The following article by Don Hamerquist has been published by our friends over at Kersplebedeb. Hamerquist’s document addresses class and social conflict, ruling class responses (actual and potentials) and the threats of emerging fascisms that are opposed to not only the existing capitalist order but revolutionary liberatory anti-system alternatives.
It is not possible to evaluate ruling class politics without fully recognizing the significance of the resistance to them. The trajectory of capitalist societies is determined by such mass and class resistance and capital’s adaption to it. Particularly important in this regard are the struggles that have explicitly or implicitly raised more general challenges to capitalist oppression and exploitation.
I think that there is major potential for a modern fascism in the center of global capital that is based on the explosive combination of the reactionary and nihilistic rejection of the neoliberal transnational capitalist status quo with the rapid expansion of declassed and marginalized populations.
Sectors of the metropolitan ruling class are increasingly aware of the apocalyptic potentials of capitalism’s long-deferred social and ecological costs and other noxious byproducts of its development. They will do everything possible to avoid and delay any transformation of such potentials into actual crises.”
The same transnational ruling class elements that fret about populism are also aware that for millions of people in the capitalist core the new global order is defined by its “… failure…to sustain cultures and communities that provide identity, meaning and purpose in life …”
The transnational capitalist elites are quite aware of the instability of the structures and processes they manage and the volatility of the populations they subordinate. They realize that their pursuit of profit also produces their populist oppositions and ensures that these will generate and regenerate. Various key players in the ruling class also recognize any number of potential social disruptions that can reverse economic and political ‘good times’ and rapidly transform current populist challenges to their already shaky political equilibrium into much larger and more destabilizing threats.