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Fun fact: fascism wasn't the first name Mussolini wanted for the Italian political movement of the 1920s-40s. Corporatism was the original name.



"Corporatism" in the context of 1920s Italy meant something different than it does in 2010s America. Specifically, it referred to vertically-integrated sectors of public life, like heavy industry, or schoolteachers, or policemen, or banks.


Also, SOPA was never about fighting piracy, that's just a disguise. SOPA is about dissent suppression. The Internet is exploding into establishment's face, and imagine what will happen when all those people who are now - thanks to the blackout - screaming on Twitter while discovering about SOPA/PIPA for the very first time - what do they do when they learn about the kind of information that's e.g. posted here: http://goo.gl/2RVeB


Hacker News will shorten URLs if necessary to make them fit, so it's not necessary to use URL shorteners (which are discouraged): http://divinecosmos.com/start-here/davids-blog/1023-financia...

Edit to add: Please make a compelling case why I should take the time to read an article that starts with an amusing replacement of the letter A in the headline with a quartet of all-seeing eyes.


Don't let that picture discourage you. Read the first few paragraphs, it doesn't take long.

See, that's why I used URL shortener - if somebody was giving me a link beginning with domain "divinecosmos.com", I'd think they are insane, and skipped that link without even blinking.

However, sometimes, things are not what they seem at the first appearance. I don't think I can or should attempt to really explain it here. Just give the article a try.


I've read a few paragraphs in and so far it sounds like a stock conspiracy theory ("They burned this guy's house down for leaking information, just like they didn't with the WikiLeaks guys"), very much in line with what the logo would suggest.


I meant a few more paragraphs. But yes, it's easy to dismiss the article based on those 2 things alone. Bad choice on author's part.


No it wasn't, that's a lefty myth recently invented. The word "corporatism" didn't exist back then.

Mussolini referred to corporativismo, which he defined as a large number of people working together, not specific to the modern corporation.

You shouldn't relay bad information if you're actually ignorant of Fascist history under Mussolini.


"Corporatism" as a concept has existed since the 19th century (identified by that term) and so did exist in the 1920s for Mussolini. Corporatism has similar aims as corporativismo, which is the Italian for corporatism.


Corporativismo (in the fascist sense) referred to a desire for single-party totalitarian rule in the fusion of state and business power-- the goal that, instead of having separate and potentially competing interests, the elites of all of these sectors should glom together and centralize power.

It's not exactly the same thing in the modern U.S.: in totalitarian corporatism (fascism) the government co-opts private businesses and installs puppets of its elite. That's not what we've seen over the past 30 years. In anarchic corpratism (which is what the American upper class and right wing had in their golden era-- the Gilded Age-- and have been implementing since the late 1970s) it goes the other way: the business elite invades the government and makes it generally powerless to stop them. This form of corporatism is more limited and therefore more benign. "Anarchic corporatism" seems like an oxymoron, but the fundamental idea behind it is that business elites (which need not put up a unified front, as states must do for morale reasons) call the shots, but nonetheless compete. It's "anarchic" in the sense that the government is not supposed to be king-making or impeding specific players.

What we're seeing, amusingly, is that the elite has no real ideology. In 1980, they were predictably conservative and relatively principled, if wrongheaded. They were anarchic corporatists and proud of it. What the Bush, Jr. Era has shown us is that when this elite successfully co-opts the state, these people start to like unlimited state power and intrusion (Patriot Act, SOPA)... even if they say they're for "small government". So anarchic corporatism leads to the totalitarian kind over time; the TL;DR summary of that is "power vacuum".




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