Hartmann: Obama's a Corporatist

It's been an increasingly common rhetorical tactic of reactionaries the nation over to dismiss the political policies of the Obama administration as fascistic. It now appears that some of the country's leading liberal figures are beginning to apply this same characterization, albeit for different reasons.

The latest liberal to take to this perspective is progressive radio show host Thom Hartmann. On Thursday he posed an interesting question to his listeners: "Did Barack Obama become a third way politician... a corporatist politician?" Assuming that this was in fact the case, Hartmann went on to ask, "Did he become one when he became president, or when he entered the Senate, or was he always one?"

Hartmann then provided his listeners with a detailed explanation of this political-economic system, that did not seem to deviate much from those found in the more sophisticated left-wing circles. He did, however, add some interesting details to his definition that seemed necessary coming from his ideological perspective -which is actually to the right of many leftists inclined to perpetuate this general argument.

"The first way politicians, the conservative politicians, they believe government has basically no function all, except military and police," Hartmann explained. "The second way politicians, the classic liberal politicians like FDR, they believe that the government should be ensuring (and providing with government employees) an entire social safety net." He went on to specify that this "second way" denoted a "welfare state" of the sort envisioned by such men as Lyndon Johnson and Franklin Roosevelt.

"And the third way, that Tony Blair did and Bill Clinton did," Hartmann stated "is to say 'yeah, we agree with the liberals on this -that the government should be providing all these things- but we're gonna do them through a private company. We're even gonna do the military through private companies; we're gonna have contractors, so that we can get the corporations in on this.'"

Hartmann then paraphrased Blair, who apparently argued that the reasoning behind this idea was derived from a recognition of the fact that both the Thatcher and Reagan administrations embraced the private sector and their mutual popularity was due in part to this fact. "They believed that the private sector was more efficient in everything, so why not bring it into government?"

"You'll recall, if you're a student of history, that's what Mussolini did in the 1930s," Hartmann boldly asserted. "He brought the private sector into government; he merged the business and government sectors." He went on to explain that Mussolini was not the only one who partook in such a policy. "Franco did and others did and it didn't quite work out so well."

He then characterized both the Clinton and Bush administrations as both having distinctively fallen into this "corporatist" model. And would this not stand to reason? After all, both the Clinton and Bush administrations certainly oversaw a significant expansion in the process of outsourcing government work to the private sector.

Hartmann subsequently expanded on his initial question. Did Obama come to "third way" politics out of political necessity, political opportunism, or does he actually believe in the theory that the private sector is more efficient than government?

Apparently, Hartmann will be exploring these questions in further detail on "Russian Television" on Monday.

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The real question, in my view, is not whether or not Obama is a "corporatist" or "third way" politician, but rather if Hartmann's analogous characterization holds any validity in the first place. As far as I am concerned, it does not.

It's been a common feature of the popular, ahistorical, narrative of fascism to imply that its economic foundation is based upon a corporate-empowering merger between the government and private sector of the economy; a militarized system of plutocracy, so to speak. Not surprisingly, this view was initially perpetuated and maintained by political opportunists seeking to delegitimize their opponents and/or gain political capital. The degree to which this characterization actually corresponds to historical reality, however, is virtually non-existent.

Now Hartmann's argument is unique in that it evokes what he refers to as the "third way" and places that theory within the limited scope of two ideological perspectives that are both inherently capitalist, American liberalism/progressivism and conservatism. Given the options presented, it would indeed make sense to conclude that the "third way" approach to this would be identified in a merger between the welfare capitalism of modern liberalism and the private enterprise principles of American conservatism.

But does this actually constitute the ideological framework by which Mussolini derived his economic theories/policies?

Irrespective of what one would assume (based upon the lexical properties of the English translation of term) corporatism does not imply the sort of corporate aggrandizement one would assume; in fact the term denotes quite the opposite.

The term corporativismo was utilized to denote a particular system of cooperation between the classes, as opposed to class antagonism -which was viewed by the fascists and socialists alike to be a unalterable property of unbridled capitalism. [In this context, the 'corporation' does not represent a business that is structured around the corporate model, but rather a collective body that represents a single segment engaged in economic activity, that is then mandated to negotiate with other such bodies, in order to establish policies that will serve the interest of all parties involved.] The fascist solution, however, stood in stark contrast to the notions of class warfare that were celebrated by most socialists of the time.

Their position on class cooperation was not without support. In fact the corporatist model had a great appeal to middle class and conflict-weary citizens, who were reluctant to embrace the radicalism of the socialists and anarchists. Corporatism also had something of an appeal to the national bourgeoisie, who viewed the prospects of survival and participation in a revolutionary new order far more favorably than the implications awaiting them in a revolutionary order that sought their complete demise. [An important fact to note here is that history has shown that the bourgeoisie turned to fascism out of necessity, rather than affinity.]

The solution was therefore an anti-capitalist one, which resolved to construct an economic system that merged such (otherwise antagonistic) interests into vertical syndicates and required them to work for the national interest, as opposed to their own short-sighted self-interest. This would consequently replace the traditional capitalist mode of production -which is based upon a hierarchical system in which owners command an absolute control over their enterprise(s)- with a system that injected other forces into the equation. Among these would be organized labor, the State and peripheral figures, such as 'economic experts'.

Together with the emasculated employers, these interests would converge in the vertical syndicates which would in turn negotiate the specifics of how a given industry would function. The State, in this context, would serve as a source of mediation, regulation -establishing protocols by which no subsequent arrangements between labor and business could deviate- and participation. Under these protocols, 'ownership' of an enterprise would essentially serve as a formality within a system of democratized economic planning, by which they were consequently stripped of the sort of hegemony to which they were accustomed under the conditions of a liberal market.

From the outset, Mussolini had no shortage of former socialists and syndicalists at his disposal to act as apologists for the system he sought to implement.

One can observe, from the most basic level, that the aforementioned economic philosophy in no way resembles the various properties Hartmann was so keen to attach it. In actuality the "third way", within the context of Mussolini's economic philosophy, represented an alternative to both capitalism and radical socialism -as opposed to Hartmann's notions of an essential compromise between welfare capitalism and free market capitalism. What's more -and what New Deal zealots like Hartmann might find painfully ironic- is that the short-lived National Recovery Administration (a manifestation of New Deal policy) is widely viewed as having constituted Roosevelt's attempt to implement a corporatist system in the United States.

Now the practical implementation of this system in Fascist Italy is another question all together. The degree to which corporatism was effective is a matter of long standing debate. Most historians seem to regard the actual implementation of the program to have been a mere formality, in which labor was typically not allotted any strong bargaining power with capital. So rather than bringing an alternative economic mode of production to fruition, the capitalist mode of production basically remained in all but name.

The primary instances in which businesses did not act in accordance to the traditional protocols were in cases of increased bureaucratic intervention on the part of the state. The government did enact regulations and experimented in a range of projects comparable to those enacted through the New Deal.

In short, Mussolini's corporatist experiment is regarded as having been a failure, insofar as its desired ends are concerned. Corporatism never took root in a fashion as robust as its apologists insisted it would.

There have been instances of acknowledgment of economic improvements within Mussolini's Italy, but the degree to which this is attributable to corporatism is negligible. Nowhere, however, did Mussolini's policies correspond with the systemic privatization of the traditional government service sector, as is inherent to Hartmann's argument. So in neither case (ideological or practical) can one draw the parallels some find befitting of the term corporatism.

Incidentally, Fascist Italy did not simply recognize the corporatist mode of production. The number of businesses that utilized the workers cooperative mode of production rose from 7,131 in 1927 to 14,576 in 1942. Mussolini also became a strong proponent of wide-ranging nationalization in 1943, during the reign of his second fascist order, the Italian Social Republic. During this brief period, Mussolini succeeded in nationalizing several of northern Italy's largest industries and resolved to apply this principle to all businesses that employed over 100 workers.

So where then does President Obama really stand on the question of political-economy?

During the run-up to the 2008 presidential election, when much of the rest of the country seemed lost in Obama's populist appeal and seductively simplistic rhetoric, a handful of skeptics were pointing to such telling signs as his campaign contributors and his senatorial support for the Bush bailouts.

Even after Obama was romantically swept into office and the realities surrounding the figures being brought in to his administration made themselves known to the public, many liberals still managed to maintain their faith in the notion that Obama would somehow manage to usher in a golden age of "change we can believe in".

Of course, in a representative democracy where capital increasingly accounts for more political representation than actual voting is able to manifest, the notion that any prominent politician can go against the will of big capital and still maintain any hope of political survival is fanciful. The economy is not yet where it was when Roosevelt was elected. Therefore to think that the Democratic Party would produce a governing body willing to alter some of the underlying flaws of the current economic system is giving it far too much credit.

I'm of the opinion that, by the time the economic system has plunged into the depths of total depression, it will be too late for the Democratic Party to establish a coalition seriously committed to mending these problems. And whether the Democratic Party would have any real inclination to establish such a coalition seems unlikely, given the nature of political-capital relations in the present day.