What kind of regime does Putin head?

The Western mass-media have had for many years the problem of how to characterise the Russian government under Vladimir Putin. The most often characterisation draws upon crude simplifications of Russian history: the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire. We're told Putin is a mini-Stalin and a mini-Tsar all in one. This is highly misleading for a number of reasons. Two come to mind immediately.

Firstly, it implies that the possibility of aggressive expansionism by Russia is a plausible likelihood. Putin has no plans to provoke a full-blown conflict with the European powers. He knows how vulnerable Russia is to such opponents. Putin now acts to hold-off encroaching Western influence and NATO outposts from the borders of the Russian Federation. It's not in the Russian interests to have NATO missile systems on its borders so close to major cities. He could live with Ukraine becoming a EU member-state, as long as the gas network is not effected seriously. In this regard, the Russian invasion of Ukraine and de facto annexation of Crimea does not compare to Stalin's 'spreading the revolution' by rifle and bayonet. Even when Stalin acted to build a buffer-zone of satellite states in Eastern and Southern Europe it was not a bid for global domination. It was about the consolidation of Soviet power by securing the country from any future Western intervention. The position Putin has taken is defined by the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Secondly, the phase of development we currently see in Russia has little precedent in previous historical conditions. The Tsars of the 19th Century presided over a feudal society with an emerging industrial and capitalist base, perching over Orthodox Christendom at home and imperialism abroad. The USSR was defined by the exacerbation of such conditions of scarcity and dislocation in the First World War and Civil War. The mission was not to reproduce the feudal order of the past, nor to build from its remains a capitalist society, it was to establish the material pre-conditions for socialism. That amounted to the industrialisation of Russian society to create the material surplus of a capitalist society by non-capitalist means and ultimately to non-capitalist ends. The promised communist future never arose from this process. When the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991 the whole edifice was then broken down and digested by economic shock therapy. Putin emerges out of this historical conjuncture.

So we find the situation in Russia is a period distinct from preceding epochs. The Russian Federation emerged out of the collapse of the Soviet Union to be forced through primitive accumulation by the Yeltsin administration. The immense resources were handed over to a small clique around Yeltsin as the Russian state-sector and public assets were dismembered and chucked to these ravenous beasts. The transformation of the material base of Russian society inevitably reverberated throughout its superstructure. The state became so weighed down by its own corruption that the oligarchs around Yeltsin decided to replace him with Putin. The hope was that Putin would deal with the officials looking to crackdown on corruption while simultaneously reinstating authority in the government. The liberalisation of the economy had led to the formation of an internationalising class, which in turn spurred on a recrudescent nationalism.

I've written before that it seem as if the Russian President stands at the apex where anti-political purism and ultra-political nationalism meet. He initially presented himself as a non-political man of action, who will enforce order and stability. Of course, there is nothing 'non-political' about the man at all. He appeals to Soviet nostalgia, particularly with regard to the defeat of German Fascism. Yet only in nationalist terms, the Soviet era was a great era when Russia wielded power on the world stage. The world was not unipolar and Russians did not have to live in fear of Western aggression. The victories in Georgia and Chechnya and now Ukraine can be understood as reactive. Putin wants to fend-off encroachments of non-Russian influence, primarily from the US, but also from independent actors, such as Chechen Islamists and separatists.

Many like to talk about 'Putinism' as if it signifies a clear characterisation of the Russian government. It is certain that the managed democracy in Russia represents a new order. The rapid and chaotic pace of primitive accumulation under Boris Yeltsin has been slowed by Putin, but it is not over by any means. It was Putin who furthered the privatisation of land. The concentration of economic power in the hands of oligarchs sits side-by-side with the state power. 'Putinism' is a very misleading and vague term. It's mainly another way of carrying out the spurious comparison between Putin and Stalin. The phrase 'Stalinism' was really used to signify a deviation from Marxism by the Soviet leadership. Perhaps in a similar vein 'Putinism' refers to a deviation from the Washington consensus which the Yeltsin administration was completely embedded in.

Aleksandr Buzgalin calls it 'jurassic capitalism' where the old state-order, as well as even older feudal structures (i.e. the Church), stand alongside a capitalist economy. We might see this as a developing form of corporatism or 'national' capitalism, rather than the internationalist and liberal variety we are so comfortable with in Western Europe. It's certain that Putin is a part of the right-wing economic consensus that has been ruling Russia since the Soviet Union was dissolved. But it is not the same as it was in the 1990s. The sympathies Putin has drawn from Westerners have been insightful. Among them we find the British journalist Peter Hitchens, a cultural-traditionalist conservative, who sees Putin as taking a stand against neoliberal globalization in defence of national sovereignty. Then there is the fascist Nick Griffin who sees Russia as the last bastion of the "white race".

American 'Fascism'.

We shouldn't use the word Fascism lightly. The US certainly isn't fascist today but the crisis has opened the door to political uncertainty. We can't see where things could go and that's worrying enough. That being said Fascism, as it was in the 20th Century, is not simply going to spring up again. It will come in a very different form, don't forget Fascism doesn't really have any universal or coherent set of characteristics (except maybe an extreme reactive tendency of nationalism). The similarities between America and Germany in the 20s are quite worrying because we know what happened in the Wiemar Republic. This isn't unique to America at this time, a poll found that 48% of Brits would vote for a far-right party if it wasn't fascistic in imagery. It's not unusual to see a rise of anti-immigrant nativism and nationalist populism in recessions, but this isn't just another recession. Walter Benjamin seems to have it right when he deemed Fascism to be the product of a failed revolution.

The United States is effectively the only society on earth founded as a federal capitalist republic. There is no monarchical feudal backdrop as there is in Europe and this means that American conservatism tends to be quite different from traditional conservatism in Europe. It's not that the Europeans don't have a long history of extermination, slavery and war (if anything Europe has a longer history) but the Americans have a 'blanking out' point in a much clearer way. You can pin-point the 'beginning' as it were, which is the basis of the American national mythology. This will become a basis of an ideologico-spiritual crisis with American decline, as it was for the British who have yet to fully accept what happened in 1945. There are upsides in American ideology that Europe lacks. Don't forget that Jefferson wanted a revolution every 20 years including a reassessment/revision of the constitution. The idea is of a permanent renovation of 1776.

If we're going to carry out a strict comparison of the US and the Fascist states of the 1930s then there are problems with the analogy. For one thing American nationalism tends not to sever itself from the values of the Enlightenment, it at least has to maintain the pretence of standing for and defending those values. Fascism was always about the destruction of the whole Enlightenment project of rights and freedoms. This is what separates Stalinism from Fascism, can you imagine the Nazis putting Jews on trial before the Holocaust? This is the reason that there were show elections held in Tito's Yugoslavia and Stalinist Russia was officially a 'people's democracy'. Even the erosion of individual rights and liberties in the US has yet to sever the cord to the Enlightenment totally. In fact it's often the case that this encroachment on the individual is accomplished within the same framework, under the umbrella of 'security' and so on.

The promise of an alternate modernity devoid of class struggle is completely missing for one thing. You have to keep in mind that the Fascists promised a 'Third Position' beyond socialism and capitalism. There is no racialised populism rooted in notions of 'blood and soil' that displaces the class struggle into a fight to preserve an organic society from a Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik cabal. There is definitely scapegoating, racism and red-baiting, but it's not on the same scale at all. The racial myths that the Nazis adhered to came out of England originally and were predominant in the US for a long time. Now it's only the KKK and other fringe lunatics that adhere to the myth of a master race. As for militarism and civil authoritarianism, these things are not unique to Fascism but are not new to America either. The US has possibly killed in excess of 10 million people since the end of WW2, Nazi Germany set out to exterminate about 40 to 50 million Europeans and set off a chain of events that left 60 million dead.

I'm not sure that there is a word which neatly sums up the US situation. It is a business run society devoid of any safety net with an authoritarian state and bloated military. It's clear that really existing democracy is decaying in front of our eyes, but it seems unlikely that there will be a dictatorship in America tomorrow. It's not always easy to sum up an entire political system with one word, luckily Hitler and Mussolini named their system - while in the US there is officially no ideology and no system. The widespread attitude is a suspicion of politicians, parties and the government rather than a worship of any of these things. Even the radical Right in the US seems to be in the grips of an anti-political purism, the theoconservatives and neoconservatives have been marginalised by a libertarian push that the GOP are trying to use to destroy what's left of government programmes. I'm not saying that there aren't things that we should be worried about and that there could never be an American fascism. But let's try not to use the word loosely.

Back to Lockerbie.

As far as we are concerned the Lockerbie bomber has just snuffed it, the reaction of many was the same as to the death of Gaddafi: good riddance. The man killed 270 people, 189 of them were American and it was the biggest terrorist attack on British soil. The media has acknowledged there is a split of opinion over whether or not Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was a mass-murderer. There was overwhelming opposition to releasing him in 2009 with the presupposition of blood on his hands. The obsession was over how this might affect the special relationship, which only exists on the Queen's side of the pond. The other concern readable in the main stream was over the cost to the reputation of British law. Of course, the mistake is to assume that this country has such high repute overseas in the first place. Furthermore it was evident then, as it is now, that the indictment and trial of the accused was not a fair one. There are reasonable doubts to be had at the allegation that al-Megrahi was involved in the atrocity of question.

To accept the label of 'guilty' stamped on al-Megrahi's corpse would be to turn a blind eye to gaping holes in the narrative. The "damning" testimony in the trial came from the Maltese shopkeeper Tony Gauci, who claimed that al-Megrahi bought clothing from him which were later found in the wreckage of Pan Am Flight 103. Gauci gave false descriptions of al-Megrahi on 19 different occasions and failed to recognise him in court. The other testimony came from an anonymous witness, a CIA informant, who claimed he saw Lamin Khalifa Fahimah loading the bomb onto the plane in Frankfurt. Fahimah was found not guilty incidentally. For this Tony Gauci and his brother Paul received payments of over $3 million from the US Department of Justice - as part of the "Rewards for Justice" compensation programme - while the CIA informant received $4 million upon the conviction. This is precisely the reason that David Cameron was wrong to rejectcalls for an independent inquiry. It gets murkier and murkier the more you look at it.

What about the backdrop of the bombing? We forget that a few months before the Lockerbie bombing Iran Air Flight 655 was shot down over the Persian Gulf by the USS Vincennes. The Americans insisted this was an accident, the Iranians disagreed. You might be a tad disagreeable if an "accident" left 290 of your fellow citizens dead. When Pan Am Flight 103 exploded over Lockerbie there were those who speculated that it was revenge. American officials, most of which were working at the US Embassy in Moscow, had reserved seats aboard Pan Am Flight 103 from Frankfurt, but cancelled their bookings at the last minute. It’s also the case that South African Foreign Minister jumped on another plane instead of Flight 103. You could draw all kind of theories from this, but it’s safer to say that we really don’t know what happened. If an independent inquiry for Pan Am Flight 103 then it follows that there’s no chance of an inquiry into Iran Air Flight 655. Yet we are reminded to remember the victims of one flight, but not another.

The indictment of al-Megrahi and Fahimah came through in November of 1991. By then Thatcher had already shot down an attempt at an independent inquiry into the Lockerbie bombing before it could even get off the ground. Then a report surfaced in 1990 that concluded the attack had been orchestrated by the Iranian government and carried out by a "free-lance" Palestinian group, probably the Popular Front for theLiberation of Palestine. The motivation: revenge for the 290 people killed by the USS Vincennes. Thatcher looked to keep this revelation low-key before she was dethroned by popular demand. This was just before Saddam Hussein annexed Kuwait and the US sought to build a coalition to break the backs of the disobedient Iraqi regime. The Gaddafi regime in Libya refused to support the American intervention and instead backed Iraq. It suddenly became a lot more convenient to go back to the old scapegoat, the mad Colonel in the desert.

The anti-capitalism of Republicans.

The Ironies of Capital.

The appalling spectacle last year around the debt-ceiling debate had an ironic side to it which slipped by the noses of snooty liberals, but not the sharp mind of David Harvey. The Republican machine and the Tea Party took a position to block any further debt-creation, had it been pursued would have led to the end of capitalism. Mind you the Tea Party and the Koch Brothers are just as oblivious as the Republicans are blind in all of this. It has long been a hope of socialists that the working-class might go ape and actually bring down capitalism to a long-awaited thud. The workers have failed to do so thus far, though it looked as though the GOP might actually succeed where the American worker failed. This would have brought a smile to Karl Marx's face. After all Marx was onto something when he noted that the capitalist could feasibly undertake actions in their own self-interest and bring down the system in doing so.

To answer the conundrum of where the extra effective demand would come from so that the profits can be extracted Karl Marx presented a simple model of a capitalist society - it featured two classes, the capitalists and the workers. The capitalists initiate the process at the beginning of the day because the workers do not have the extra money to do so, but the capitalists must supply the necessary demand to close it out at the end of the day. There is the problem of how capitalists can consume and pay for the surpluses they have been instrumental in getting labour to produce. The surplus can be consumed either in personal consumption or through investment in expansion, which may take the form of hiring more workers and buying more means of production. The latter implies perpetual growth and accumulation of capital over time. Conveniently the demand for expansion tomorrow can absorb the surplus product created yesterday.

The expansion takes place the next day and it does not generate profit in money form until the end of the day, so only after the money is needed to purchase yesterday's surplus. The only answer to this problem is credit with the promise of future expansion of surplus production. This is what allows the circle to be squared, in Harvey's words, which depends on whether or not future expansion comes about. In the event that it fails to do so, then we may face a crisis in which the debt cannot be paid-off. This is where we can see capitalism as one gigantic speculative machine, where the accumulation of capital and wealth runs synchronous to the accumulation and expansion of debt. The relationship is not just simple dependency as the two feed on and support each other. But this doesn't mean that there can be no crises. We have seen a debt crisis in Greece because of the imbalance which emerged between capital and debt. So we find that the Eurozone crisis comes out of the failure to find a new way to expand the surplus through reinvestment.

Of course, this is disingenuous anti-capitalism and we shouldn't fool ourselves that it would have led America down the road to socialism. In fact it would have more likely dragged the US into fascism as the system imploded and the right-wing forces mobilised by the Koch Brothers run amok. The Republicans are especially cynical in rhetoric when in opposition, any cause will do to bash the Democrats and it will be abandoned as soon as it was picked up. Fiscal conservatism is an old joke at the expense of the American tax-payer, Newt Gingrich knows it all too well and it is hardly a mystery to the American political class. You can piss away as much cash as you like to feather the nests of the rich. Once a crisis emerges then you attack public services and go after anything that helps the poor all in the name of cutting the deficit. As the ignominious Dick Cheney observed "Reagan taught us that deficits don't matter".

The Republicans have the potential to trash the system in the short-term, probably for the benefit of an opulent minority and leave the American people to pick up the bill. This is the extreme end of the Republican programme which gave you policies with names like "starve the beast" and "trickle-down". The capitalists buy now and pay later, credit fills in the gap in between and the Republican Party is thoroughly embedded in this arrangement. David Harvey refers us to Mark Twain when he said "We have the best congress money can buy." So it is very strange that the Republicans would threaten the entire system in this way. It may be indicative of the distance from power that the Republicans are enduring. The capacity of the system for self-destruction is the reason that Marx thought it might end in the "common ruination" of all classes. As Karl Marx noted, the contradictions of capitalism move in mysterious ways.

The Vote to End Capitalism

The End of Capitalism?
The Greek Tragedy 
Obamarama - the Republican Drama
The Republican Hypocrisy on the Debt Ceiling
Perhaps Newt Gingrich filched his Bright Ideas from Europe
Ha-Joon Chang on Trickle-Down Economics
Stoking the Beast

Umberto Eco on Eternal Fascism.

In the essay Eternal Fascism: Fourteen ways of looking at a Blackshirt, Umberto Eco outlines a list of features that are typical of what he calls Eternal Fascism, it is a force which remains in plainclothes today and won't necessarily come out sporting a Swastika for us to spot easily. It could easily take a far more innocent guise. The world is too complex for history to repeat itself and we have to uncover Eternal Fascism for all to see wherever it may hide. He stresses that the features cannot be organised into a single coherent system and there are contradictions between the different features. Eco also notes that the features are typical of other kinds of authoritarianism. Even one of these features is enough for a fascism to coagulate around it, so we find the reason that there are various differences between the Fascist movements which have come and gone. There are differences between the neo-fascist groups of today and the Fascist movements of the 1930s, the English Defence League is not the same as the British Union of Fascists though it shares certain features.

Umberto Eco rightly refers us to the words of FDR in 1938: "If American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land." It should be noted that the democratic system was never betrayed in the US, as the liberal critics of George Bush accuse him of the destruction of the Constitution. There is some truth to the claims of a debasement of old-fashioned liberal principles of freedom and rights. But the political system in the US was designed not to be democratic, nor to be autocratic, rather it was constituted as a polyarchy. This is what Alexander Hamilton called "moderate government" as the Golden Mean between dictatorship and democracy. To be more exact, the political parties can take turns running the state in the favour of the particular interests in which they are ensnared. It was James Madison who held that the government "ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." The stagnation of American politics combined with economic turmoil leaves the population angry, fearful and confused - this is ripe territory for Blackshirts!

First comes the cult of tradition. Traditionalism long precedes fascism, it was typical of counter-revolutionary Catholicism in the aftermath of the French Revolution and it first emerged in the Hellenistic era in reaction to classical Greek rationalism. In the Mediterranean basin, people of different religions (most of the faiths accepted by the Roman pantheon) started dreaming of a revelation received at the dawn of human history. The revelation had long been concealed in forgotten languages, from Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Celtic runes and beyond to Asia. We can only persist in the interpretation of the obscure messages. The primeval truth could be procured from these ancient messages, each with a sliver of wisdom, and help compose a new culture. It would be a syncretistic culture in the sense of a combination of different forms of belief and practice, which would require a tolerance of internal contradictions. This is where the combination of Paganism, Christianity and race myths come together in Fascist states. It's also the reason that Fascism seeks to posit itself as the Third Position between capitalism and socialism.

So there can be no advancement of knowledge as truth has already been spelled out once and for all. Umberto Eco takes the example of Saint Augustine, not a proto-fascist at all, but points out that it would be symptomatic of Eternal Fascism to combine Augustine with Stonehenge. From a Marxist perspective we may note the importance of traditionalism to Fascism as superstructural to the economic conditions which fostered the regimes of the 1930s. As Terry Eagleton argues, Fascism is a last-ditch attempt on the part of monopoly capitalism to abolish the contradictions which have become intolerable. The traditionalist feature may imply a rejection of modernism, but the Fascists did not regard technology as a negation of tradition. Rather the Fascists were focused on the construction of an alternative modernity beyond the class struggle with a narrative of blood and soil. The Third Reich was proud of its industrial achievements, though the praise for modernism was only the surface of an ideology based on blood and soil. The emphasis is really on the master race, the sublimity of death and self-abnegation.

Umberto Eco notes that the Fascist finds action as beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, reflection because thinking is a form of emasculation. Action is placed above thought. To be more precise it is reaction rather than action. One of the principle differences between a socialist and a Fascist is that the former acts whereas the latter can only react. This is where the propensity for political violence comes from, it takes the reactive form and often seeks to justify itself along such lines. The violent reaction is always justifiable to defend and secure the fatherland. This is the logic which remains in the background of the kind of 'protests' that the former football hooligans of the English Defence League hold. Originally the EDL were the violent wing of the British National Party and it remains in line with the tradition of fascist groups since the British Union of Fascists took to the streets and raised havoc. It is out of this irrationalism that culture is suspect insofar as it is identified with academics, critical attitudes and intellectualism in general.

So the entire educational system underwent a Nazification in the Third Reich, with the employment of major academics such as Martin Heidegger to purge Jewish teachers and implement the desired curriculum. This suspicion of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Eternal Fascism. Hermann Goering was fond of a phrase borrowed from Hanns Johst "When I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun" as well as expressions such as "degenerate intellectuals", "eggheads", "effete snobs" and the description of universities as "nests of reds." The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in an attack on the rampant decadence of modern culture and charge the liberal intelligentsia with the betrayal of traditional values. The point of Fascist propaganda was to tap into the irrational drives of the masses and utilise them against particular groups. The propaganda techniques to do so were picked up from the American public relations industry, which was based on the ideas of Sigmund Freud as applied by his nephew Eddie Bernays.

To make distinctions is a sign of modernism and to give into the current of depravity which began with the Enlightenment. The rejection of the modern world was dressed up as a kind of anti-capitalism, but it is the Enlightenment which is the source of decay in the modern world and Eternal Fascism rejects it on such ground. The Nazi slogan "Think with your blood!" comes to mind. The scientific community praises disagreement as a way to further pursue greater knowledge, but the disagreements we may have are treasonous for Fascists because it is a sign of diversity. We should remember the nationalist emphasis on unity and purity which opposes such liberal pluralism as a subversive or destructive influence on the nation. Thus the strange fixation on Pagan rituals, leader worship and Nordic blood myths. The rejection of the Enlightenment in Fascism is what distinguishes it from Stalinism. By contrast, Stalinism considers itself a part of the Enlightenment tradition comes in the form of the show trials held as part of the purges. The suggestion of shows trials for Jews in the Third Reich is unimaginable because there isn't even a semblance of a just society in Fascism.

Eternal Fascism seeks consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the fear of difference and of the Other. The subversive influence of an alien race or culture becomes the principle target of Fascism. The point is to stamp out the forces which have undermined the nation and unity in society. It is racist by definition. The Nazi schoolbooks founded an impoverished vocabulary as well as an elementary syntax in order to limit the instruments of critical thought and inquiry which could undermine the regime. Even boardgames and children's books were produced to further anti-Semitic attitudes among the population. George Orwell invented Newspeak in 1984 as the official language of English Socialism. The elements of Eternal Fascism are common to different forms of dictatorship. Newspeak can even take the apparently innocent form of a popular talk show today. With the shock jocks of the Right we find that the words 'socialism' and 'National Socialism' have been emptied out so that Obama can be called a socialist and a Nazi. The meaning of words are intentionally blurred and we see the same thing in Fascism.

The most typical feature of Fascism is the appeal to a frustrated middle-class, which had suffered through the crises of capitalism and intense feelings of political humiliation as in the Weimar Republic. The threat of working-class movements such as trade unions and leftist organisations is also a source of agitation in this instance. The possibility of revolution becomes genuine and the capitalist class begins to get desperate. Eco holds that once the proletarians are petty bourgeois and the lumpenproletariat are marginalised totally from politics then fascism will find its audience in a new majority. The audience have to be humiliated in socio-economic terms as well as political terms, it could be a war but not necessarily. The wealth and force of the enemy is defined in such terms. The Fascist is convinced of his ability to overwhelm the enemy through harsh measures, violence is never out of the question. A continuous shift in rhetorical focus maintains that the enemy is at once too strong and too weak. The inability to evaluate the force of the enemy clouds the capacity of Fascism to win wars.

To people who have been deprived of a social identity, Eternal Fascism offers a clear privilege that we were born in this great country. This is where nationalism comes into the picture, which we might be described as palingenetic (as Eco does not recognise) in that Fascist Italy was the reincarnated second Roman Empire and the Third Reich was the First and Second Reich realised as an alternate modernity. The idea of a rebirth is common, it feeds into a self-pitying and disordered view of the imperial past of the European powers. The nation can only define itself through the exclusion of the Other and the same can be said of the national identity. The Fascist mind is obsessed with an international plot which is taking place and must be stopped for the good of the nation. The people have to feel besieged and under attack in order to flock around identity-markers such as religion and nationality. The plot has to appeal to race hate, the most base instincts of hatred and it relies on the gullible cynicism of the individual to buy into a conspiracy theory in the first place. The plot must be insidious and almost invisible, which is why Jews are perfect given that they are inside and outside at the same time.

Permanent warfare is an inevitably given the nature of Fascism. Life is lived for struggle, pacifism is treason. The consequence of this is an Armageddon complex as enemies have to be defeated, so there must be a last battle or final stand to make and then the movement will have total control of the world. This implies an era of peace and unity afterwards, which stands in contradiction to this doctrine and no Fascist leader has ever succeeded in solving this problem. This doctrine of perpetual war fits in with the popular elitism of Fascism, as it is fundamentally aristocratic and militaristic to the extent of holding contempt for the weak. Each citizen belongs to the best people in the world, but the members of the Party are the best of the citizens and each citizen should join the Party. There can be no patricians without plebeians. The leader knows that the position he holds was stolen and not given to him through the democratic process (though there are exceptions, Hitler being the most infamous), it was the weakness of the masses which allowed him to seize power - this applies even to cases where the Fascists came to power via the ballot box.

The masses need a ruler in this conception, so the view of people differs greatly from the liberal view of human beings as having rights and freedoms - and by extension the political impact of the citizenry in quantitative terms. So the individual often falls in line with the community, as we see with so-called 'safe seats'. Of course, Eternal Fascism rejects the claim of individuals to such rights and the People are a monolithic entity which expresses the common will. No doubt the liberal protection of individuals and minorities from the whims of the majority feeds into fascistic conspiracy theories. No large quantity of human beings can have a common will, the Fascist leader becomes their interpreter. As marginalised from the political process, individuals no longer act as citizens but take on the role of the People as a theatrical fiction. Umberto Eco foresees that the future internet version of this populism may take the emotional response of a selected group of individuals as the accepted Voice of the People. The masses are manipulated under Fascism, not disdained as they are in conservative thought.

Out of a qualitative populism, Fascism takes a stand against the "rotten" Parliamentary model and the governments which have been formed as a result of them. There are hints of Eternal Fascism in the doubts raised by politicians of the Parliament's legitimacy, that the government does not represent the Voice of the People as Umberto Eco puts it. Richard Seymour notes that for the Fascist the political system is vulnerable to viruses. So the problem is not capitalism as such but super-capitalism, as Mussolini noted, which should be contrasted with the heroic capitalism of the 19th Century. Of course, heroic capitalism became super-capitalism eventually as it grew decadent. The explanation for the inherent contradictions and destructive capacities of capitalism can be displaced onto a cabal of some kind. It could be the Jews, the Freemasons, the Communists or even a bit of all three as in most cases. This is a very similar logic to the claim that there is a liberal elite which has poisoned American society.

Everyone is taught to be a hero in a strict sense, as the exceptional being which becomes the norm in Fascist ideology. The cult of heroism is joined at the hip with the cult of death. It is not by chance that a motto of the Spanish Falangists was "Viva la Muerte!" which means "Long Live Death!" This motto may have been borrowed from the Iron Guard in Romania led by Corneliu Codreanu who considered Hitler "soft" when it came to the Jews. The view of death maintained by the Fascist is in contrast to the standard views of death, that it is to be faced with dignity and it leads to a better place etc. The Fascist hero craves a heroic death, to the point of impatience, because it is the best reward for having led a heroic life. In this impatience then the Fascist will send other people to die in droves. As a consequence of the impracticality and difficulty of ceaseless war and a heroism based on death the Fascist transfers his will to power to sexual matters.

The cult of the masculine leader and the heroic death retreats to the bedroom. This is the origin of chauvinist machismo complete with misogyny, as well as intolerance of sexual habits which do not fit into a certain set of standards (from chastity to homosexuality). Mussolini famously said "War is to man what maternity is to woman." Ultimately, even sex is a difficult game to play - the Fuhrer was a masochist in the bedroom who left behind a string of relationships which ended in suicide - and so the Fascist tends to games with weapons as Eco notes "doing so becomes an ersatz phallic exercise." Plato maintains that the tyrant lives the life of dreams, where there is no conceivable 'crime' that we can commit and we can follow our desires to their end without consequence. The tyrant becomes what he was in his dreams, eating forbidden fruit and killing at a whim. Nothing is off the table, from incest to mass-murder. Dreams become reality for the tyrant. Perhaps these words were prescient of the indulgences of Fascist dictators.

How did we get here?

A Safe Pair of Hands?

For over 30 years the post-war settlement has been systematically eroded and it looks as though we may see the end of the welfare state in our life times. The austerity measures David Cameron has delivered unto us have come with the promises of the "Big Society". Perhaps the political class has a Victorian model in mind, the philanthropic capitalism that prevailed throughout the 19th Century. The welfare state constructed under the Labour government of 1945 to 1951 never pleased everyone and it was met with strong criticism from the right-wing media with The Financial Times in the lead. But the criticism of the welfare state took on a much more mainstream character in the 1960s and became increasingly emphatic throughout the 70s. Even though the social democratic era which lasted for 30 years has been likened to a "golden age" of capitalism as a significant growth and development was achieved by historical standards. It culminated in the rise of the Thatcherites and the subsequent 30 years of neoliberalism.

Second-Hand Ideas.

The transition did not simply come about out the growing criticism of the welfare state in the 1960s and 70s, there was a propagation of neoliberal ideas throughout this period and it began with the Institute of Economic Affairs. It was a right-wing businessman Anthony Fisher who founded the Institute in 1955, it was the first of 150 think-tanks which he would set up to disseminate "second-hand ideas". In the early 50s when Anthony Fisher was an isolated figure working with Major Oliver Smedley after they met at the Society for Individualists. Both of them were opposed to the state planning involved in the reconstruction of Britain after the Second World War. Smedley and Fisher were convinced that the increasing power of the state would lead to the end of democracy. For them even the Milk Marketing Board and the Egg Marketing Board were enemies of liberty. Importantly, it was Friedrich Hayek who talked Anthony Fisher into setting up think-tanks in order to the shape the dominant discourse and ultimately influence public opinion to achieve political change.

By then the British Empire was falling apart with the rising tide of revolutionary nationalism in the Third World. The political class was determined to see to it that the UK could be invigorated to the level of an economic powerhouse in spite of the collapse of the Empire. With the achievements of the 1940s came a state apparatus of economic planning in which technocrats worked to secure prosperity in Britain. The National Economic Development Council was set up in 1961 with the growth target of 4% between 1961 and 1966. At the time NEDC was dominated by Keynesian economists who were convinced that it was possible to control an economic boom, so that the rise of aggregate demand would not necessarily lead to the economy being flooded with imports and wage rising leading to inflation. There was no new theory, just a new use of old methods. NEDC pledged to plan investment in industry as the government would hold down inflation. The Conservative government poured money into the economy and by 1963 it looked as though the economy was on track with the plan as a boom was underway.

A Soviet Spy?

In opposition the Labour Party responded with a national plan which would be run by the Department of Economic Affairs, that would aim to deliver a great deal of growth in 6 years as well as the expansion of British industry would be stable insofar as it is controlled. If Labour could succeed in doing this then there would be little need to redistribute wealth because there would be more for everyone. Harold Wilson came to power just as the economic boom initiated under the Conservative Party began to overheat, imports were flooding the country and wages were rising. It looked as though the Labour government had to devalue the pound in order to make British exports cheaper abroad. It was in part the inability of the political class to accept British decline which led to a refusal under Wilson to devalue the currency. Instead the Labour government opted to pin down wages and prices, as well as initiate spending cuts and cancel election promises. There were repeated runs on the pound as foreign investors lost confidence in the Labour government before finally Labour conceded the devaluation of sterling, but by then it was too late and the economy grinded to a halt.

In doing so the Labour government under Harold Wilson had unwittingly undermined the notion of the planning apparatus as a unique and certain method to secure significant economic development at a faster pace. During this time that the City of London became increasingly important as the government acted to protect and enhance the powers of finance with respect to the global flow of finance capital. The protection of finance capital through the manipulation of interest rates conflicted with the needs and interests of domestic manufacturing capital. A structural division within the ruling class emerged as the conflict held back the expansion of the domestic market via the restriction of credit. The commitment to a strong pound had undermined the export position of British industry, this laid the ground for the balance of payments crises of the 70s. These contradictions played a fundamental role in the breakdown and regeneration of the British state-corporate nexus which composed the transition from social democracy to neoliberalism.

The Master and Medvedev.

So, it looks like Vladimir Putin will be President of Russia by March 2012 due to a convenient arrangement with Dmitry Medvedev, who succeeded Putin in 2008 though Putin stayed on as Prime Minister. By 2008 Putin had served two terms as Russian President and had to allow someone else to take office for at least a term because of a constitutional technicality. So Medvedev stood for the Presidency and Putin became Prime Minister for 4 years. In return Medvedev will serve as Prime Minister and lead United Russia. This is not a surprise to anyone familiar with the highly cynical and corrupt nature of Russian politics. It has reached the point that there is not even a whiff of shame to be found at such scenes anymore. It was in front of an audience of dutiful bureaucrats that the decision was announced, then came an embrace which the bureaucrats were keen to welcome with applause. Then it was openly stated that Putin and Medvedev had come up with this arrangement several years ago. The obvious had been admitted.

The possibility of 12 years of Vladimir Putin draws the inevitable comparison with Joseph Stalin in the Western media, e.g. if Putin retains power until 2024 he will be Russia's longest serving ruler since Stalin. When faced with a Russian authoritarianism the Western media can only refer us back to the shibboleths of the old Communist Party. Sadly it doesn't go without saying that the rise of Putin cannot be understood without context. The Economist would have you believe that it is Putin who has undermined Russian democracy before it got a chance to flourish; created a "Mafia state" of crony capitalism via the Kremlin and poisoned the benevolent experiment with liberal capitalism. The conclusion being that the West should adopt a tougher policy towards Russia, e.g. to support Ukraine and Georgia. There is no room for a deeper look at the roots of Putinism, because we might find that the post-Communist world is not just an orgy of consumerism where the sky is the limit when it comes to free-choice and rates of growth.

For the journalists at The Economist it was Putin's failure to shirk from liberalisation of the economy which will lead Russia into future crises. According to The Economist these "weaknesses may make Russia unstable and nationalistic, which will make it harder for foreigners to deal with." Even though nationalism has been a strong tendency in Russia for a long time and the economy was plunged into a deep crisis in the 1990s as a result of reforms. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the advice and support of the US, Boris Yeltsin initiated economic "shock therapy" - a wave of spending cuts, removal of price-controls, deregulation and a spree of privatisation. It was "creative destruction" as millions were plunged into poverty, prices shot through the roof and ruthless businessmen grabbed as much as they could. The country was effectively looted as the state became increasingly ensnared by the oligarchs that had managed to seize large chunks of Russian industry in the chaos. Ultimately the structural adjustments of the Russian economy provide the pretext and create the conditions for a figure such as Putin to emerge on top.

There is no attempt to even reflect on this point in the pages of The Economist. Of course, what really bugs the squealing pigs at The Economist is that the new Russia has yet to join the World Trade Organisation and that the rampant corruption in the country has a disruptive impact on the market. This is not a fundamental critique of Putinism. Primarily The Economist is displeased with Putin's specific choice of Prime Minister and would prefer it if he had chosen Alexei Kudrin over Medvedev. The reason: Kudrin stands for "fiscal responsibility" which means spending cuts for the plebs. The fact that Kudrin can balance a budget means more to this lot than the fact he's just another crony. Kudrin has an affinity for civil liberties, human rights and political pluralism, so he is much more appealing than Medvedev. But he is even more appealing as a "martyr" to liberal values in a barbarous land, it feeds into the self-serving narrative in the Western media. If Alexei Kudrin was Prime Minister under Putin then he would no doubt walk the same line as Medvedev.

The Economist notes that the swap between Medvedev and Putin "opens a new chapter in Russian history - one that may well end in crisis." The fact that it was a crisis in 1998 which allowed Putin to slither into the Kremlin in the first place. The "new chapter" began with the fall of the Berlin Wall, after which Fukuyama heralded the "End of History" and a pisshead named Boris Yeltsin became the President of the new Russia. The collapse of Communism left a void, it was as if all ideologies had failed and the world had entered a post-political age of managerial governance which fed into a climate of cynical anti-politics. Since then an ultra-nationalist populism has emerged, as well as anti-Communist hysteria and even a conservative nostalgia for the Cold War. In a similar way to Berlusconi in Italy Putin stands as a bulwark to the chaos of the marketplace which is conveniently situated at the apex where ultra-politics and anti-politics collide. The only "alternative" permitted by the Kremlin is the Russian Communist Party, everywhere the politics of Russia is riddled with ultra-rightist and proto-fascist groups such as the National Bolsheviks. All the while the Western media is only capable of liberal day-dreams about the new Russia.

The Lesson of Mobile Phones.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the rage and condemnation expressed through mobile phones and laptops about the riots in London, never mind the use of phones to coordinate looting, is that there is a hidden lesson about history in the production of mobile phones. The lesson of mobile phones is a historical one, whenever we send a text or a tweet we should remember that the relation between barbarism and civilisation is synchronous not sequential. It is true that the establishment of states is accomplished through violence, but it should be noted that the development of civilisation is entwined with systemic forms of violence. How does the advent of the mobile phone demonstrate this? The Congo has long been important because it is rich in key resources such as coltan, cobalt, copper, diamond, uranium and gold. It was uranium that was extracted from the Congo that was used to make the atom bombs which the US then used to bomb Japan. Later on, copper became fundamental to the running of the Cold War.

The value of coltan has exploded in recent years because it is essential to the production of mobile phones, laptops and games, thus the cheap extraction of coltan became vital for the consumer boom in the West. Zimbabwe, Angola, Uganda, Chad, Libya and even Rwanda have sought to seize control of the precious resources. Behind them Western companies and consumers were looking for new goods. The interests of foreign corporations are at once a threat to, and in harmony with, the interests of the war lords that have been dominant since Mobutu fell. The war lords control territory with militias that include drugged children, the deal to give China access to the vital minerals in exchange for a railway and highways is a threat to the interests of war lords who maintain control through the broken state of affairs in the Congo. But at the same time these war lords have business deals with multinational corporations that are given the right to start mining without paying any taxes and with minimal complications.

In the meantime over 4 million were slaughtered in the Congo in the last decade or so. In a period of just 18 months the Rwandan army made $250 million just on coltan. The accumulation of the material resources necessary for our daily lives is not that distinct from barbarism, capitalism is indebted to feudalism and slavery in that each of them provided the material preconditions for the explosion and development of capitalism in the last couple of hundred years. We can discuss violence on the streets of London because of a bloodbath in Africa, which the majority of us aren't even aware of and feel no responsibility for at all. Every advance in civilisation is an advance in barbarism, bringing in it's wake new possibilities of emancipation and often arrives coated head-to-foot in blood. The price of the material advantages we enjoy is blood and misery. It is not clear whether we can ever make-up for the immense suffering, unimaginable misery and innumerable generations of people born into filth and squalor; only to amass the material resources that might provide the preconditions for a better existence.

125 Years of Coca-Cola.

A Sip of Capitalism.

You must have come across the new ads for Coca-Cola. When you can't buy a bottle of Coke you've passed the borders of civilisation, either that or you've been kidnapped and taken to North Korea where you'll be making films written by Kim Jong-il. The story of Coca-Cola might be understood as a microcosm of the rise of American corporate power and consumerism throughout the world. In global politics the company has carved out a history, which is unique and disturbing whilst also reflective of the level of power corporations have garnered over the past century. Since corporations were given the legal status of human beings, in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery in America, the power of the corporation has increased enormously. Except corporations are immortal and amoral in nature, only profit matters and the law requires them to place the financial interests of their owners above all other interests.

The way Coca-Cola has been marketed over the decades have been important in the development of public relations and advertising. As Žižek has pointed out, ideology does not work by saying "no" but by providing the masses with sanction to particular modes of enjoyment. The slogan of Coca-Cola "Enjoy!" is the most perfect demonstration of the way that consumerism buys the passive support of the people. Even in mainstream economics, the stimulation of demand through consumption is a part of the means to securing economic growth. There is no need for calls to maintain inhibitions, save money and resist temptation. The promise of Real enjoyment is the key. The shape of the Coca-Cola bottle was originally designed to remind male consumers of the curves of a woman's body. The constant and obscene injunction to enjoy, obligatory jouissance, comes from the superego. We experience this as a transgression when we indulge, as we worry about the sugar content of the drink, the affect it has on our teeth and son.

The Coca-Cola Company emerged in the early 20th Century just as Edward Bernays pioneered the use of propaganda on a corporate scale, whether it be for advertising or political subversion. By now the stern calls for self-denial by the paternal superego, the Protestant ethic of the Victorian era, has been superseded by a maternal superego which enjoins us to relax and enjoy ourselves. The short-circuit of this obscene injunction (which requires us to feel as though we are not being coerced in anyway) is depressive, self-punitive hatred and the anxiety that we have not enjoyed enough or that others have enjoyed more than us. In consumerism the position of agency is taken up by objective knowledge, which concern our health, appearance, sexual and social needs etc. The advertisers claim to have psychological insights into the target market, what the consumers truly want to become happy, well-adjusted and successful people. Thus, the phrase market Stalinism.

It all began in the American Civil War, way back in the 1860s, when the Yankee North battered the Confederacy of the South in order to abolish slavery. The rural South was torn apart in the process, one of the most prominent cities Atlanta was practically torched to the ground and there was widespread humiliation, along with melancholia, guilt and hysteria. The quack doctor would come around to offer potions of mysterious ingredients and promises of a better life with such potions. One such fellow was John Pemberton, a druggist and a veteran Confederate soldier, with his 'ideal brain tonic'. With the rise of temperance Atlanta went dry and Pemberton sold his 'brain tonic' as a soft-drink Coca-Cola off for $2,300. The tonic, which was part cocaine at the time, would be marketed as the symbol of American wholesomeness. At the time Coca-Cola was part cocaine and had just the right colour to disguise a slug of whiskey. So Coca-Cola became the temperance drink in the 1890s  as the South was in the grips of Christian revivalism and prohibition.

Coca-Cola first transcended the borders of the US after the Spanish-American war when Cuba was claimed by the US and Coca-Cola was soon on the island, with the first bottling plant open by 1906. At the time the formula could not be patented at first as that would have forced the company to hand over the product to the public domain after 50 years at the time. It was vulnerable to competitors, the company only maintained the product through strict secrecy as well as a systematic legal war against all the competition. Pepsi Cola being the only rival to survive, as it emulated the franchise model of Coca-Cola. By 1919 Coca-Cola had been bought for $25 million by Robert Woodruff, who also owned a consortium of Northern banks. The temperance movement turned against Coke after Woodruff snatched the company from the Christian Right. Woodruff led the company to infiltrate Pepsi with 'soda spooks' and took the company to court over the use of the word 'Cola' and lost.

Under Woodruff the company went even further to launch itself into foreign markets and penetrated markets in Britain and France, as well as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. The Second World War gave the company the chance to distribute bottles of Coke all over the world. As it marketed itself as the drink of patriotism in the US, it was being sold in Nazi Germany throughout the 1930s. Early in the War, Coca-Cola's man in Berlin Max Keith was made the Head of Soft-Drink Production by the Nazis. The company was given priority in distribution throughout all of occupied Europe, the Nazi state allocated the corporation trucks and petrol. Fanta was invented for the Nazi market when the Allies' embargo against Germany obstructed the company from importing Coca-Cola syrup into the country. There were bottling plants on both sides of the War, subsidised by the US War Department and the Third Reich.

There have even been Coke Presidents and Pepsi Presidents, which is indicative of the interests invested in the White House and the importance of business in policy-making. Typically the Democrats have been closer to Coca-Cola, from Franklin D Roosevelt onwards, whilst Republicans were closer to Pepsi. Dwight Eisenhower is a notable exception among Republicans, even Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon were Pepsi men in a sense. Coke was too "red" for McCarthy, who sat on the Senate Sugar Committee, who also received $20,000 from a Pepsi lobbyist and concluded that it was un-American to ration sugar. Richard Nixon worked as a lawyer for Pepsi Cola and as Vice President to Eisenhower he flew out to Moscow on a trade fair to meet with Nikita Khruschev. Before hand he had been taken aside by Donald Kendall, the future President of Pepsi. Kendall wanted to get a bottle of Pepsi into the hand of the Russian premier and Nixon was more than willing to do so. It was an instrumental moment in the introduction of Pepsi to the Soviet Union years later.

Pepsi would later be the first American product to be made and sold in the Soviet Union. Pepsi sought to profit by association with a possible future President as Nixon was traveling around the world in the 1960s. Pepsi-Cola partially financed the traveling as the company would later contribute to the Nixon campaign and on the campaign trail Tricky Dick flew in a Pepsi plane. Soon after his inauguration Richard Nixon was grateful and appointed Donald Kendall, by then the President of Pepsi Cola, head of National Alliance of Businessmen. In 1971 there was an American trade mission to Russia at which Donald Kendall met Alexei Kosygin, second only to Leonid Breznev, and secured a deal to flood the Russian market with Pepsi. It was part of a bid to combat alcoholism in Russia, but it only succeeded in turning Pepsi and vodka into one of the most popular drinks in Russia. This is the essence of detente, which was mocked by Ronald Reagan and the neoconservatives for that reason.

It was also under the shameless administration of Richard Nixon that Salvador Allende, the democratically elected President of Chile, was overthrown in a military coup on September 11th 1973. Allende was seen as a threat to American corporate power at a time when the US government was looking to establish detente with the Soviet Union. The socialist Salvador Allende was killed, General Augusto Pinochet seized power and began to reverse the reforms of Allende. All opposition was eliminated, trade unionists were dumped into the Atlantic from helicopters, thousands simply "disappeared", citizens were detained without charge and tortured. The military junta led by General Pinochet kept the Chilean markets open to penetration from American corporations and investors. In the run up to the constitutional crisis, which led to the coup, the bottler for Pepsi Cola in Chile was Augustin Edwards and he was also the publisher of El Mercurio. The newspaper became a front for the CIA and was instrumental in the coup which installed a dictatorship that would run Chile until 1990.

Jimmy Carter was a Coke President, he even appointed a Coca-Cola lawyer to Attorney General and Chairman Paul Austin shuttled secretly between the White House and foreign statesmen like Anwar Sadat. On the campaign trail, Carter brought on Tony Schwartz who had made over 300 adverts for Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola was banned in Portugal until Carter gave the state a $300 million loan. The product was introduced to China as the economy was opened up for the first time by Deng Xiaoping. Mao had kicked Coke out of China in 1949 and for years all the Chinese had was Happiness Cola. The alliance signed with Coca-Cola was announced publicly a week after it had actually been signed as to not embarrass Jimmy Carter. The President had just secured a trade alliance with China just after the company was welcomed back into China. It was a symbolic gesture to the Soviet Union, which had just forged a pact with Vietnam.

Today the company is known to take out "dead peasant" insurances on employees, so when an employee dies the company can receive hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. Trade union leaders have been killed at bottling plants in Guatemala and Colombia where the organised workers pushed for better pay and better working conditions. Just like other corporations the Coca-Cola Company is defined by white privilege in its' upper echelons, in which women and black people are almost entirely excluded. In spite of all of this, it is practically impossible to boycott the Coca-Cola Company effectively without mass-organisation. As the strange history of a soft-drink corporation is indicative of corporations and the tendencies which guide them. So the only means through which the problems created by corporate structures are revolutionary in nature and at a fundamental level the battle against corporations is a battle against the capitalist system.

What About Corporate Dole?

There is talk of deficit reduction and austerity measures, on both sides of the Atlantic, a lot of the "debate" is geared towards dismantling the welfare state which FDR constructed. In the US the Obama administration is looking to pursue greater spending initiatives for now, but it is spending cuts which we will see at a later date. In Britain, on the other hand, a series of deep spending cuts are about to be rammed through by the Con-Dem Coalition. These programmes of austerity will hit the poor hardest and function like an increase in taxes on working-class people everywhere. The impact is regressive, as it removes or severely undermines services which millions of people depend upon and have done for decades. The cuts will increase the amount of money that ordinary people will have to spend to get by on a day-to-day basis. The disposable income of the wealthy will be unscathed as they are the less reliant on institutions of the welfare state, like the NHS.

Typically the welfare state, particularly benefits, are a target of these cuts. The aim being to destroy a corrosive "culture of dependency". Even though in the US the trillion-dollar deficit is mostly due to the enormous costs entailed by a dysfunctional health-care system and a bloated military budget. Offense spending, not defense spending, has increased to $1.5 trillion in recent years and Obama has increased the military budget even further. Today 50% of military spending in the world is just the US offense expenditure, it is higher than the military budgets of the rest of the world combined. Though it should be noted that a great deal of this spending is funneled into the economy, to fund research and development of technology for high-tech industry. Along with enormous subsidies and protectionist measures, 'Corporate America' benefits enormously from government intervention in the economy.

This is nothing new, the US government from it's origins in revolution and war to the present has reflected the interests of the wealthy class of white men. In fact if the US economy had been truly laissez-faire from the beginning the country would have remained an appendage of the British Empire for much longer. In the 1850s, the railroads received 20 million acres of land free from the US government and during the Civil War this amount increased to around 100 million acres of free land. This land had been "cleared" of Native American tribes, not by the free-market, but by the state so that rich white people could become the owners of it. Today it is corporations, like Lockheed and Microsoft, which are the primary beneficiaries of supply-side economics dressed up as free-market economics. The US is no different to other first world countries in that development and economic growth was a result of state-intervention in the economy.

The free-market rhetoric of the Tea Parties and the right-wing ideologists spurring them on is absurd. The Tea Parties are for a free-market, small government, family values and a strong defence. Notice that a strong defence and a free-market are specifically in opposition with one another as the offence budget is used to subsidise high-tech industry. The ideologists of the movement are not free-marketeers, Newt Gingrich is a cynical reactionary seeking to manipulate people with legitimate grievances to support a narrow right-wing agenda. We can see this just by looking at Gingrich's record of supporting a welfare state for the rich. For over 20 years, Newt Gingrich represented the 6th district of Georgia and a leading recipient of federal subsidies in the country - namely Cobb County, Georgia. There Lockheed produces F22s at a subsidised rate which exceeded $70 billion a year under Gingrich.

Accumulation by dispossession comes to mind, the opulent minority accumulate wealthy and property at the expense of the poor majority. As for the Con-Dem Coalition, David Cameron has a proposal for job creation that will supposedly provide the "unworthy poor" (benefit cheats and single-mums etc) with work. The proposal is the cut in national insurance, which Cameron described repeatedly as a "jobs tax" during the campaign. The policy of "job creation" could be summed up as subsidies to firms who hire the unemployed at the minimum wage. It's likely that this policy could drive down the wages of other workers and it has the potential to undermine trade unions. A cut in "jobs tax" doesn't sound as wonderful when described in these terms. Especially if you consider the massive spending cuts as a form of taxation, decimating the ability of many people to live comfortable lives.

It's interesting that we think of the welfare state as a safety-net providing health-care and education, as well as financial assistance, to the poor. We do not think of the bailouts, tax-cuts and subsidies as falling under welfare. Even though a regressive tax-system funnels money into the pockets of the uber-rich. Naturally, the reactionary press have a problem with the poor living off of the "dole" and regularly accuse them of living parasitically on the hard-work of the "deserving poor". The assumption being that tax-cuts which benefit the wealthy, and spending cuts that harm the poor, reward the worthy and punish the unworthy. It is not the case that individuals thrive according to their own merits in this world. The self-made man is mostly a myth, as almost all "self-made men" are a product of centuries of affirmative action for rich-white-men and the dole queue of fat cats.

Rule by Abaddon.

Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality.

There are plenty of reasons to be concerned or even outraged at the conduct of the Kremlin in recent years. At the top of the list should be the atrocities committed by Russian troops in Chechnya. Let alone the anti-democratic and extreme nationalist tendencies of Putinism, which has led to the establishment of the Nashi movement, as well as the harassment of the opposition and attacks on civil society. To top this off the Kremlin has actively tried to stamp out all dissent in the mass-media and has succeeded in marginalising independent news. The judiciary has been "compromised" and the direct election of governors has been abolished. In short, Putin is busily "hollowing out" democracy in Russia. But at the top of every one's list right now is the Kremlin's move to ban wheat exports from Russia, which came after a severe drought and a series of wild-fires. As the protectionist measures of the Kremlin are forcing up prices all over the world, though the developing world will be hit hardest by this.

The genius of Putinism is that the Russian people seem indifferent to policies which infringe on civil liberties and human rights as they have been pacified. A rising standard of living is one reason for this, according to one source, when Putin came to power the middle-class consisted of 8 million people and today the middle-class consists of 55 million people. This is partly the reason that Putin's approval ratings have never dropped below 60%. The logic of the wheat ban is to minimise the impact on the electorate and to keep them at bay all at once. The last thing the Russian people want is to return to the 1990s when the economy descended into chaos as Boris Yeltsin put the country through economic "shock therapy". This "shock therapy" brought an end to all price controls, leading to rampant inflation, and saw all of Russian industry sold-off at dirt cheap prices to the likes of Boris Berezovsky.

This series of free-market reforms left the Russian people subject to the forces of the market and no adequate safety net to fall into. It was Putin who exiled and arrested the major oligarchs, under him a kind of order was brought to the economy along nationalist lines. It is the nationalist populism of Putin which filled the void left by the fall of Soviet communism in the early 90s. Whereas neoliberalism became a source of malfunction, servility and dispossession, from nationalism a sense of dignity, pride and security could be taken. Nationalist populism is also compatible with the permissive elements of late capitalism, as demonstrated in Putin's ridiculous public displays of machismo. Neoliberal dogmatism lacks the "You may!" quality which post-modern nationalism seems to provide for many. You may be proud of your country, you may use racial slurs, you may use violence in defence of the motherland and so on.

For the Motherland.

In banning wheat exports, in order to sustain his position in the Kremlin, Putin may have sentenced millions to death around the world. In 2008 the food crisis pushed 250 million more people to the verge of starvation, bringing the total number of the world's hungry to over 1 billion people - as a consequence of decisions made by banks and financial institutions. The food crisis led to riots in over 30 countries as prices soared, as food prices increased to a point where most people couldn't afford the most basic of food. The price of wheat had increased from $3 per 60-pound bushel to $25 per bushel in 2008. At a time when more wheat was produced in world history. This was a result of a "demand shock" created as the likes of Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers accumulated a mountain of long-only wheat futures. Once the financial crisis of 2008 began Western governments began to bailout banks, cutting down on food aid to the developing world along the way.

If leading economies like the US had created an international grain reserve this kind of crisis may have been averted. As it was an artificial "demand shock" that caused wheat prices to skyrocket as aggregate demand exceeded aggregate supply. Of course, the desperation of millions of people exacerbated the rise of prices. The price of retail wheat flour increased by 82% in Pakistan between 2007 and 2008. The global price of food increased by 80% in 2008, this included not just wheat that was affected but the price of soy, cooking oil, maize and rice etc. In Thailand the price of wholesale rice increased by 73% whilst the price of white maize in Ethiopia increased by 141%. Protectionist measures were taken in counties like the US, Britain and Russia to make sure that the impact on the market of these practices had minimal impact on the populations of their countries.

Now it looks as though a new global food bubble is on the way as speculation in the commodity futures market has led to the price of food to increase since 2009 - which is the result of financial deregulation. Putin's ban on wheat exports will further exacerbate the problem and has the potential to lead to a "domino effect" of intensified protectionist practices throughout the developed world. The bubble will inevitably burst, like the last one did in 2008. It could be that we need not just an international grain reserve, but greater economic integration, tight regulation and capital controls that transcend borders. Internationalism is the answer today, whereas nationalism should be tossed aside into the margins of history. Putin only offers the Russian people a crude answer to complex problems, at the expense of other peoples around the world, for the sake of personal gain and glory.