1/4/2017 The Failure of Passive Revolution

Publicado en Amrica Latina en movimiento (http://www.alainet.org)

The Failure of Passive Revolution

William I. Robinson

Barack Obama declared to CNN this past December 26 that he could have
beaten Trump had he the chance to run against the president elect for a third
term, but he may have done more than anyone else to assure Trumps victory.

While Trumps election has triggered a rapid expansion of fascist currents in

US civil society and the political system a fascist outcome is not inevitable and
will depend on the ght back that has already begun. But that ght back
requires clarity as to how we got to such a dangerous precipice. The seeds of
a 21st century fascism were planted, fertilized, and watered by the government
of outgoing president Barack Obama and the bankrupt liberal elite that
Obamas presidency represents.

By the nal years of the George W. Bush regime, and especially with the
nancial collapse of 2008, seething discontent burst out into mass protest in
the U.S. and around the world. The Obama project was from the start an effort
by dominant groups to reestablish hegemony in the wake of its deterioration
during the Bush years. Obamas election was a challenge to the system at the
cultural and ideological level that shook up racial/ethnic foundations upon
which the U.S. Republic has always rested, although it certainly did not
dismantle those foundations.

However, the Obama project was never intended to challenge the socio-
economic order. To the contrary, it sought to preserve and strengthen that
order, to sustain capitalist globalization, by reconstituting hegemony and
conducting a passive revolution against the mass discontent and spreading
popular resistance that began to percolate in the nal years of the Bush
presidency.

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The Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci developed the concept of passive

revolution to refer to efforts by dominant groups to bring about mild change
from above in order to defuse mobilization from below for more far-reaching
transformation. Integral to passive revolution is the cooptation of leadership
from below and the integration of that leadership into the dominant project.

Obamas 2008 election campaign tapped into and helped expand mass
mobilization and popular aspirations for change not seen in many years in the
United States. The Obama project co-opted the brewing storm from below,
channeled it into the electoral campaign and then betrayed those aspirations,
as the Democratic Party effectively demobilized the insurgency from below with
more passive revolution even as it resumed and actually accelerated the
project of capitalist globalization and neo-liberalism. The mass enthusiasm
that the rst Obama electoral campaign generated quickly dissipated.

Transnational corporate capital nanced both of the Obama presidential

campaigns and purchased the Obama presidency. Obama pushed forward the
agenda of global war, neo-liberalism, and the drift towards an authoritarian
state. He became the corporate bailout president, the mass deportation
president, and the drone-warfare president. His government pushed the
construction of a repressive police and surveillance state. It authorized the
indenite detention without writ of habeas corpus of anyone the state deems an
enemy, waged war against whistleblowers and leakers, and defended NSA
domestic and global spying. It ramped up the military budget, which had
already reached an historical high under the Bush regime. It brokered the
Transpacic Partnership, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership,
and the Trade in Services Agreement.

In this sense, the Obama project weakened the popular and left response from
below to the crisis, which opened space for the right-wing response for a
project of 21st century fascism to become insurgent. The Obama
administration appeared, certainly in this respect, as a Weimar republic.
Although the social democrats were in power during the Weimar republic of
Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s they did not pursue a leftist response to
the crisis but rather sidelined the militant trade unions, communists and
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socialists, and progressively pandered to capital and the right before turning
over power to the Nazis in 1933. Obamas 21st century Weimar republic
generated conditions propitious to the development of neo-fascist forces in the
United States.

During the Bush regime, these neo-fascist forces spread throughout U.S. civil
society, exhibiting a growing cross-pollination between different sectors of the
radical right not seen in years. Right-wing elements among the transnational
corporate community broadly funded during Obamas presidency neo-fascist
movements like the Tea Party and neo-fascist legislation such as Arizonas
notorious 2010 anti-immigrant law, SB1070. That legislation sparked copy-
cat laws around the country and helped spawn a vicious anti-immigrant,
border vigilante, and white supremacist movement. The far-right wing
billionaire Koch brothers, for instance, were the prime bankrollers of the Tea
Party and also of a host of foundations and front organizations, such as
Americans for Prosperity, the Cato Institute, and the Mercatus Center.

These organizations pushed an extreme version of the neo-liberal corporate

agenda, including the reduction and elimination of corporate taxes, cutbacks in
social services, the gutting of public education, and the total liberation of capital
from any state regulation. This neo-liberalism on steroids is precisely the
economic program of the incoming Trump regime and converges perfectly with
the interests of the transnational capitalist class, even if its cultural and
ideological garb is dramatically distinct from that of Obama and the liberals.

Trumpism far-right agenda, contrary to supercial interpretations, constitutes a

deepening, not a reversal, of the program of capitalist globalization pursued by
the Obama administration and every U.S. administration since Ronald
Reagan. The crisis of global capitalism has become more acute in the face of
economic stagnation and the rise of anti-globalization populism on both the left
and the right of the political spectrum. Trumpism does not represent a break
with capitalist globalization but rather the recomposition of political forces and
ideological discourse as the crisis deepens and as international tensions reach
new depths.

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Whether in its 20th or its emerging 21st century variants, fascism is above all a
response to deep structural crises of capitalism, such as that of the 1930s and
the one that began with the nancial meltdown of 2008. I have been writing for
the past decade about the rise of 21st century fascist currents in the context of
the new global capitalism. One key difference between 20th century fascism
and 21st century fascism is that the former involved the fusion of national
capital with reactionary and repressive political power, whereas the latter
involves the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power.
Trumpism is not a departure from but an incarnation of the emerging
dictatorship of the transnational capitalist class.

Trumpism and the sharp turn to the extreme Right is the logical progression of
the political system in the face of the crisis of global capitalism. The liberal
elite and its project of capitalist globalization through a kinder, gentler
discourse of multiculturalism reached a dead end and led the system into a
new crisis of hegemony. To paraphrase Clausewitz famous dictum that war is
an extension of politics by other means, Trumpism is an extension of neo-
liberalism by other means.

There is a near-straight line here from Obama to Trump. It was the Obama
government and the liberal elite that more fully opened the Pandoras box of
Trumpism and 21st century fascism. As the 2016 elections approached, the
question was how renewed mass discontent would be expressed. The liberal
elite marginalized Bernie Sanders and lined up behind Hillary Clinton. But
unlike 2008, this time it failed in its effort to pull off another passive revolution.
By once again quashing a leftist response to the crisis the liberal elite fed the
turn to the far right.

The liberal elites refusal to challenge the rapaciousness of transnational

capital and its brand of identity politics served to eclipse the language of the
working and popular classes and of anti-capitalism, pushing white workers into
an "identity" of white nationalism and helping the neo-fascist right organize
them politically. Alongside voter suppression of largely Black and Latino
voters, Trump deftly mobilized a signicant portion of the white working class
around a demagogic discourse of racist scapegoating, misogyny, imperial
bluster and the manipulation of fear and economic destabilization.
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Trumpisms veiled and at times openly racist and neo-fascist discourse has
legitimated and unleashed ultra-racist and fascist movements in U.S. civil
society. These forces seem to be achieving a toehold in the U.S. state through
the emerging Trump regime. This regime brings together billionaire bankers
and businessmen with politicized warrior generals and neo-fascist activists in a
deadly cocktail that threatens to lead us to disaster if the ght back is not able
to derail Trumpism.

This is an extremely dangerous moment but it is very uid. Political and

economic elites are divided and confused. Trumpism has further fractured
ruling groups and may well be generating a crisis of the state that opens up
space for popular and leftist responses from below. A signicant portion of the
elite opposed Trump during the electoral campaign. Will they accommodate
themselves to his regime or turn against it?

We are not at this time in a fascist system and it can be averted if the ght back
is expansive, organized, and unied into an anti-neo-fascist front. In order to
do that, the ght back cannot turn to the decadent liberal elite organized in the
Democratic Party. Foundations and corporations will fund the liberal anti-
Trump groups to try and shape the agenda of the anti-Trump ght back. The
Democrats and their corporate backers will try to channel the ght back it into
the next legislative and presidential elections.

Working class politics must achieve hegemony in any united front against neo-
fascism. Trumps electoral base among the white working class will discover
very early on in his regime that his promises were a hoax. How will their rage
be contained? Will they be recruited into projects of 21st century fascism or
into a popular and leftist project of resistance and transformation? For the
latter to happen we need to move beyond identity politics, to reconstruct a
working class identity by coupling anti-racism and defense of immigrants with a
program of economic and social reconstruction that brings the language of
class and socialism back into the vocabulary. Only by building up the
organization of the global working class in all its diversity and placing its
multitude of struggles at the center of the ght back can we win.

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- William I. Robinson, Professor of Sociology, University of California at Santa

Barbara.

URL de origen: http://www.alainet.org/es/node/182634

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