From owner-marxism-international
Date: Fri, 4 Apr 1997 17:44:03 -0500 (EST)
From: Brian M Ganter <bmgantereacsu.buffalo.edu>
Subject: M-I: PANIC LEFT, Pt.2
— — — — — — — — — —
Revolutionary Marxist Collective at U of Buffalo
PANIC LEFT, Pt. 2
It is strange — isn't it — that on the one hand the
RMC/Buffalo is accused of writing impenetrable prose that no one
can read and that no one would read ("beyond the first
sentence” — to quote Doug Henwood) and on the other
hand we are discovering that all of our texts are not only
“read” but “studied” and responded to! How
is that for a “contradiction"! How the
“un-readable” is at the same time the most read! Which
shows that “readability”, “stalinism”,
etc. are little more than ideological alibis deployed as devices
of resistance against thoughtfulness and difficult thinking.
The sentimental left of Ralph Dumain that lives on anecdotes
justifies itself by accusing rigorous thought of being
stalinist. Stalinism is, for Ralph, to put it another way, a cover
up for the fascism that his brand of leftism (as the paid agent of
capital) advocates. He shares his strategies of fascist propaganda
with not only Stanley Crouch but also Laura Ingraham and others
who also have made a habit of deploying stalinism to defend a
triumphalist capitalism. Since Ralph Dumain is clearly a
“fan” of “Comrade Zavarzadeh”, we publish
here a short and very accessible text by “the
comrade” (appropriate salute for the stalinist in residence) that might
make clear why Ralph is so mad at him! Here we go:
THE FRESH FACE OF POSTMODERN FASCISM ON TV POLITICAL ANALYSIS
By Mas'ud Zavarzadeh
The retirement of David Brinkley as the commentator on ABC's talk
show ("This Week with David Brinkley") and the subsequent
lowering of George Will's profile on that show, signal the arrival
of a new era in television political analysis. The Brinkley-Will
brand of conservative commentary has become rather
embarrassing. They speak the old languages of the cold war and
show how out of touch they are with the emerging global capitalism
and its post-national politics so important to big business. Their
commentary is mired in nostalgia for a dying nationalist
capitalism and its fading nation-state.
The TV networks are now scrambling to find fresh voices that are
tuned to the new globalization of capital
and can defend the interests of transnational big business in
hipper, more cosmopolitan tones. They are looking (to paraphrase
one network executive) for young, smart, image-savvy
political analysts who can cut against the nationalist
conservative clichés
of Brinkley-Will-Novak.
In Laura Ingraham — the new analyst on the CBS's Weekend
News who also has a spot on Microsoft-NBC's world-wide
MSNBC—the networks have found the new postmodern political
commentator for the post-cold war. She is not simply another
“far-rite” (as her Porsche vanity-plate proclaimed)
conservative. She is a postmodern analyst whose “fresh
voice” is the voice of transnational postmodern
fascism. Like her Italian counter-parts (the
“post-fascists"), she packages fascism as a transnational
ideology with wit, humor, irony and an image-savviness for mass
consumption. She makes postmodern fascism look
cutting-edge—a hip politics.
Ingraham's commentary is aggressively postmodern, irreverent
and—unlike the old modernist fascism—postnational. Her
main interest is in a foreign policy that protects transnational
business. She believes that the model for US foreign policy should
be one based on the “desire to promote democracy abroad."
But “democracy aboard” is a code word, in her
commentary, for the free market. She is, therefore, upset about
the lack of trade balance between the US and China and wants human
rights issues be used as a lever to correct that imbalance by
opening up more of the Chinese market to US business. Similarly,
Milosevic's regime, which is still based on state supervision of
business, should be replaced by a “pro-democratic”
government that accepts the free market and offers favorable
business terms for foreign capitalists.
Her defense of transnational business avoids the old nationalist
fascist “argument” against “liberalism."
Instead, like other postmodern fascists steeped in the culture of
MTV, she bypasses “argument” and simply presents her
audience with an image, an ironic play of wit. When she showed up
for a lunch
interview with David Shribman of The Boston Globe, she
wore a full-length fur which, she assured him, was made
from “baby squealing foxes." In one image she condenses her
case for big business; her contempt for animal rights, and her
ironic pleasure in the individual rewards of capitalism. And she
does this fearlessly (in John MacLaughlin's
words, on whose show,
The McLaughlin Group, she also appears).
"Fearlessness” is the trade mark of all fascist
militaristic aggressions against the people's
democracy. Ingraham's postmodern fascism is born out of the
current crisis of U.S. capitalism. Fascism is the outcome of the
tremendous economic hardship facing the petty bourgeoisie. Like
other postmodern Fascists, Ingraham persuades the petty
bourgeoisie that its economic hardship is caused not by the
exploitation of workers, which has resulted in the rising profits
of transnational business, but by liberal cultural policies, which
favor the working class, the poor, the African-American and
women. More specifically, her commentaries manipulate the fears of
the middle class in order to attack liberal social policies that,
she says, support homosexuality,
abortion, secular school
curriculum, feminism, welfare mothers and a whole host of other
things that scare the white middle class. She has, for example,
called the Gay Students Association at Dartmouth, where she was an
undergraduate, “cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites."
However, for her, the main beneficiaries of shameful liberalism,
which robs people of their rights of free competition (by
affirmative action, for example), are labor unions. Unions have
become the symbol of liberal and anti-business regulations that
restrict free enterprise and limit individual freedom and
prosperity. Ingraham thinks, like another postmodern fascist,
Arianna Huffington, that we should abandon social programs that
provide a safety net (because they increase taxes on big business)
and substitute for them compassion and moral responsibility.
In the guise of debating cultural issues, Ingraham's comments
alienate people from working class movements and thus weaken the
unions. Weakened unions leave transnational big business free to
increase its exploitation of workers all over the world—from
sweatshops making designer clothes in New York to child labor in
Bangladesh making soccer balls and carpets for Western consumers.
What is just as dangerous as Ingraham's postmodern fascism is the
way in which she is received by the media. Her views are being
accommodated and made familiar not just by entertainment magazines
like Vanity Fair but by the “serious” media, notably
Sixty Minutes and The New York Times. For instance, The New York
Times, which put her on the cover of its Sunday Magazine, has
treated her postmodern fascism as the charming views of an
outspoken, bold and hip performance artist and not as the
dangerous political ideology that it is. Her anti-gay comments,
for example, are not seen by the media as an ingredient of fascism
but as an ironic performance since, after all, her own brother is
gay.
By personalizing her views and representing her politics as pure
style and image, the media has taken her fascist views as a
refreshing new voice. Network executives argue that such a hot new
voice should be heard as part of larger pluralism of voices on
TV. But this is, of course, a very selective pluralism: when was
the last time network executives allowed a socialist voice to be
heard as a part of a pluralist commentary?
Ingraham's views, far from being “personal” and
eccentric expressions of a hip postmodern conservative, are
symptoms of a new transnational fascism marked by the increasing
violence of big business against workers: lay-offs and outsourcing
to maximize profits; the rise of white militias in the U.S. and
ethnic cleansing abroad; the trafficking in child prostitution and
slave labor, and more and more sweatshops — whether in
U.S. cities or free trade zones. Ingraham's postmodern fascism is
the symptom of the latest crisis of transnational capitalism. One
should look beyond its slick veneer and fight it on all fronts.
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