English Fascism, when it arrives, is likely to be of a sedate and subtle kind (presumably, at any rate at first, it won’t be called Fascism),

 

~George Orwell

I was recently musing upon global neoliberalism , and its semi-totalitarian reach into almost every corner of the Earth, and thought of this Orwell quote.

I decided to google “Neoliberalism is fascism” and came across this really cool chick’s blog:

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2007/10/neoliberalism-i.html

She says, in part:

One last prefatory remark: I think it is important to recognize that fascism (forms of contemporary conservatism) is a result of neoliberal thought. It is not simply a supplement that aims to save neoliberalism from itself. So, even as forms of religious fundamentalism provide supplements to the extremes of neoliberalism, neoliberalism on its own has horribly conservative effects.

You can watch a really wonderful discussion with the author here. I highly recommend watching it. She is one of my new heroes. I am shamelessly thirsty for vision and insight. And she is full of some vision and insight.

She’s a commie, which was an interesting coincidence for me. As I expressed in a previous entry, I REALLY want to understand Noam Chomsky’s’ vision for how society should work. I know for a fact that his facts about foreign policy and geopolitics are correct, more or less. I know he’s brilliant. But in my search to understand his actual vision, I kept hitting brick walls. And I really really have looked. That does not in any way degrade him or his intellect or his monumental contributions to the Westerners’ understanding of geopolitics. Chomsky will always be King.

Yet (heh? I was trying to not say “but”, because I really mean all that) I think this might be true:

Chomsky has never written systematically about how his brand of small-scale socialism will be achieved. This would require a discussion of matters such as human agency and economic policy that seem to matter little to him. For despite his affiliation with a movement that wrote a vast literature on such questions, Chomsky himself often seems content to proclaim its superiority to state socialism on face value.

The best ideas I mooched off of the chick I linked to earlier are:

1) DE-privatization! REVERSE privatization. That’s what we should be uniting behind and endorsing. No matter what flavor of leftie you are.

2) politically, who knows? OWS??  (she’s a huge OWS advocate, like us.) Keep on keepin’ on? She’s been writing academic stuff and whatnot about it, like here.