Global capitalism and 21st century fascism

BY:WILLIAM I.ROBINSON The crisis of global capitalism is unprecedented, given its magnitude, its global reach, the extent of ecological degradation and social deterioration, and the scale of the means of violence. We truly face a crisis of humanity.
We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups

that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions.
Militarised accumulation, financial speculation and the sacking of public

budgets.
Forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forums annual meeting in

Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is the most serious challenge in the world and is raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars.

 We face a system that is now much more integrated, and dominant groups

that have accumulated an extraordinary amount of transnational power and control over global resources and institutions.
Forced participants in the 2011 World Economic Forums annual meeting in

Davos to acknowledge that the gap between the rich and the poor worldwide is the most serious challenge in the world and is raising the spectre of worldwide instability and civil wars.
By the 21st century, the TCC turned to several mechanisms to sustain global

accumulation, or profit making, in the face of this crisis.

One is militarised accumulation A second mechanism is the raiding and sacking of public budgets And a third is frenzied worldwide financial speculation This is not a cyclical but a structural crisis a restructuring crisis, such as

we had in the 1970s, and before that, in the 1930s that has the potential to become a systemic crisis, depending on how social agents respond to the crisis and on a host of unknown contingencies.

21st century fascism in the United States

There are some key features of a 21st century fascism 1. The fusion of transnational capital with reactionary

political power 2. Militarisation and extreme masculinisation 3. A scapegoat which serves to displace and redirect social tensions and contradictions 4. A mass social base 5. A fanatical millennial ideology involving race/culture supremacy embracing an idealised and mythical past, and a racist mobilisation against scapegoats 6. A charismatic leadership

 The counterweight to 21st century fascism must be a

coordinated fight-back by the global working class. The only real solution to the crisis of global capitalism is a massive redistribution of wealth and power downward towards the poor majority of humanity. And the only way such redistribution can come about is through mass transnational struggle from below.

2011: calling time on capitalism

Richard Wolff

Recent decades have seen a massive redistribution of

wealth, imposing the cost of successive crises on the poorest. Recovery Hype Created Yet, this is more fantasy than reality. After all, the nearly 20% of the US labour force that became unemployed or underemployed in 2009 remains so as we enter 2011. No recovery there. The last half-century suggests a very different analysis of the crisis and a correspondingly different response for 2011. Growth in the US and Europe steadily slowed over those years

Average growth of GDP per capita in US and Europe, 1961-2009.

 While workers' conditions deteriorated, capitalist surpluses and

profits soared and stock markets boomed. Income and wealth were redistributed from poor and middle to the rich. But the promised results never materialised: neither more investment, nor greater economic growth. As the graph shows, growth actually slowed and then the whole system imploded into a catastrophic crisis.
The recovery being planned and hyped aims at a return to the US

economy before it crashed. However, that capitalism was like a train hurtling toward the stone wall of crisis. To return to a pre-crisis capitalism risks resuming our places on a similar train heading for a similar crash.
No Keynesian monetary or fiscal policies address, let alone change,

how that system works and who uses its wealth to what ends. No reforms or regulations passed or even proposed under Obama would do that either. To avoid the instability of capitalism and its huge social costs requires changing the system. That remains the basic issue for a new year and a new generation.

Obamas budget and the rot of American capitalism

Patrick Martin
After committing trillions in federal bailouts to the banks and

billionaires, the White House is demanding cuts that will devastate the working class, and particularly its poorest and most vulnerable sections.
The $1.1 trillion in cuts for the next decade proposed by the White

House is to be only the starting point for further cuts, as spokesmen for both big business parties acknowledge. Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad, a Democrat, declared, Weve got to do substantially more than $1 trillion worth of deficit reduction in the next decade.
Democrats and Republicans agree on gargantuan military spending,

an uninterrupted flow of funds to the financial aristocracy, and continued tax breaks for corporate America and the wealthy.

 The Obama budget projects that the ten-year cumulative deficit will

reach a staggering $10.4 trillion.

The military budget accounts for the lions share of the ten-year

deficit: more than $7 trillion of the projected $10 trillion.

These measures will provoke mass opposition. The revolutionary

struggles in Egyptin which protests and strikes of millions of workers and youth forced the resignation of a US-backed dictator that ruled the country for more than 30 years political system are common to Egypt and the United States, and are in fact universal. of the capitalist system as a wholethat is, the reorganization of economic life to meet social need. In every aspect of its policies and of its social being, the ruling class itself makes the case for socialist revolution.

Mass unemployment, record inequality, and the corruption of the

The working class can secure its interests only through the overturn