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A Totalitarian Republic?

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As for the command-and-control center of the faction, it should come as no surprise that due to the faction's historical origins in organized crime, central authority and effective decision-making is structured along the lines of a traditional criminal organization meting out rewards and punishments as deemed necessary and appropriate.

In the end, class struggle is not the motor of history; the capture and control of institutions is the prime directive of world history; elites become elites through their closeness and/or absolute identity with leading institutions.

As mentioned before, Neopatrimonial Factionalism has a profound effect on both domestic and international politics. Domestically, NF deflates or empties the contents of the purportedly dialectical nature of ostensibly democratic politics. When the leadership of political parties is infiltrated by NF collaborative actors they no longer really serve the interests of either their parties or constituents but the collective interests of NF. If this is true, we could take for purposes of illustration the recent election of Boris Johnson rather than Jeremy Corbyn. The outcome of this election can be looked at in a certain specific way if both parties are indeed merely "theatrical" facades covering the deeper structure of NF-organized power we are suggesting here. If, for example, both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn are members of the same NF, then any number of collaborative strategies would be available to them. For instance, strategies that would favor one or the other's election that would serve the longer-term interests of the NF and certainly not their specific parties or countries. Any number of engineered "scandals" or "false steps" or "scare tactics" or "fake news" could be easily manufactured to strongly favor one or the other candidate. To be even clearer, this means that the underlying structure of NF would, almost every time, dictate the preferred candidate/party through the active, if covert, cooperation of the "opposition". Indeed, in a world of NF there is no real opposition; only formal democratic "theatrics".

We could take another recent example--The ongoing impeachment process of Donald Trump. If the leadership of both parties comprises members of NF then, like the recent British elections, a wide variety of imaginative collaborative strategies are open to them. For instance, what may seem to the uninitiated as a "principled" pursuit of "justice" would in fact be just another example of democratic theatrics as usual. The real substantive goal of the impeachment process would be to ensure the reelection of Donald Trump by rousing his base, as well as others, to his defense and eventual (landslide?) reelection. After all, the likelihood of his impeachment by the senate is a very small one, if almost a "toothless" forgone conclusion in the house of representatives. Thus it is that NF reduces democratic (as well as other kinds of politics) to a performance art, rather than a real clash of interests, or real servants of the "people". The "res publica" is here revealed to be what it truly is: a "res privata". Citizenship is reduced to a mockery of itself. The citizen is, at best, a tool of private interests here described as NF, and if not that, then an unconscious fool or sleepwalker lost in the dreamscape of past political visions such as those of the contract theorists, the founding fathers, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and many others. Thus Marx was closest to the mark when he described the state as merely a mask for private, economic interests. The particular ways in which NF differs from Marx's interpretation of "democratic" "bourgeois" politics is that we do not see NF as primarily made up of capitalists or even just the "rich" but as a vast assembly of actors that criss-cross the socio-economic spectrum. NF does not primarily seek wealth (although it certainly requires and wields it) but power. Power over politics. Power over business. Power over media. Power over education, culture, and science. NF is the steering mechanism of both domestic societies and, increasingly, international relations. If true, substantive public opposition has evaporated within the intricate networks of private interests.

If NF is also a salient feature of world society and not just domestic societies (in a global age it would not be surprising that NF would also become global), then certain political tendencies should be observable. One is that the necessity of overt violence of one formal state structure versus another should decrease, particularly among reciprocally significant trading partners. The overwhelming benefits of covert cooperation would consistently outweigh destructive behaviors leading to unnecessary loss of life and property. Thus, the decline of major warfare would be the result not of the spread of democratic politics or the spread of commerce per se, but of an understanding among private elites of the mutual benefits of a "pax mafiosa".

From time to time, in order to sustain the last great mass illusion of publicly competing states, artificial crises would need to be created. This fundamental idea was first brilliantly described by George Orwell in his book "1984". The illusion of potential conflict--of China vs the US, or the US vs Russia, or the US vs North Korea etc... etc.--would have to be sustained to essentially keep fundamentally deluded populations mobilized, cohesive, and obedient to their separate state powers. As Hegel long ago remarked, a state of conflict (war) makes for good political hygiene (cohesiveness). If the world were all of a sudden to be definitively revealed to be a vast con game structurally steered by privately motivated players, an immense anarchic backlash of peoples would most likely result. Such an outcome is however highly unlikely since NF, by its very nature, is highly impervious to empirical verification. If a criminal organization is large enough, it will be able to effectively cover its actions no matter how minute in the short term or overwhelming in the long run. He who is able to organize and discipline the most people wins the planetary game. It is here that small private moves can potentially determine vast public permutations.

Thus it has come to pass that the historical, titanic battle for "the planet of the Apes" in the twentieth century: Red (Communist) mafia, Brown (Fascist) mafia, Multi-Ethnic American mafia was settled and won: American gangsterism won the global game of thieves and bestrides the world as a colossus, largely undisturbed and unchallenged in its might and influence. But it is important to remember that it won, in part, because of its remarkable powers of co-optation. After all, it was Abraham Lincoln who said that the best way to defeat an enemy was to make him your friend. We can think of no better expression that encapsulates the quintessential imperial American strategy than this.

The growing homogenization of the world reflects the growing political, economic, social cohesion of the global faction and its collective goals; globalization reflects, in part, the removal of obstacles to further effective rule by the faction and the growing coordination among its members and their aims.

Capitalist economic relations and formal democratic institutions are the most efficient systems through which the faction can rule; they provide ideological legitimacy, real economic and social benefits, and regulate the vast majority of problems that arise within the system and that are of no particular interest to the faction. In order words, the system works, in part, as advertised. It is only when the vital interests of the faction are concerned that action that is deemed necessary is taken and the contingent nature of the regime is revealed. Democratic rules are broken and the ethos of the system becomes a mockery of itself. The system reveals itself, in its occasional temporary suspensions, for what it is: A Totalitarian Republic. A system where a large faction that has captured the commanding heights of all major institutions decides upon "the exception"; who or what will be protected, eliminated, and fostered by the system. To a certain extent, it retains the consensus and unanimity of its members, not out of a quaint concern for the democratic "spirit", but because they understand that their material well-being depends on the system's continual exercise and distribution of preferential power.

Why would a vast number of people accept such a system? Answer: scarcity and opportunity. There are just so many good jobs, desirable goods, and other material benefits that can be distributed. A semi-surreptitious social system that helps to provide you with any possible edge or preference for you over another equally deserving, if crucially uninformed, member of society would be, almost needless to say, of great and lasting personal advantage. And it is a synergistic system based on the well-known game of "Tit for Tat". Each member strives to not only benefit himself but all the others in the network, thus creating an enormous collective advantage. In playing for the team, you, inevitably, help yourself. In such a system, defection would be supremely irrational not to mention deadly.

The capture and arrest of "mafia" figures today is the roundup of old non-integrated remnants that have for whatever reason been unable to successfully infiltrate the institutions whether corporation, committee, political party, university, hospital: they are the anachronistic outsiders feebly battling both the formal institutions of society and their real content of direction and power. The real mafia IS society; it does not stand outside of it; it is a Gramscian story of the march through the institutions; it is a neopatrimonial compact between individuals to ensure first their survival, then employment and career advancement, then social and economic influence, and then finally the careful projection and deployment of various forms of non-democratic practices. This is beyond conspiracy; this is a system of collective collusion based on a collective understanding of an ultimate aim--the maintenance and projection and control of power wherever and whenever it matters. For the most part, the actors are not hidden; they are almost all public figures. What is hidden is the organization of their methods and the ultimate outcomes of their collective actions: this is a methodological conspiracy with a public face.

Make no mistake though; coordination, organization, and the ability to conceal one's actions are of the utmost importance here. Keeping with its American origins, the methodological conspiracy recruits from all nationalities, ethnicities, religions, genders, classes; the socio-cultural origins of the recruits do not matter in the least, the willingness to accept the rules of the game and to execute them is the vital component; and who wouldn't join them if asked, especially the socially disadvantaged? Since the immediate gains and the harshness of punishment is so evident: the combination of carrot and stick are almost perfectly effective here.

Ultimately, we cannot empirically prove our assertions here; we can but offer a theory of the partially unseen that may one day be proven by those more fortunate, intrepid, or courageous than ourselves, or perhaps when the system we are describing will have, for whatever reason, reached its historical end; no system lasts forever after all, even the most efficient and popular. An entrenched neopatrimonial structure, which is at sharp odds with Western ideology of universal human rights and individual freedoms and pretensions to equality, rules the West; surreptitious networks of power form the web, while a compact of silence affords them their universal protection.

All wish to partake in the bounty of the political and economic system and will use any means necessary to unfairly obtain it; connection, influence, and collective solidarity are the means to this end. The West is still framed by a system of competition under conditions of the relative scarcity of desirable social goods; any organizational structure that could effectively take advantage of this situation would be of great long-term benefit to all participants in it.

Can such a system be defeated? Unfortunately, probably not because it is eminently rational. As Hegel once said "The Real is Rational and the Rational is Real." This idea fits well with our system. Under conditions of modernity, it will always make sense for a group of people to furtively combine their efforts to penetrate and control as many modern institutions as possible in order to tilt the game of survival and the scarcity of all kinds of goods in their favor.

Even slight advantages would add up quickly in such a system. Under modernity, whether in its fascist, communist, nationalist, liberal-democratic form, factional groups always arise whose interest it is to capture the commanding heights of society. And they will always do this under the cover of some ideology with which to more generally regulate those that are not directly included in the leading group.

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PhD in Continental Philosophy. Teach Political Philosophy at Zeppelin University Friedrichshafen, Germany.

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