Michael Klare on the New Fascism

January 26th, 2007

Views: 726

Posted by ChrisG at 1:40 pm

The use of illusory threats by contemporay democratic governments in a way that covers over their gradual unintended creation of all-too-real ones is dealt with in two largely excellent pieces by Michael Klare over at TomDispatch. What Klare calls ‘energo-fascism’ is a consequence of the Hobbesian prisoners’ dilemma that industrialised nations have been pursuing for the best part of a century, the race to seize as many non-renewable energy resources as possible – and in the process to make one’s economy as monolithically dependent as possible on those same resources.

Without a serious reconsideration of how, as Marx might say, the means of social reproduction are organised – which means going beyond the level of technological solutions to look at the social and political relationships that structure production (e.g. centralisation-decentralisation) – then Klare’s presentation of the choices facing the world looks a likely scenario. All the talk of ‘energy security’ and the language of spreading, all-consuming emergency that haloes it may well render the increasingly authoritarian legal and political regressions of the last five years just a prelude to something far more unpleasant, involving a massive centralisation of energy infrastructure and governance that may well fulfil Andre Gorz’s premonitions about ‘eco-fascism’. Gorz saw this possibility (the barbarie to his socialism) as rooted, not in the free-market Right’s current favourite spectre – the alleged massive influence of some numinous tree-hugging cabal, benefiting from the Other’s usual miraculous combination of properties (utterly powerless and invisible/utterly powerful and ubiquitous) – but in the inner dynamic of capitalism itself, as does Klare. Klare affirms (again echoing Gorz)that centralised government and the energy corporations, with their futurological, technocratic addiction to large-scale planning in the service of economic growth, can only envisage massive investment in nuclear energy as the main alternative to a fossil-fuel economy, and that such an expansion of nuclear energy can only reinforce an ongoing process of anti-democratic centralisation. In the USA, such a programme will meet some obvious obstacles:

Currently, America’s municipalities, counties, and states still exercise considerable control over the issuance of permits for the construction of new nuclear power plants, giving citizens in these jurisdictions considerable opportunity to resist the placement of a reactor “in their backyard.” For decades, this has been one of the leading obstacles to the construction of new reactors in the U.S., along with the costly and time-consuming legal process involved in winning over state legislatures, county boards, and environmental agencies.

But, as Klare points out, the aforementioned prelude is already being written:

The only way to increase reliance on nuclear power, therefore, is to federalize the permit process by shunting local agencies aside and giving federal bureaucrats the unfettered power to issue permits for the construction of new reactors. Unlikely, you say? Well consider this: The Energy Policy Act of 2005 established a significant precedent for the federalization of such authority by depriving state and local officials of their power to approve the placement of natural gas “regasification” plants

Whilst laying the ground for the government’s recent Energy Review, Tony Blair made a point of stating that easing planning requirements for nuclear stations would be a necessary part of any new ‘push for nukes’. As was recently discussed hereabouts, the ‘presumption of development’ in the planning process, in the name of ‘the national interest’, has been receiving all kinds of affirmative treatment recently. With the nuclear option, anti-democratic moves at this level will need to be accompanied by an increasing militarisation of energy infrastructure:

Finally, there’s another danger in the spread of nuclear power: that it will require a systematic increase in state surveillance of everyone even remotely connected with commercial nuclear energy. After all, every uranium enrichment facility, nuclear reactor, and waste storage site — and any of the linkages between them — is a potential source of fissionable materials for terrorists, black-market traffickers, or rogue states like Iran and North Korea. This means, of course, that all of the personnel employed in these facilities, and all their contractors and sub-contractors (and all their families and contacts) will have to be constantly vetted for possible illicit ties and kept under strict, full-time surveillance. The more reactors there are, the more facilities and contractors who will have to be subjected to this sort of oversight — and the more the security staff itself will have to be subjected to ever higher levels of surveillance by state security agencies.

Following the recent fascinating discussion of apocalypticism in a certain subset of the set of all philosophically inclined blogs, one more point: within the monotonic consensus concerning the necessity of economic growth, that ‘this way is the only way’, is perhaps a hidden conviction that understanding action in relation to the present is the only way to give it meaning. The speeding up of economic decisions, legislative proposals, and the construction of military strategies suggests that there is nothing envisaged beyond the present (certainly nothing like the space of progress provided by a political programme) against which the significance of action could be assessed. There is nothing more comical in current UK political discourse than Blair’s repeated references to our ‘duties to future generations’ – and not just because this phrase often appears in speeches where he proclaims the ‘need’ for nuclear power (the comedic resonance here like that which accompanies libertarians talking about wealth-creation being the only reliable means of fulfilling said duties).

Heidegger’s idea that humans are beings for whom all meaning comes from their future-orientation has been undergoing a sustained socio-economic assault for a long time, intensified by the new political logic of security and emergency. With the rise of managerialist politics through the latter stages of the Cold War came the wholesale evacuation of the future, even more so than under the shadow of nuclear destruction: to imagine, in the current context, that policy could be built on an actual connection with an envisaged world-to-come is next to impossible. This breaking off of any ethical and political relationship to the future is a major force driving the spreading acceptance of the prisoners’ dilemma Klare describes.