Capitalism with the Gloves Off
(Monthly Review, June 1981)

by Doug Dowd

Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America,
by Bertram Gross.
New York: M. Evans and Company, Inc., 1980.
420 pp., notes, index, $15.00.

You and I shudder in the night and grit our teeth at the very thought of (Oi!) President Reagan and his henchmen swimming at the top of the cesspool the United States ever more becomes, and of their doing so for years—years that will seem like centuries. And then we must confront the fact that untold millions of our fellow citizens, largely irrespective of class, color, creed, gender, or present condition of servitude, are blissed out over tll very same prospect; are beguiled by dreams of a Second Coming of rugged free enterprise and its each-for-himself and the market-for-all economics; are eager to strut to its hell-for-leather, chest-pounding foreign policy: God on our side where He belongs, once more.

Bertram Gross has been putting this book together for mail years, and had completed it well before the Reagan election. It. an almost desperately pertinent study, as solid as it is comprehensive; and it helps us to see the triumph of the Reagan gait as part of a process that has been taking shape for a very lore time. Reagan’s boyish, all-American style might explain how he became the figurehead of this visible shift to the right—toward, that is, increased social viciousness and mindlessness, toward the sanctification of greed and of patriotic bombast, toward systematic reaction and camouflaged authoritarianism. In our history, none of these has been missing; that they now move swiftly to an ever tighter and more dangerous combination, and that the U.S. public in significant part finds it soul-stirring, has very little indeed to do with Reagan himself; it is the latest outcome of how the U.S. social system has moved . through time, of its recent decades of monopoly capitalism in ascendance and decline, most especially of the dog days of the past several years.

All this raises at least two questions: What accounts for the current range of economic, political, and social afflictions of the contemporary United States? And, given those afflictions, why do so many of our people see this troupe of Meeseketeers as a portent of change for the better, instead of pelting them with rotten eggs and hooting them off the stage?

A reading of Friendly Fascism adds urgency to those questions, at the same time that it helps us to move toward usable answers. But to begin with, it is advisable to defuse the likely (and unwarranted) indignation of those readers for whom not even capitalism, let alone fascism, could conceivably be seen as “friendly.”

The choice of that adjective was perhaps unfortunate, except as an eye-catcher. Gross knows well and shows fully that fascism has no room in it for humane institutions; but he needs to distinguish what is now emerging in the United States from the fascism of other times and places: from the classic fascism of Italy, Germany, Japan (and many other countries) between the two world wars; or, since the Second World War, from that of Chile, Greece, South Korea, and the like. In his first chapter, Gross provides a brief but sufficient discussion of classic fascism, which shows the basis and the need for seeing potential U.S. fascism, if not as “friendly,” as likely to be a very different kind of beast.

Fascism has always been a response to socio-economic crisis in capitalist society. Whether or not it has taken on the forms it did in, say, Nazi Germany has depended upon the needs and the possibilities facing the capitalist class in the midst of crisis. In Germany, as with the other classic fascist developments, strong revolutionary forces existed: whatever else it was and had to be, Nazism was counter-revolqtionary. Why there were such revolutionary forces in Germany points to critical aspects of its history; that there were, points to critical needs facing German capitalism if it was to survive-and survive it did in the period that stretches from 1930 down to the present, grotesquely, insanely, destructively; survive it did, always with a little help from its friends.

The needs of German capitalism in crisis cut through the entire range of social existence, and its fascism both could be and had to be one of fanatic totalitarianism, the glorification of the state, the nation, the race, of war, with associated genocidal repression and all those ways and means that make one’s gorge rise when thinking of Hitler’s Germany.

If any of these “German” developments were to accompany fascism in the United States, they would do so, it may be argued (and is, by Gross), only in minor degree-except that fascism has been, and in its nature must be, the most warlike of all social forms. Considering the perennial warlike stance of non-fascist America, that is no small exception. Nor should we believe that none of these Nazi-like institutions could take hold in the United States because of our superior moral core. Germany, after all, was seen as something like the apogee of Western civilization in the late 1920s (in the arts, in science and learning, in technology, and in its model constitution) ; nor, to put no finer point on it, has the United States eschewed, say, genocidal tactics within its borders or outside them.

Still, so long as there is an at best weak revolutionary threat in the United States, and the country is unlikely to require (or be able to create) a full-scale counter-revolutionary process, we may well produce a fascist society as the crisis deepens, but one without the need for “a charismatic dictator, one-party rule, glorification of the state, dissolution of legislatures, termination of multiparty elections, ultra-nationalism, or attacks on rationality.” (p. 169) But, if and “when genuine neofascism emerges it may be associated with a relaxation of crude terror and the maturation of more sophisticated, effective, and ruthless controls.” (p. 171) Not exactly a rose garden, and all the more insidious and dangerous because it will not seem so different from stagflating monopoly capitalism, especially if, as is likely, the process from here to there is a gradual one. By comparison with the Germans, the Japanese, and the Italians (among others) as they moved into fascism, ours is a, country with a considerable layer of economic fat (also part of the: reason for our lack of revolutionary forces). We are not likely to be ranted and raved at as we move further down the primrose path; Ronnie will do it with jokes and smiles, all the way.

Which takes us back to our two questions, beginning with why the people of this country are so easily manipulated or, to put it bluntly, such political morons.

It is not only the United States that fits Marx’s epigram to the effect that the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of its ruling class, nor just the United States that Antonio Gramsci had in mind when he saw the power of “bourgeois ideological hegemony” to gain the “uncoerced acceptance” of capitalist rule. But would it not be difficult to find a society whose population has so fully accepted capitalist values, ways, and means, and allowed them so thoroughly to infuse all its institutions, whether economic, or educational, or political, or aesthetic, or religious, or...? In different words, the United States has been the most successful of capitalist societies in “teaching” its people not to think analytically, let alone historically, about their social existence (or much else): as Veblen once put it, we have “a trained incapacity” for social understanding. Over time that “training” has spread and deepened, has become a leukemia to our mental (and emotional) processes, has produced a degree of social inanity that brings us now to the verge of species suicide. (In none of this do I mean to suggest that there is some other society, capitalist or not, whose residents are, or have been trained to be, socially astute. But it seems clear that in this contest, the United States is the one to beat.)

A full analysis of U.S. capitalist development is required to understand why this has been achievable and achieved here. Part of the answer is that U.S. capitalism has been able to deliver the goods to larger numbers of its population in greater quantities and sooner than anywhere else; and part of the answer has been that its population has been so docile, so eager to become what its ruling class needed: at one time hard workers and, later, hard consumers. (What next?) And seen from another angle, the relative absence of class consciousness thereby suggested was much aided and abetted by the heterogeneous racial and religious mix of our population and the successes of racism in exploiting the situation. Still, what finally tipped the scales was that cornucopia of blessings that have made U.S. history what it is, blessings, of natural and human resources, of timing and of location, of, in short, whatever was necessary or useful for easy and swift capitalist development. Name it, and it came to the United States, almost as though from on high. (Maybe God was on our side?)

That at every moment of our history some substantial percentage of the population was denied a seat at the groaning table, far from promoting class consciousness, was effectively interpreted and used to strengthen the ideology of self-help, and to locate the causes in the shortcomings of those on the outside, not in the key operating rules of the system. (System: as a college teacher, one of my main difficulties is to get students to see that there u a system of society, not just a collection of getters and spenders.)

There have been, of course, episodes of anger and protest—e.g., before the First World War, during the Great Depression, and in the 1960s. But each of these petered out (or was crushed, as in the early 1920s and the McCarthy period), to be followed by, respectively, the “ages” of jazz, Uncle Ike, and Now, in each case scaling new heights of social know-nothingism. Except for a minority, and only once in a while, when things have gone bad in society, it has been seen as the fault of our historic bogeymen: gummint and furriness. In one of his customarily perceptive essays for The Nation, Alan Wolfe*sees “a particularly American form of reaction, a soft-core counter-revolution that harms the spirit as much as violence and state-directed terrorism maim the body.” And he goes on to argue that when our “national malaise” is explained to us “you may be sure that it will blame some sinister outside force for domestic ills.” (January 31, 1981)

Meanwhile, there have been problems in our political economy that have been emerging and connecting with each other now for many years, almost all of them analyzed in these pages, one by one and in relation to each other, and well before even being noticed in the straight world: stagflation, financial precariousness, creaking empire, and so on. But in the capitalist world, the word “problem” is itself problematic: it is a world of class, business, social, and national conflicts; and what is a problem for one is more often than not an achievement for another: e.g., inflation, which tends to make the powerful more so, and the weak more so. But Gross is not concerned with “problems,” he is concerned with the connection between a chronic crisis for the system and its only visible option for dealing with it: by transition to another system: neofascism, friendly fascism, or, as Harold Laski put it in the 1930s for what then existed, “capitalism with the gloves off.”

The “gloves” are the forms of political democracy (unionism, social welfare policies, etc.) that have had the effect of blunting the jagged edges of the capitalist process. A buoyant capital accumulation process in the stages of modern industrialization both allows and requires such amelioration: it keeps the social peace and it feeds economic growth. But in times of systemic crisis (which almost always includes a sagging rate of accumulation), social amelioration becomes transformed from necessity to luxury, and it must be sliced back to the bone if accumulation is to be saved: back to the harsh procedures of nineteenth-century capitalism, in the name of “supply-side economics.” But how do you get a whole population to accept such cutbacks (not just for “the poor” but for the entire working class, broadly defined), especially when the argument in favor is couched in the abstruse terms of an utterly implausible economics? By friendly fascism, if at all, that’s how. By extending the processes of mind management that are already so thoroughly embedded in all aspects of our lives, and by repressing those who ask for trouble.

Gross is expert in treating the complex processes by and because of which U.S. capitalism has been groping its way through the thickets of relative decline. He is good in many ways, and clear, but he is best at establishing the paths of continuity between the past, the present, and what lies ahead.

It is difficult to think of any important social process or structure that has escaped his analysis. All of what are usually called economic problems (of stagflation, of monopolistic power, of foreign trade and competition, and so on) are here; as are the global and national politics that move both above and below the surface; as are the various techniques of persuasion and manipulation, whether mental or physical, whether soothing or terroristic. Nor does he neglect the ways of those who believe they have found a personal means of getting out from under this system, through drugs, or cults, or whatever. It is thus a very large book, crammed with arguments and facts, but coherently. It is unpleasant reading, unrelieved by a light touch. Gross is not seeking to amuse.

But it is not a book without hope, despite the author’s insistence that it can happen here, indeed that we are in some real sense already halfway there. Gross does not believe (nor do I ) that the various components of an American fascism cannot be turned back, despite how much they already ooze over our social landscape. His Chapter 18 is entitled “It Hasn’t Happened Yet.” But we all know that a change toward life in this country will not happen of itself. Even if, as is probable, the hopes promoted by Reagan are deflated soon and firmly, it does not follow that a better fate awaits: indeed, the accompanying bitterness could enhance the dangers.

Better fates, as we all know, must be created by those who would have them. And Gross spends the last fifty pages of his fine book making specific suggestions as to the components of a plausible program of what might be worked at right now that could lay the foundations for the social reconstruction of the United States from the bottom up. In a generally valuable book, those suggestions may finally be among its most valuable contributions, if also difficult to bring to fruition. But whatever the difficulties, to seek to build democratic institutions in all parts of our lives can scarcely be harder on us than to shudder through the night.

*Twenty years have passed since Prof. Wolfe wrote those words.  Much has changed in those years, as have many—including Prof. Wolfe. He now contributes regularly to mainstream periodicals, and his contributions almost always wee wee on those left of center and bow to those who are not.  Sic transit gloria mundi, as the man said.  return to text

June 23, 2003