This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘F’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
It’s impossible to summarize such abroad political philosophy in a paragraph, but… Fascism is a political and economic system where the power of economic capital and a narrow political elite align to bolster their position by promoting a ‘divide and rule’ view of society. Do not think 1930s Germany. Today the Twentieth Century fascism of Spain, Italy, France, and Greece are far better examples of the nature of the this ideology – often characterized as ‘palingenic ultranationalism’ (a call for the ‘recreation’ of a state’s perceived lost past under its dominant ethnic identity, e.g., ‘Make America Great Again’). One of the most accessible academic views of Fascism is provided by Umberto Eco in his essay, ‘Ur Fascism’. Presented as a 14-point check-list many contemporary political events, from Trump to Brexit, correspond to the list of ‘red flags’ in Eco’s essay. Hence, from Neofeudalism, to the immiserating influence of the dominant Neoliberal economic model, many trends within present day society point towards a divergence of elite interests with the Western democratic values of the last century or so – for example, Silicon Valley tech. billionaires such as Peter Thiel.
‘FUD’ is increasingly the key to making the public less certain about the reality of the world they live in, and therefore more likely to listen to manipulated or manufactured views in order to gain their compliance with or, more often, blind acceptance of extreme ideas. FUD is the keystone of much advertising and political messaging, especially the increasing role of negative messaging in politics, and the ‘here comes the science’ kinds of marketing messages. Carl Sagan once said of Medieval Europe that, “superstition is a natural refuge for those who are powerless”. Increasingly FUD operates upon people’s powerlessness in order to deflect criticism away from vested interests, preventing political or economic reforms – the classic example being the ‘tobacco industry playbook’. In the modern, digitally networked world we could replace the word ‘superstition’ with ‘conspiracy theories’.
With its origins in the ‘Global South’, food sovereignty movements seek to restore a direct connect between people and the land in order that they can provide their needs for food, fuel, and raw materials, without being the subject of exploitation through the dominant economic system operated by the state. This idea begins with securing access to land and challenging property rights, encompasses genetic biodiversity and the need to preserve traditional plant varieties, and ends with the promotion of alternative models of low impact agricultural production which might reverse ecological damage – such as Permaculture. As yet, there is not as powerful a movement in the affluent ‘Global North’, although this topic is beginning to be discussed at the fringes of Green and academic forums.
Standing in opposition to mainstream economic production and property rights, ‘free culture’ seeks to establish a non-proprietary, free to share and use alternative to mainstream media and culture. To a certain extent this is happening on-line, albeit it is still subject to control via both hardware and software property rights, and the power of on-line platforms to control and censor. Though developing more slowly off-line – from free festivals, to independent print media, to ‘low-tech’ free engineering or electronics designs made from scrap – there’s a whole movement around creating a truly ‘free’ alternatives to the products and media created by mainstream businesses.
Free and Open Source Systems – FOSS (usually called free and open source software, but we take a broader view) – still rely on intellectual property rights, but they use those rights to protect the information from inclosure by private interests (e.g., The Creative Commons license). ‘Free’ means that the designs, digital information, or software are made available for use, modification, and redistribution of the modified design; ‘open source’ is not completely ‘free’ to redistribute, but the user can look inside and modify their system if required without any penalty. Initially ‘FOSS’ was mainly applied to computer software, but now various forms of licensing are applied to documentation, hardware designs, and digital media. The rise of FOSS mirrors a wider counter-cultural movement against the norms of the modern economic system, to increase protecting privacy, or avoid increasing restrictions upon our use and sharing of goods and services – where the public must continually pay for a license for ongoing use rather than conferring outright ownership of the product (as described by the mantra from the World Economic Forum, ‘You will own nothing and you will be happy’).