should not completely disregard the idea of capitalism, but rather have the higher working class focus more on recognizing the needs of their employees, rather than focus on making large profits off their backs. Off their backs probably wasn't in Mill. But the idea of having social benefit and limiting social harm does come in there.

There was always this concept of... noblesse oblige, the idea of the rich being obligated to help the poor. This is one of the dangers of capitalism, right?

It was that the old premise, like the knights, there was the knight's honor in the classic system. There was the idea that the monarch was at least some level obligated to their subjects. When you turn everything into market relations, then the market has no obligation to anybody. We'll get into that with...

anti-homeless architecture in a bit. And then, of course, you have fascist corporatism. The vast majority of fascist regimes in the 20th century used corporatism as their main economic system, most notably the Kingdom of Italy, which was the first fascist state to adopt corporatism.

However, the... You know, for everything else, he made the trains run on time, right? That was the argument that always was made with Mussolini, that he fixed the economic... problems and then that justified all the other main difference between fascist corporatism and the original idea of corporatism is that the state would incorporate every single corporate interest in the early 20th century corporatism was mainly practiced and promoted why am i being seduced by some italian music in the back by catholics as i mentioned previously the idea of corporatism emerged under the pope you And it was an attempt to integrate Catholic social teachings into the modern industrialized society. This is why the vast majority of state Catholic nations across the world had corporatism as their economic system.

Even after the post-World War II reconstruction period, there were attempts to bring back corporatism in order to combat liberal capitalism. This was supported by Christian Democrats, National Conservatives, and even a few social democrats. Well, and you understand why, right? Because this creates the idea of a social obligation.

There was a history in Canada of a red Tory tradition instead of blue Tories, right? So red Tories have this kind of British sense of republicanism that says that we are obligated to help Canadians all benefit together. And the idea of the liberal capitalism as coming under critique...

specifically from these types of frameworks is that the liberal capital is everything's a market relation and there's no nationalism in here i mean dieffenbaker did some of this stuff dieffenbaker is the one who instituted the kind of bill of rights in canada because he saw it as a kind of an obligation of canadians to help one another so it was a form of conservatism that said that nationalism and conservatism go together to help each other um it just yeah we And so it's easier to find an external enemy It's easier to securitize than it is to to find the idea that we should all contribute more to help those who are the less Fortune yo corporatism came to be and was most prominent in the 60s and 70s There were numerous attempts to bring corporatism to the United States in order to replace the capitalist model. Yeah, okay I... The problem with YouTube is you can't check the sources, right?

And so without the sources, like you can say John Stuart Mill, but show me where, and without the sources I don't really think that that's useful. So corporatism then is the arrangement of society and organizations that directly interact with the state. So this can be the tripartite bargaining.

That's what the International Labour Organization was based on. The capitalists, the government, the politicians and the laborers all get together, they meet at a table, and they debate things. That's why Unifor, or the Canadian autoworkers, still has such a significant role in Canadian society, was that traditionally, it was seen as the kind of the spear point of the labor mobilization in Canada.

And so it would coordinate what it coordinated, then kind of trickled down to the rest of Canada, because it set the standards, right? This is all over the place. So the Islamic Association of...

China, Japan Inc., religious associations, lobbying groups. It's not necessarily about corporations. It's about corporatism as a coherent body, a corpus, right?

Think of it more like that. And so it does come from the Pope in 1891 on this idea of capital labor. The Pope was worried that the Marxists were fomenting all of this strife and specifically the communists were anti-religious, right?

you know, religion is the opiate of the masses, as Marx said. So the idea then was, in order to make both Catholicism relevant and respond to Marxism, we came up with this idea that we need to have social justice, that social justice was ensuring class harmony. It's wild now to think about social justice warriors, but this comes from the Pope specifically in a kind of quasi-somewhat fascist move. Saying that we need to have social harmony, right?

That we have to have market forces, that liberal capitalism tempered by moral considerations, that we have to have things like the idea of a living wage, that unionization is good so that we don't have class conflict, that property needs to be protected, that communism is terrible, but so is unrestrained capitalism, right? And so I think that is our, the current Pope has been pretty clear. critical of kind of billionaires and capitalism. And this idea that God is on the side of the poor, which I mean, read text, that's what it's there.

And so we have a bunch of these. And this goes back to the state capitalist model. The Asian model uses this strong central government's large support for corporations, forms of chosen unions, so legal and illegal unions, the exclusion of non-approved unions. Why?

Because because A lot of the unions will radicalize or argue for positions outside of the social good, what is conceived of by the centre, right? Directed development strategies, so you can target a region for development, potash development in Canada, the development of the tar sands, the bitumen, development of that as a regional strategy, as something that the federal government should support. Now, in that case, it's been a long contentious process between Alberta and the federal government, which I don't have time to get into. But the idea here is that the government supports certain businesses.

It was the meaty system in Japan, Sony, Honda, were all part of developing what became the consumer goods that were shipped to the US. And those brands are still very important today, because they had state support in the ways in which they did this. Now, we have the both the Asian model, and then we have the Russian model of corporatism by default.

which is the transition from the Soviet system into our system, resulting in these massive oligopolies, right? These huge conglomerates of businesses that came about through this weird kind of government-directed, well, you know this business, you get to bid on it first, and now you're a billionaire overnight because we've taken something that was socialized before and we've put it in private hands. And so if you have resources or the capacity to control those resources, you automatically get these huge amounts of money. And they still, you know, you can call this kleptocracy or whatever. It's the idea that specific key figures and specific key businesses are then closely linked to the regime.

And that regime is closely linked to them. And so we've got all, you know, with the Chelsea owner. And we've got all of these questions that have come out from the sanctions on Russia have targeted these specific industries and these specific individuals, which has been happening well before the Ukrainian invasion, that the foreign interference in U.S. elections.

and the failure to comport themselves has resulted in sanctions on specific individuals. Because so much of what's happening in the Russian corporatist model is those individuals and firms are closely allied with the interests, and they have banks, well, quasi-state monopolies, and cabinet members on corporate boards. So business politicians and bureaucrats are heavily connected.

And then the Italian fascist corporatism of that. era was about the single coordinated entity, the coordination of labor and corporate production, the nationalization of property, the dissolving of independent labor unions and national syndicalism. So we have one designated union you must be a member of, you can't have a wildcat strike, right?

Corporate control over sections of the economy and the rejection of uncontrolled markets and the calls for full employment. And so we have these frameworks I'll get into. I think these are Kind of a combination of the stuff we've talked about all along, as Modi and Trump talking about populism, we'll talk about populism in the next video, that borrow from elements of those other things.

Charisma, for one, which overlaps with the obsession with the cult of personality, as another one, which is a bit of the Stalinist tradition, a bit of these kind of fascist undertones, or corporatist undertones, if you want to be a more sympathetic reading. But that's why I think it is important to bring in corporatism because it's largely absent from the text.

Transcript for:Understanding Fascism and Corporatism

Transcript for:
Understanding Fascism and Corporatism