Chile – El Pueblo: Notes on Fascism and Corporatism – Part II
We hereby share an unofficial translation of the second part of the previously translated first part, found published in the Issue nº101 of the newspaper El Pueblo from Chile.
Notes on Fascism and Corporatism
(Part II)
The Bolshevik victory in 1917 marks a turning point in the development of the international class struggle, ushering in a new era of world proletarian revolution. Imperialist economic relations and the global reactionary forces were dealt a mortal blow. All counterrevolutionary forces panicked, imposing extraordinary measures to confront the revolution in every country, especially those where the rise of the revolutionary mass movement threatened the old and rotten order.
This new era, marked by the escalation of violence, will see the emergence of new reactionary political forms to confront the working class and the combative people, who have already shown that they are capable of sustaining revolutionary power through their dictatorship.
It is necessary to understand that fascism is a political phenomenon characteristic of imperialism. Let us remember that imperialism is monopolistic, parasitic, decaying, and dying capitalism. Imperialism arises at the moment when the division of the world among the imperialist countries has been completed. Fascism arises to confront the revolutionary struggle of the proletarian and popular masses in the imperialist countries and in the colonies and semi-colonies.
It was not enough to repress and terrorize the communist and revolutionary columns, something that the bloody and cowardly reactionary classes have undoubtedly carried out. It was a counterrevolutionary task of the first order to contain and defeat the revolution and effectively prevent the Bolshevik example from spreading throughout the world. The civilian and military representatives of the magnates of big capital also had to politically reorganize society, molding it in order to contain the revolution. This required restructuring the State, adjusting it in all areas, and establishing a corresponding form or system of government to strike at the class and the people.
Repression, terror, and corporatization
As we explained, terror is not enough, bloody repression is not enough. Russia itself is a good example of how terror, cruelty, abject punishment, torture, and savage repression against the revolutionary workers’ movement and its vanguard are not enough to prevent the victory of the oppressed. Terror and violence are means to impose political objectives, and political objectives express in a concentrated form the economic interests of the reactionary classes in this case.
Some factions of the ruling classes of the imperialist countries understood that in order to survive and prevail, they had to generate a new way of organizing society, since “bourgeois representative democracy” was no longer sufficient to contain the revolutionary advance of the masses, to sustain the bourgeois dictatorship, since the class struggle had far surpassed the representative forms. In order to effectively strike and halt a growing and increasingly unified labor movement under the leadership of a communist Party, which already had the experience of a triumphant Party in Russia, it was necessary to frame society in a new form of organization, one that responded to the needs of the moment and ensured the continuity of the bourgeois dictatorship. that form of organization was corporatization, which had the political guidance of fascism.
Corporatization is therefore the response to the revolutionary threat and is inspired by the old medieval corporations, but in a context of imperialist capitalist development.
Its very name alludes to understanding or interpreting society as a body, with its different parts. The head commands the body; the ruling classes are not going to use their hands to hit their heads. The hands and legs would be the subordinate classes, whose main function is to work and produce under the command of the ruling classes (the head). Class struggle would be an infection artificially inoculated by communists and destructive or dissolving elements of society into the social body, which had to be removed or annihilated at all costs. Between the head and the extremities of the body were intermediate organs, intended to make the functioning of society more effective, including technocrats and corporations. Trade unions were reduced to guilds whose main concern was to serve production and under no circumstances alter the “natural order” of society. On the contrary, their duty was to combat class struggle as a tumor to be removed, especially its promoters.
Undoubtedly, the repression and persecution of the revolutionary movement is imperative, in which they seek to involve all the agencies that make up and integrate the State, in order to preserve the old regime of exploitation, the only order possible for them. Politically, in terms of the organic expression of its interests, fascism seeks a corporate social or State order, aiming to bring together the worker, the boss, and the State.
If it resorts to violence or terror, it is to intimidate, paralyze, tame, and subdue, but in accordance with its political path and the imposition of its corporate order.
In our country, if Pinochet was unable to further promote fascism and corporatization in the 1980s, it was because of the rise of popular protest, the development of armed struggle, and mass struggle. It has to do, above all, with the growing development of mass organizations in opposition to Pinochet, and he was unable to advance further as a result of global crises and their profound impact on Chile and the opposition of demoliberal Parties. The Yankee imperialist plan imposed on the Chilean army high command the transition to governments emerging from the ballot box.
Fascism and corporatism, however, remained imprinted in the 1980 constitution and in a series of institutions, but on a secondary level with respect to “representative democracy,” an issue that before 1980 had not been entirely decided.
Corporatism and the economy
Many of the measures adopted by a fascist regime are designed to secure bureaucratic capitalism (the type of capitalism that imperialism allows to develop in its semi-colonies), and many of its laws are aimed at corporatization, readjusting the State, and strengthening the old order. Fascism and corporatization are in no way opposed to measures in favor of imperialist capital and non-State monopoly capital. On the contrary, such measures became necessary for the implementation of so-called “neoliberal” measures.
Large producer associations are strengthened. While it is true that trade may remain open to the outside world, it will still be monopolists who control it: the State is the guarantor of this. The rest of non-monopolistic trade remains hierarchical and controlled by the State. The aim is also for workers’ unions to become de facto integrated into the State.
Under capitalism, corporatization serves capitalism, and for this reason socialist forms of ownership cannot develop, and State-owned enterprises cannot be confused with a form of common ownership of enterprises. As long as the capitalist system is dominant, even though there is State ownership in some areas of industry, these will never be socialist enterprises in the true sense of the word.
Corporatism is not only a political readjustment of the State, it is also a set of economic measures for the maintenance and development of large property, as well as for increasing the accumulation of capital and concentrating land ownership. Likewise, as a means to achieve the above, it must deploy the persecution of the labor and peasant movements and other sectors of the people.
Corporatism promotes a reactionary economy. The State intervenes at one moment in favor of State monopoly capital and at another to promote non-State monopoly capital. The political system they develop has to do with tying the masses to the State through various agencies. The results of the implementation of these policies vary according to the intensity of the class struggle and the opposition they face at any given moment (the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution are clear examples of this).
For example, today the development of non-State private capital increasingly depends on State intervention, not necessarily in the sense of developing State-owned enterprises, but rather in guaranteeing the monopolistic condition of capital, ensuring its development, defending the prevailing order of exploitation, and repressing or restricting the oppressed classes of society (proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, middle bourgeoisie). Similarly, progress in the application of these measures transforms the masses into a revolutionary breeding ground.
Corporate restructuring of the society
In this sense, corporatism emerged in the 20th century as a system of government, guided by fascist politics and based on the contradiction with representative bourgeois democracy (as expressed in constitutional texts). This contradiction is also a manifestation of the contradictions between different factions of the big bourgeoisie, which undoubtedly intensify as the strength of the people and the working class develops, since this very struggle leads to the crisis of representative bourgeois democracy. Of course, these contradictions do not imply fighting fascism with a demoliberal approach, that is, placing the proletariat at the tail end of one of the factions of the bourgeoisie.
The corporate restructuring of society points toward the creation of the Corporate State, sometimes presented as “full participatory social democracy.” But this corporate political construct, due to class struggle (especially its most acute and manifest expressions), torpedoes this restructuring, often leaving it half-finished. It is essential not to be confused: this Corporate State does not change the class nature of the bourgeois dictatorship, in our case a joint dictatorship of landlords and big bourgeoisie at the service of imperialism, mainly Yankee imperialism.
Strictly speaking, corporatism builds the State on the basis of corporations, implying the rejection of parliamentarianism and serving as a response to its crisis. It is increasingly through the executive branch that the country’s most important laws are enacted, tending to diminish the role of parliament due to its own stagnation. Corporatism asserts that, in the face of liberalism, which focuses on money, and communism, a government based on corporate systems, similar to medieval models, should be established. In the past, it was closely linked to Catholicism. It aims to create corporations for farmers, industrialists, merchants, artisans, professionals, technicians, and workers, as well as students, the armed forces, and the police. All of these groups appoint delegates and join a corporate system that is closely linked to the State, i.e., organizing producers corporately. This can vary from country to country. In Chile, CONARA itself and regionalization after 1973 were inspired by this. Even the imposition of this in Chile after 1980 was weakened because, at the international level, Yankee imperialism was promoting the replacement of government with “democratic representative” forms. The important thing to understand is that the bourgeois State, in general, has a process of development and that it is this process of development that leads it to a fascist and corporate system.
In summary. Fascism and corporatization are not caricatures, they are not individuals with shaved heads tattooed with swastikas, waving Nazi flags and with bulging eyes. It is a form of political and organic response by the magnates of big capital, a response managed directly or through representatives, to the struggle of the conscious proletariat. This, on the one hand, but it is also a struggle against other sectors or factions of the bourgeoisie who rely on “representative democracy” as a means of confronting the acute class struggle. The fascists also fight against the latter. Between these two sectors of the big bourgeoisie, there are other sectors that are torn between supporting either of the other two.
Finally, the forms or systems of the State and the political systems of government in a society composed of distinct and opposing classes are a response to the needs that the class struggle imposes on the political struggle and the structuring of the State at any given moment, and even more so when the political struggle turns into armed struggle or people’s war.
