The Global Rise of Authoritarianism in the 21st Century

Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization and the Nationalist Response

Berch Berberoglu, Berch Berberoglu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000171068
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Neoliberal globalization is in deep crisis. This crisis is manifested on a global scale and embodies a number of fundamental contradictions, a central one of which is the global rise of authoritarianism and fascism. This emergent form of authoritarianism is a right-wing reaction to the problems generated by globalization supported and funded by some of the largest and most powerful corporations in their assault against social movements on the left to prevent the emergence of socialism against global capitalism.

As the crisis of neoliberal global capitalism unfolds, and as we move to the brink of another economic crisis and the threat of war, global capitalism is once again resorting to authoritarianism and fascism to maintain its power. This book addresses this vital question in comparative-historical perspective and provides a series of case studies around the world that serve as a warning against the impending rise of fascism in the 21st century.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization and the Rise of Authoritarianism in the Early 21st Century

Berch Berberoglu

Neoliberalism was first introduced in Chile after the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet, orchestrated by the United States, on September 11, 1973, overthrew the democratically elected Socialist government of President Salvador Allende, who was killed in the presidential palace by the bombs dropped by the Chilean Air Force as he defended Chile’s fragile democracy. Upon taking power, the fascist military dictatorship of General Pinochet dismissed Congress and eliminated all Socialist and progressive forces from the government and installed an authoritarian regime advised by conservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman’s “Chicago Boys,” implementing a neoliberal monetarist policy in line with the interests of U.S. corporate capitalist forces that took over the Chilean economy to secure their own globally-driven profit-based schemes. The following year, in 1974, the neo-liberal capitalist model was introduced in Bolivia through a similar military coup. And a year later, in 1975, in Argentina, a military coup led by General Jorge Rafaél Videla installed a fascist military dictatorship in that country. Subsequently, throughout the 1980s, U.S. transnational corporate control of Latin America was assured by a series of U.S.-backed military coups that spread across the entire region under the pretext of fighting Cuban- and Nicaraguan-inspired “socialism and communism.” It was accomplished by propping up death squads in El Salvador, the Contra War against the Sand-inista government in Nicaragua, and right-wing reactionary regimes (mostly military dictatorships) throughout the continent south of the Rio Grande. This was essentially the beginning of what later became a continent-wide neoliberal global capitalist expansion of U.S. transnational corporations under the auspices of U.S. imperialism. Soon, other military coups, such as the one in Turkey in 1980 and elsewhere in the periphery—in the Middle East, Asia, and Africa—came to define the global strategy of U.S. transnational capital in transforming the economies of these and other states around the world in a neoliberal capitalist direction in the 1980s and beyond, from which U.S. transnational corporations benefited immensely. In effect, a series of authoritarian (military/fascist) regimes were installed to advance U.S. global capitalist interests across the world during this period of resurgence of U.S. imperialism.

Whereas neoliberalism, as the ideology of global capitalism, was adopted in Latin America and elsewhere to advance the interests of both U.S. and other advanced capitalist-imperialist powers in alliance with local corrupt, crony-capitalist regimes imposing authoritarian/fascist rule mostly through military dictatorships exerting their power on the masses across the periphery of the advanced capitalist centers that prevailed for nearly two decades during the 1970s and 1980s, progressive forces led by workers, peasants, Indigenous peoples’ movements and others adversely affected by the neo-liberal policies of authoritarian regimes came to challenge the prevailing neocolonial order during the closing decade of the 20th century.

The “Pink Tide” in Latin America that came to exemplify a series of left-wing progressive regimes in Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Argentina, Uruguay, Venezuela, and elsewhere in the continent was the response of the left to the dictates of the imperialist states in alliance with their local cronies to facilitate exploitation, oppression, and political domination over the people. The resistance of the masses throughout Latin America that ushered in the “Pink Tide” across the continent in the 1990 and 2000s under the progressive leftist regimes of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, as well as others, set the stage for the battle against neoliberalism that promoted authoritarianism and fascism to stabilize the political situation in response to the global capitalist crisis, which had been unfolding since the global economic slump of the mid 1970s, which in effect embodied the worldwide crisis of neoliberalism and global capitalism in the age of capitalist imperialism—a period of decline of empire that unleashed the resurgence of fascism across the world in the closing decades of the 20th century.

Today, in the early 21st century, we have been facing a similar crisis that submerged the world capitalist economy into the Great Recession in 2008–2009—the deepest and most severe recession since the Great Depression—and are on the verge of facing another, similar and deeper recession compounded by the COVID-19 crisis that may in fact plunge the global economy into another Great Depression if current trends continue to threaten global capitalism and its future prospects. With the United States and a number of countries in the world moving to the right, we are once again under the threat of the further consolidation of authoritarian regimes and face the erosion of democratic rights in Europe and the United States in line with the interests of big business as it attempts to consolidate its hold on the U.S. economy and polity in times of economic uncertainty, social unrest, and threats to the stability of the global capitalist system. Thus, it is during times of weakening and decline of empire and imperialism on a global scale and the corresponding divisions and stalemate within the ruling class that erode empire’s ability to turn things around to prevent a total collapse of the system, that increasingly prompts the powers that be to look for repressive racist solutions to disarm the people’s movements to halt their struggle toward a radical, socialist alternative to the crisis of capitalism and imperialism. Increasing racism, police brutality, and repression, especially of racial and ethnic minorities, as in the brutal killing of an African American, George Floyd, by a racist police officer in the United States in May 2020, is another example of the brutality of a system in crisis.

As we enter the third decade of the 21st century, neoliberalism and the neoliberal globalization project promoted by U.S. transnational capital and the state for much of the latter part of the 20th and early 21st century is in deep crisis. The contradictions of this process are seen and felt everywhere, and the disturbing manifestations of neoliberalism—from cronyism and corruption to suppression of civil liberties and human rights in the form of authoritarian states across the globe that violate the rule of law and trample on democratic governance—are on the rise since the emergence of Trump.

The rise of fascism and authoritarian regimes around the world are not new, as we know from the experience of such regimes in Chile under General Pinochet and Argentina under General Videla, and a host of other military and civilian dictatorships in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East (e.g., in Iran under the Shah, in Nicaragua under Samosa, in the Philippines earlier under Marcos and now under Duterte, in Egypt earlier under Mubarak and now under Sisi, in Libya under Qaddafi, in Iraq under Saddam Hussain, and elsewhere throughout the world) were the order of the day in the 1970s and 1980s through the early years of the new millennium to the present, with right-wing authoritarian regimes ruling across the globe.

While Latin America went through a “Pink Tide” that mildly challenged neoliberalism and moved many of the societies in the region to the left, some even establishing various forms of “socialism” in a few countries, as in the case of the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela under Hugo Chaves, or the Sandinista Revolution led by Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, as well as a series of leftist regimes in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, Uruguay, and elsewhere, where progressive forces came to power to halt the disastrous policies of neoliberal capitalist regimes propped up by transnational corporations and global financial institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the pendulum has again swung to the right with the counterrevolutionary forces gaining the upper hand in the havoc that they have created in Venezuela, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and now in Brazil. Thus, the class struggle is once again at the forefront of the struggles for state power throughout the region.

In Asia, the march of authoritarianism and military-backed regimes have spread from Myanmar to Thailand to Cambodia to the Philippines, where dictators like Rodrigo Duterte have been running rampant across Southeast Asia. This is also the case in India under Narendre Modi at one end and as some might argue Xi Jinping in China at the other. For good or for ill, whether they are right-wing fascist dictatorships with authoritarian leadership or benevolent nationalist movements that have set the path to nationally based populist projects, the end result is much the same: top-down authoritarian regimes that have emerged in the context of the worldwide spread of neoliberal global capitalism and its devastating crises and impact on people across the world.

Two trends seem to have emerged as a consequence of the expansion of the neoliberal project of economic plunder and political repression to further the process of capital accumulation in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The first has always benefited the transnational corporations (and their capitalist owners in the center states) and the cronies of foreign capital, who, through their corrupt practices, have fulfilled their role as agents of foreign corporations and of the imperial state, thus taking many of these countries down the same disastrous path. The second has emerged in response to the crisis and impact of neoliberalism and capitalist globalization on broad segments of the population across the world in the form of a populist reaction led by pseudo-nationalist forces that have mobilized people under the banner of ultra-nationalism and xenophobia to prevent the rise of a socialist or communist movement against global capitalism. It is against this background and in the context of the contradictions and crisis of neoliberal capitalist globalization that we need to understand the re-emergence of authoritarianism in the early 21st century.

This book is devoted to the study of this urgent phenomenon that has engulfed the world and taken us back to the dark days of authoritarian dictatorships across the globe. The book consists of fourteen chapters on the crisis of neoliberal globalization and the rise of authoritarianism that provide a broader understanding of neoliberalism, imperialism, and authoritarianism through regional analyses of the situation in Latin America, Asia, and Africa and of case studies of Russia, China, the United States, India, the Philippines, Turkey, Hungary, and Poland. These wide-ranging chapters, most of which were commissioned specifically for this book, provide incisive analyses of key cases of neoliberalism and authoritarianism—whether they be Putin and the oligarchs in Russia or Trump and his billionaire right-wing backers engulfed in corruption, nepotism, and profiteering in the United States.

The opening substantive chapter of this book by Alessandro Bonanno provides a broad global perspective for understanding the nature and contradictions of neoliberal globalization that has led to its crisis across the globe. Bonanno argues that the rise of populist reaction to neoliberalism in the early 21st century is a response to high levels of socioeconomic inequality and uncertainty, generated by neoliberal globalization that culminated in the Great Recession of 2008–2009, which created the conditions for a restructuring of the political economy of global capitalism in the form of an emergent neoliberal authoritarian capitalism. Bonanno persuasively argues that the recent wave of authoritarianism across the globe is a product of the crisis of neoliberal globalization, which generates a dual authoritarian response (one from above—to maintain order under repressive authoritarian rule—and another from below—challenging the neoliberal status quo by providing a far-right populist, ultra-nationalist authoritarian response to the decline of empire). This response is reactionary, Bonanno points out, in that it denounces liberal/bourgeois democracy for being distorted and corrupt; advocates racism, nationalism, and xenophobia; and justifies totalitarian solutions to socioeconomic and political problems. Bonanno concludes his analysis by arguing that the inability of neoliberalism to address the crisis of global capitalism and the imposition of authoritarian rule across the globe to maintain law and order opens the path to fascism and political repression.

Ilya Matveev in his chapter on the development of neoliberalism in Putin’s Russia, examines in great detail the fundamental contradictions of the post-Soviet transformations that the imposition of the neoliberal policy paradigm has led to the emergence of an oligarchy that expanded its wealth on an unprecedented scale through the imposition of an authoritarian regime. This context of the promotion of neoliberal policies to facilitate capital accumulation by a new oligarchic class led to the development of an authoritarian state with Putin at the helm. In explaining these developments, Matveev is cognizant of the class forces at work in implementing the neoliberal policies of the authoritarian state in Russia.

As in other cases of authoritarian states, where cronyism, corruption, and neoliberal state policy are intertwined under the reign of a dominant ruling class, the evolution of neoliberalism in Russia in the post-Soviet period is accommodated by neoliberal authoritarianism. Thus, through an understanding of the relationship between neoliberalism and authoritarianism, we are able to delineate the impact of global capitalism on the rise of authoritarianism in Russia. However, the matter of implementing the neoliberal policy paradigm in Russia may not be as simple as it appears at first sight in that the interests and actions of the state in intervening and mediating the relationship between neoliberal oligarchs and the state may coincide with the state’s broader “nationalist” societal agenda while accommodating neoliberalism in its economy. In this regard, by weaving together the social, political, and economic dynamics of the Russian state, Matveev makes an important contribution to our understanding of the situation in Russia under the Putin regime in the post-Soviet period of neoliberal authoritarianism.

Alvin Y. So in his chapter on China addresses the changes in leadership that have been going on in that country since the ascendance to power of Xi Jinping in 2012. He argues that, since taking power in the Communist Party several years ago, Xi has systematically dismantled the political reforms of his predecessor Deng Xiaoping, who led China for four decades. These reforms, So points out, had included fixed term limits and enforced retirement rules for leaders and cadres, the relative tolerance of intellectuals and limited dissent, and safeguards against the development of a personality cult around the leader. Through recent reversals of these reforms, So argues, Xi has succeeded in establishing an authoritarian regime in China. In examining the process by which this transformation has taken place, So aims to understand the distinctive features of Xi’s authoritarian regime, the rise of this regime and its relationship to the Communist Party of China over the past several years, and the implications of these features and changes for China and the world in the years ahead.

The critical issue that needs to be addressed, however, is the nature and aims of this regime and its relationship to centers of power in China in relation to not only the leader as such but also (and perhaps more importantly) the chief political institutions of Chinese society—first and foremost the Communist Party of China. It is only through an understanding of the dynamics of this relationship that we would come to know if what has emerged in China is a personalist authoritarianism under the leadership of Xi Jinping or the institutionalization of the rule of the Communist Party through its leader (Xi Jinping) to implement the party’s political line and authority. If So is right in calling Xi’s regime “Maoist authoritarianism” and finding it as resting on the rule of the Communist Party, then perhaps what we may have in China today is a return to Maoist ideology promoting “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as it is officially proclaimed by the party. Whatever may be the case, it is clear that big changes have taken place in China in recent years, and these changes will have a major impact on the future course of China’s development in the 21st century.

Turning to developments in the United States following the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, Alan Spector in his chapter provides a wide-ranging historical analysis of the rise of authoritarianism and right-wing politics in the United States over the past several decades. Going as far back as the Nixon and Reagan administrations to provide the historical context of the imperial presidency that set the stage for the entry of Trump to the highest office in the land, Spector helps us understand the critical relationship between the deteriorating neoliberal economic situation during the past several decades and its contradictions on a world scale, including its devastating impact on working people in the United States, and the populist reaction to the decline of empire—a recipe for the rise of authoritarianism and fascism in the absence of an organized left-wing working-class response to the unfolding crisis.

To make sense of recent developments surrounding the rise of Trump and its place in recent U.S. history, Spector explores the changes in U.S. and global political-economic developments over the past fifty years and how they are used by xenophobic “populists” to broaden their political base. Examining the effects of global capitalist expansion and the consequences of neoliberal economic policies on working people in the United States, Spector argues that dominant capitalist forces have promoted right-wing authoritarian reaction to the crisis of neoliberalism to deflect and divert attention away from the problems created by the capitalist globalization process. It is within the context of this broader process of global economic expansion and contraction of neoliberal capitalism and its impact on the United States that we need to unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Crisis of Neoliberal Globalization and the Rise of Authoritarianism in the Early 21st Century
• Part I Crisis of Neoliberalism and the Rise of Authoritarianism: A Global Perspective
• Part II Neoliberalism and the Rise of Authoritarianism in the Leading States of the World Economy: Russia, China, and the United States
• Part III Neoliberalism and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Latin America, Asia, and Africa
• Part IV Case Studies of Neoliberal Authoritarianism in the Periphery: India, the Philippines, and Turkey
• Part V Neoliberalism and the Rise of Authoritarianism in Former Socialist States: Hungary and Poland
• Part VI The Future of Neoliberal Global Capitalism and the Struggle Against Authoritarianism and Fascism
• Select Bibliography
• About the Editor and Contributors
• Index