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Italian corporativismo, corporativism also called corporatism.
The theory and practice of organizing society into “corporations” subordinate to the state. According to corporatist theory, workers and employers would be organized into industrial and professional corporations serving as organs of political representation and controlling to a large extent the persons and activities within their jurisdiction.
However, as the “corporate state” was put into effect in fascist Italy
between World Wars I and II, it reflected the will of the country’s dictator,
Benito Mussolini, rather than the adjusted interests of economic groups.
Although the corporate idea was intimated in the congregationalism of colonial Puritan New England and in mercantilism, its earliest theoretical expression did not appear until after the French Revolution (1789) and was strongest in eastern Germany and Austria. The chief spokesman for this corporatism—or “distributism,” as it was later called in Germany—was Adam Müller, the court philosopher for Prince Klemens Metternich.
Müller’s attacks on French egalitarianism and on the laissez-faire economics of the Scottish political economist Adam Smith were vigorous attempts to find a modern justification for traditional institutions and led him to conceive of a modernized Ständestaat (“class state”), which might claim sovereignty and divine right because it would be organized to regulate production and coordinate class interests.
Although roughly equivalent to the feudal classes.
Its Stände (“estates”) were to operate as guilds, or corporations, each controlling
a specific function of social life. Müller’s theories were buried with Metternich, but
after the end of the 19th century they gained in popularity. In Europe his ideas served movements analogous to guild socialism, which flourished in England and had many features in common with corporatism, though its sources and aims were largely secular.
In France, Germany, Austria, and Italy, supporters of Christian syndicalism revived the theory of corporations in order to combat the revolutionary syndicalists on the one hand and the socialist political parties on the other. The most systematic expositions of the theory were by the Austrian economist Othmar Spann and the Italian leader of Christian democracy Giuseppe Toniolo.
The advent of Italian fascism provided an opportunity to implement the theories of the corporate state. In 1919 Mussolini and his associates in Milan needed the support of the syndicalist wing of the Nationalist Party in order to gain power. Their aim in adopting corporatism—which they viewed as a useful form of social organization that could provide the vehicle for a broad-based and socially harmonious class participation in economic production—was to strengthen Mussolini’s claim to nationalism at the expense of the left wing of the centrist parties and the right wing of the syndicalists.
The practical work of creating Italian fascist syndicates and corporations began immediately after Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922. Italian industrial employers initially refused to cooperate in mixed syndicates or in a single confederation of corporations. A compromise was arranged that called for pairs of syndical confederations in each major field of production, one for employers and one for employees; each pair was to determine the collective labour contracts for all workers and employers in its field. The confederations were to be unified under a ministry of corporations that would have final authority. This so-called constitution for the corporate state was promulgated on April 3, 1926.
The formation of mixed syndical organs or corporations, which was the central aim of the corporative reform, had to wait until 1934, when a decree created 22 corporations—each for a particular field of economic activity (categoria) and each responsible not only for the administration of labour contracts but also for the promotion of the interests of its field in general. At the head of each corporation was a council, on which employers and employees had equal representation.
To coordinate the work of the corporations.
Mussolini’s government created a central cooperative committee,
which turned out in practice to be indistinguishable from the ministry of corporations.
In 1936 the national Council of Corporations met as the successor to the Chamber of Deputies and as Italy’s supreme legislative body. The council was composed of 823 members, 66 of whom represented the Fascist Party; the remainder comprised representatives of the employer and employee confederations, distributed among the 22 corporations.
The creation of this body was heralded as the completion of the legal structure of
the corporate state. However, the system was broken by the onset of World War II.
After the war the governments of many democratic western European countries—e.g., Austria, Norway, and Sweden—developed strong corporatist elements in an attempt to mediate and reduce conflict between businesses and trade unions and to enhance economic growth.
Multiculturalism, the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgment of their differences within a dominant political culture.
That acknowledgment can take the forms of recognition of contributions to the cultural life of the political community as a whole, a demand for special protection under the law for certain cultural groups, or autonomous rights of governance for certain cultures. Multiculturalism is both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and a way of compensating cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination, and oppression.
Most modern democracies comprise members with diverse cultural viewpoints, practices, and contributions. Many minority cultural groups have experienced exclusion or the denigration of their contributions and identities in the past. Multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture.
Multiculturalism as a challenge to traditional liberalism
Multiculturalism stands as a challenge to liberal democracy. In liberal democracies, all citizens should be treated equally under the law by abstracting the common identity of “citizen” from the real social, cultural, political, and economic positions and identities of real members of society. That leads to a tendency to homogenize the collective of citizens and assume a common uni-party political culture that all participate in. However, that abstract view ignores other politically salient features of the identities of political subjects that exceed the category of citizen, such as race, religion, class, and sex.
Although claiming the formal equality of citizens, the liberal democratic view tends to underemphasize ways in which citizens are not in fact equal in society. Rather than embracing the traditional liberal image of the melting pot into which people of different cultures are assimilated into a unified national culture, multiculturalism generally holds the image of a tossed salad to be more appropriate. Although being an integral and recognizable part of the whole, diverse members of society can maintain their particular identities while residing in the collective.
Some more radical multicultural theorists have claimed that some cultural groups need more than recognition to ensure the integrity and maintenance of their distinct identities and contributions. In addition to individual equal rights, some have advocated for special group rights and autonomous governance for certain cultural groups.
Because the continued existence of protected minority cultures ultimately contributes to the good of all and the enrichment of the dominant culture, those theorists have argued that the preservation of cultures that cannot withstand the pressures to assimilate into a dominant culture can be given preference over the usual norm of equal rights for all.
Multiculturalism’s impact on education
Some examples of how multiculturalism has affected the social and political spheres
are found in revisions of curricula, particularly in Europe and North America, and the expansion of the Western literary and other canons that began during the last quarter of the 20th century. Curricula from the elementary to the university levels were revised and expanded to include the contributions of minority and neglected cultural groups. That revision was designed to correct what is perceived to be a falsely Eurocentric perspective that overemphasizes the contributions of white European colonial powers and underemphasizes the contributions made by indigenous people and people of colour.
In addition to that correction, the contributions that cultural groups have made in a variety of fields have been added to curricula to give special recognition for contributions that were previously ignored. The establishment of African American History Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in the United States is an example of the movement. The addition of works by members of minority cultural groups to the canons of literary, historical, philosophical, and artistic works further reflects the desire to recognize and include multicultural contributions to the broader culture as a whole.
Challenges to multiculturalism
There are two primary objections to multiculturalism. One is that multiculturalism privileges the good of certain groups over the common good, thereby potentially eroding the common good in favour of a minority interest. National unity could become impossible if people see themselves as members of ethnic or racial groups rather than as citizens of a common country. The second is that multiculturalism undermines the notion of equal individual rights, thereby weakening the political value of equal treatment.
Equal individual rights could be set aside or deprecated in favor of rights that are possessed by the group.
Multiculturalism raises other questions.
There is the question of which cultures will be recognized. Some theorists have worried that multiculturalism can lead to a competition between cultural groups all vying for recognition and that this will further reinforce the dominance of the dominant culture. Such competition could even lead to a reaction in which the dominant culture sees itself as a beleaguered group in need of recognition and protection. Further, the focus on cultural group identity may reduce the capacity for coalitional political movements that might develop across differences.
Some Marxist and feminist theorists have expressed worry about the dilution of other important differences shared by members of a society that do not necessarily entail a shared culture, such as class and sex, and the resulting neglect of policies that would minimize economic and gender inequalities. A related concern is that actions that celebrate cultural pluralism would be taken because of their popularity but that actions that redress past discrimination would not be taken because of their threat to the dominant group’s status.
Multicultural politics
Multiculturalism is closely associated with identity politics, or political and social movements that have group identity as the basis of their formation and the focus of their political action. Those movements attempt to further the interests of their group members and force issues important to their group members into the public sphere.
However, in contrast to multiculturalism, identity politics is based on the shared identity of participants rather than on a specifically shared culture. However, both identity politics and multiculturalism often have in common the demand for recognition and redress for past inequities.
Multiculturalism raises important questions for citizens, public administrators, and political leaders about balancing recognition for groups with the interests of the entire society. By asking for recognition of and respect for cultural differences, multiculturalism provides one possible response to the question of how to increase the participation of previously oppressed groups. Communist brain wash you against what is right in the world 20 reasons why capitalism is bad for humanity (msn.com)
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