By Rodney Atkinson
Dateline 5th January 2006
Corporatism defined – Putin and Schroeder’s corporate scandals – Corporatist fascist nature of Ukraine’s revolution – anti-semitism in Ukraine – Bavarian corporatism versus Angela Merkel’s protestantism – David Cameron’s dangerous corporatism.
Andre Illarianov, the former Economic Adviser to Russia’s President Putin has resigned because, in his own words, Russia was increasingly “ruled by State corporations acting in their own interests”.
Of course there are also many privatised Russian (or British or German or French) corporations who can equally “run a country in their own interests”. Such behaviour constitutes a large part of the definition of corporatism – although that term also covers non commercial “corporates” like interest groups (remember the very large donation by the RSPCA to the Labour Party in order to persuade it to ban hunting!) trades unions (the British Labour Party would hardly survive with their donations) and financial organisations like the George Soros Funds which buy influence in Eastern Europe. Soros is indeed a classic corporatist – that is he manages (some would say gambles with) other institutions’ funds which in turn manage other people’s savings. He used that power to make a vast profit when Britain was forced out of the European Exchange rate Mechanism in 1992.
Japan has always been a haven of corporatist politics with large corporations running the political machine with Government and Central Bank in turn manipulating exchange rates and encouraging companies to keep their foreign earnings abroad. The result was of course the collapse of both the Japanese property market and an 80% fall during the 1990s of the Japanese stock market. A similar corporatist approach may well produce a similar outcome in China! The State does its part by buying the allegiance of those (MPs) who are supposed to represent the people against the State! A young Japanese MP was astonished recently to see the salary (£125,000 per annum) and perks (£5,000 per month telephone allowance) to which he was entitled. He was quickly silence by his parliamentary party! “youtis a good thing” said a senior LDP official “but it can also be dangerous. Indeed corporatism must go its anti-democratic way – silently!
The former Chancellor of Germany Gerhard Schroeder is under criminal investigation over allegations that he used his position in politics to get a top job with the Russian energy company Gazprom where he is Chairman of the Supervisory Board of Gazprom’s’ North European Gas Pipeline. And how did Schroeder achieve this rapid industrial promotion after a life-time of NOT getting his hands dirty in industry? Why of course he did Gazprom a big favour while he was German Chancellor – by signing a £3.4billion pipeline deal with president Putin for a gas link between Germany and Russia.
Even some of Schroeder’s own Social Democrats (presumably the socialist ones who have a vague idea of what corporatism is) have objected. But what Schroeder was doing is no different from what large numbers of British and American and in particular French businessmen and politicians do all the time. Indeed it was with great difficulty that I myself was able to persuade the British investigators of public sector sleaze to accept the concept of “contingent corruption” in public life. By that I meant exactly what Schroeder has done here (or what for example former Cabinet Ministers David Mellor did for the BBC or Peter Walker did for British Gas, each being rewarded with highly paid jobs AFTER they left office for services rendered while they were in office!) In other words it is not just a question of receiving payment for favourable treatment at the time. It certainly cannot be rectified by a “delay before taking up appointments in the private sector” – indeed the delay helps to disguise the contingent corruption.
If we need a particularly crass example of corporatist attitudes we need look no further than the British Royal Mail, a massive State owned but increasingly “corporatised” monster. The trades unions run the Royal Mail and nothing can be done about it because the responsible Government Minister is a former general secretary of the communications Workers Union! But the management is demanding that the taxpayer pays in £200million to subsidise their pension fund and that 20% of their equity should be handed to their workforce, free of charge and that stamp prices should rise by about 25%. That is corporatism and it always arises out of a period of socialist, Statist politics when politicians dare not reverse that socialism and tackle the real problems but feel they have to do something. They therefore land in a corrupted half-way house which is neither socialism nor free enterprise capitalism but a corporatist, parasitic compromise between big business and big government.
This happened in Germany after the First World War when a period of violent socialist revolution was followed by the inept Weimar Republic with its corporatist “Centre Parties” stoking inflation, robbing small businesses and handing massive power to large corporations. That of course was followed by Hitler’s Nazism which both exploited the alienation which corporatism produced AND used that very corporatism as the basis of the new fascism.
So the above examples are not of free enterprise capitalism (which has long faded, along with democracy, in the Western world to which the post communist Eastern Europe looked for their emancipation) but they are examples of Corporatism. The communist regimes of Russia and China are today all too willing to mimic corporatism for it allowed former party bosses to transfer seamlessly from socialist apparatchik to corporatist apparatchik – except that the latter was far more personally profitable! It is no surprise therefore that it is the German and French political classes who are most enamoured of the Chinese communist-corporatists and seek to provide them with vital “defence” equipment which the USA has rightly termed as extremely sensitive.
The close links between the Blair Government and big business was in a way the defining alliance of his regime, mimicking – as he did in most things – the political economy of the Franco-German axis. The Bilderberg powers which destroyed democratic nations in the European Union were corporatist, collectivist, elitist (corrupt monarchs and leading clerics were often eager to be co-opted) and anti democratic.
Democracy consists not so much of votes at elections, or MPs or parliamentary decisions or Government power – all of which can easily be manipulated by the REAL powers behind the scenes. It consists to 75% of people in general acting, buying, selling, saving, moving, voting and speaking freely without the interventions and controls of the State (or monarch). Real democracy is mutually dependent on the freedoms of enterprise – whereby free individuals, constrained only by minimal laws to protect order, property, health and social emancipation, arrive at social service by genuine democratic accountability. There is no more immediate and direct accountability (day to day, year to year) than the freedoms of one’s fellow citizens to refuse to “buy into” a given choice, be that choice social or economic. Democracy therefore goes hand in hand with free enterprise capitalism. Anti democracy on the other hand goes hand in hand with State business, State manipulated corporations and corporation manipulated Parliaments – in a word, corporatism.
There can be no greater expression of this philosophy than the European Union where at the behest of large multi-national corporations a centralised bureaucracy was set up in Brussels in order to bypass those democratic national parliaments of free peoples which two world wars were fought to establish. The authoritarian, corporatist and anti democratic nature of the European Union was clear from the kind of people and the kind of corporations which supported it – “former Nazis, fascists, Roman Catholic corporatists on both sides of the Atlantic, former Vichy French collaborators like Francois Mitterand and British fascists likes Oswald and Diana Mosley and large Nazi-friendly groups like Ford and General Motors. Many of those who had been most prominent in the Nazi regime became leading founders and office holders in the European Economic Community established in the 1950s. It is this Europe which now confronts the former Russian empire and its satellites, the latter having gone from the Soviet communist frying pan into the Euro-corporatist fire!
Ironically when the left wing and Marxist rioters disrupt political and economic summits in Europe and around the world they hurl abuse at “Capitalism”. But what they are really objecting to is Globalised Corporatism which I would define as supranational, collectivist, dirigiste and elitist (ie those who describe themselves as elite!) and the very opposite of that free enterprise, free trading, international entrepreneuship which, unlike corporatism,can live in harmony with democracy and the emancipation of nations.
Corporatism is very popular among the governing classes, but not among democrats for it is a classic top down, authoritarian, all controlling, interventionist machine. That closed system needs to hide its own economic and industrial failings by expanding its globalist power to stop free systems and free peoples outside its own orbit from challenging it and competing with what it insists is its own “success”! (Note how the German and French political classes, having caused mass unemployment with the Euro in their own countries, have prevented Polish and other east European entrants to the EU from working in Germany or France while the EU itself extends its control over those very countries).
The Russians under the former Communist Putin are in a grave dilemma. On the one hand they know they need western (and in particular German) markets and capital to bring them even into the 20th century never mind the 21st. But those markets and that capital has come in the form of politically powerful loans and investment and they see German corporatist Europe spreading its influence across Russia’s former empire. They see the break up of their Slav and orthodox neighbours by that (always unholy) alliance of German Europe and Vatican politics. Nowhere is that clearer than in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and the Ukraine, where the present argument about gas prices demonstrates the understandable Russian reluctance to continued subsidy, by way of artificially low gas prices to Ukrainians, of a country which was forcibly hijacked by German Europe.
That new allegiance was bought by a so called “orange revolution” inspired by Germany and the Vatican (the latter through Ukrainian Catholicism and the “uniates” who seek unity between Orthodoxy and Catholicism) and successor organisations to those Ukrainians who collaborated with the Nazis.
The principal economic theory of the Vatican is corporatism, manifested in all its collectivist fervour in Bavaria and in the person of its President Edmund Stoiber. The Catholic Stoiber refused to serve under the new (protestant) Chancellor Angela Merkel (whose communist upbringing in East Germany and Atlanticist leanings show that she understands the nature of German Corporatist-Fascism). Stoiber is a perpetual critic of Anglo Saxon free enterprise capitalism and fervent supporter of the Sudeten Germans right to return to the Czech Republic (despite their support for Nazi rule in that country during the Second World War!)
Corporatism is of course the basic building brick of all fascist systems. Explicitly lauded by Mussolini and enjoying resurgence in Italy today it was avidly practised by German Nazism and Vichy France and the descendents of both in the European Union today. The State is everything; collectives and corporations, churches and interest groups dominate over free voters, free enterprise and free trade. The unholy alliance between business and the State leads to mutual back scratching and mutual bail outs. The new leadership of the Conservative Party in Britain is principally corporatist with David Cameron seeking to give business “social responsibilities” by which he means to offload new “Government services” (for which the State would otherwise have to raise taxes) onto business and shareholders. The resulting destruction of a healthy balance of powers between independent wealth creators on the one hand and democratic public service provider on the other is thereby fatally undermined. When business and Government combine there can be only one loser – the people.
Many of the organisations supporting the “revolution” in the Ukraine were pro Nazi during the war and the so called “revolution” was more a corporatist manipulation of the masses than a spontaneous bottom up revolt. Large corporations gave workers time off work to conduct their “revolution” and today those corporate powers benefit from the pro EU, pro corporatist and anti Russian Government of Victor Yuschenko.
If there was indeed a populist element even that was infected by anti-Semitism. When the newspaper Silski Visti(circulation 500,000, comparatively larger, considering the Ukrainian population, than the Guardian or The Times in the UK) was attacked for publishing an article about “Jews in the Ukraine” the German favourite (and now President of Ukraine) Victor Yuschenko supported the paper. The article had described Ukraine as being “dominated economically and politically by a small group of Jewish oligarchs”. When the complaint against Silski Visti was upheld Yuschenko launched a campaign “Hands off Silski Visti” in which leading pro EU campaigners like Alexander Moroz and Julia Timoschenko were also prominent.
The Ukrainian Jews were decimated during the second world war with large collaboration between the local population and the Nazis. It was in the West Ukrainian town of Lviv, where thousands of Jews were killed some 60 years ago that Yuschenko’s election coalition supported a former leading figure in the extremist, anti-Semitic party UNA-UNSO which is predominantly Catholic, very anti-Russian and seeks a “Ukraine-German-Spanish axis” (see also The Berlin Madrid Axis www.freenations.freeuk.com/news-2006-03-17.html) The son of the Ukrainian national Socialist Commander who in June 1941 was responsible with the Germans for the murder of Jews is a prominent member of the UNA-UNSO.
The successor organisation of the Ukrainian Nazi collaborators (OUN(B)) is the Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists which was one of Yuschenko’s coalition partners.
So, as my 1996 book Europe’s Full Circle both documented and predicted, and as my book Fascist Europe Risingand the Freenations website demonstrate, the old continental European pendulum swings again from fascism to communism and back towards fascism again. The Anglo Saxon controlled interlude of the post Second World War period has come to an end and some of the more dangerous and extreme elements of European history are again raising their ugly heads.
If we had to locate the socio-economic theory and practice which underlies these political movements then that theory is Corporatism. It is therefore of extreme concern that the traditionally most anti-corporatist conservative party in western Europe, the British Conservative Party, should now be led by a young man oblivious of this ideology’s dangers and unsure of the role of his own country in a Europe which Britain’s traditional enemies have based entirely on the philosophy and structures of the 1940s.
Rodney Atkinson
January 2006
See also:Weimar Revisited www.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/archive.html (March 2000) and How Euro-corporatism destroyed Russia www.ukconservatism.freeuk.com/archive.html (October 1998)
