Will Capitalism Be The End of Us All?
Identitarian fascism is tied explicitly to the continuation of capitalism, but hides in plain sight behind narratives that disguise its blatant racism & deny the existential nature of the threats humanity faces using bald-faced lies shot through with ignorance clothed as scepticism & reclaiming lost freedoms. The fight against fascism in the 21st century is being lost, & we must do more…
‘It bears terrifying witness to what happened to everyone who got here, and paid the price of the ticket. The price was to become ‘white.’ No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations and vast amount of coercion, before this (America) became a white country.’
James Baldwin; On being white …and other lies, 1984.
Old Orange Donald had a Funny Farm, e-i-e-i-whooooaa! 🎶
On November 4, 1938, FDR said:
‘I dare to say that if American democracy ceased to progress as a living force, seeking night and day by peaceful means to improve the condition of our citizens, the power of Fascism would grow in our country.’
And since January 20, this year, both the U.S. and global economies have been repeatedly hit, taking body blow after body blow applied by Chump’s ill-considered and woefully inept application of tariffs raising the prospect of a trade war between the world’s two biggest economies; the U.S. constitution has come under concerted attack; U.S. foreign policy and international relations have been upended; the U.S. bureaucratic state has been shredded and come under sustained assault; educational establishments have been coerced and threatened using the pretext of antisemitism when the ‘real purpose is to defund, demoralize, and diminish higher education in the U.S.’ such that an American brain drain has already begun in earnest; measures have been taken to re-segregate American society; the American judiciary has been attacked, severely weakening the fundamental pillars of American government; measures have been taken to limit democratic enfranchisement; freedom of the press has been undermined; and attempts have been made to severely curtail First Amendment rights. And all those are pretty much off the top of my head…there are more, but hopefully you take the point! As the wonderful Dana Milbank asks (rhetorically? ironically?), ‘Is there anything that Trump won’t destroy?’
Ermmm. Please Sir! 🤓 I think I know the answer to that one!
No! would be my answer. There is nothing Chump would not destroy!
On Chump’s so-called ‘Liberation Day’ — the day he put a 10% tariff on all goods entering the U.S. and sent every major world economy into a tailspin, Dana commented slyly that it may well turn out to be ‘Liberation Day’ of a different flavour: ‘the day the United States freed itself from economic prosperity and liberated its citizens from their retirement savings.’
American democracy and American freedoms are under concerted and sustained attack by the Chump administration. As FDR warned, American democracy is no longer progressing, but is rather regressing at an alarming rate. The rise of fascism is readily apparent in almost every sector of American life and is becoming more visible, and — given the chaotic, boys own club feel of the Chump administration — in some instances, more risible almost by the hour.
Indeed, the laughably incompetent, and wholly immoral spectacle of the leaked chat group, where Chumpian government officials who (most, but not all in the chat group) call themselves Christians, were discussing airstrikes against the Houthis.
‘But,’ as David Cochran wrote in Commonweal, all it did was provide, ‘a rare glimpse of actual Christians in power making actual decisions about actual warfare,’ and revealing just ‘how little they care about any of it (Christianity, that is). Instead, it exemplified how Christian leaders use empty religious gestures as window dressing for war-making.’
But then, are we really surprised, because I’m not. Joe Biden was fond of talking about his generational family Bible and how he apparently ‘liked to go to Church,’ but that didn’t stop him helping the Israelis — another government replete with ministers who call themselves ‘religious Zionists’ of one stripe or another — to kill tens of thousands of Palestinians in cold blood.
Fervent racism, disguised as religious zealotry, mixed with outright hypocrisy (read Cochran’s post for more on this particular case) have long been welded together in strange and terrible ways; the ultimate absurdity being that studies have shown that such actions rarely, if ever, change the behaviour of the targets. It really is, killing for killings sake, and nothing more!
You can feel Cochran’s pain when he closes his post with this question:
‘It almost makes one wonder: If self-proclaimed Christians act in such manifestly un-Christian ways when deciding who lives and who dies, then what’s the point of Christianity?’
Well…I have no answer for that…and just the fact that it can be posed in all seriousness as a question leaves me saddened about the state of the world we live in.
The great Pakistani thinker, Eqbal Ahmad (1) observed that:
‘All religious systems are made up of discourses which are, more often than not, dialectically linked to each other as in light and darkness, peace and war, evil and goodness. Hence, it is possible to detach and expropriate a part from the whole, divest it of its original context and purpose, and put it to political uses. Such an instrumentalist approach is nearly always absolutist, that is, it entails an absolute assertion of one, generally de-contextualized, aspect of religion and a total disregard of another. The phenomenon distorts religion, debases tradition, and twists the political process wherever it unfolds. The idea of Jihad is a case in point.’
Indeed, he continued, ‘…all variants of contemporary ‘fundamentalism’ reduce complex religious systems and civilizations to one or another version of modern fascism. They are concerned with power not with the soul, with the mobilization of people for political purposes rather than with sharing or alleviating their sufferings and aspirations. Theirs is a very limited and time bound political agenda.’
Such insight and wisdom, and just months before he was taken from us…
And Eqbal would, I’m sure, and perhaps more than most, agree with Umberto Eco that the fight for freedom and liberation are never-ending tasks. And today, that is true nowhere more so than in America; not because it is more endangered, or more at risk than anywhere else, because that would be a patent falsehood; but because it is the United States of America; the richest, most powerful nation the world has ever known. The dark shadow that has engulfed America should concern us all simply because of the immense influence and sway it has over us all, wherever we live.
But the voices of freedom are being extinguished in the U.S. as many Americans stay silent in the face of blatant intimidation, taking the easy route of compliance with Trump’s ever growing authoritarianism, perhaps in hope that it’s all just a passing phase, and that in little over three and half years, it will all be over.
I would suggest that that passive hope is a forlorn one. If, and that’s a big if, America has an election in 2028, then it will likely be highly rigged in the manner of, though not to the same degree, as Russian elections with only one result possible. Provided Trump’s health remains okay, then an unconstitutional third term is the most likely outcome. With highly partisan and corrupt Trump acolytes in charge of every remaining governmental department and resource, the Supreme Court, and the military, any dissenting results would be mercilessly quashed and the offending dissenters likely to be, I would suggest, jailed, deported, or perhaps even worse.
It may be that the mid-terms in 2026 will be the last opportunity to save the creaking institution that is American democracy, such as it is. Time is the key factor here for both parties; Chump may not have enough time to undo and destroy all that he would ultimately wish to, and the Democrats, if they can find the willingness and sufficient vigour, may not have enough time to break their existing structure and rebuild it anew into something approaching a winning format. The remnants of a functioning electoral system may still be enough for Democrats to regain some of the ground they have lost, but they will need a forceful, viable strategy to win back the many hearts and minds they have already lost, and at the moment I see little evidence of the change they so desperately need.
The only man capable of tapping into the fears and growing disenchantment that Trump is sowing, would seem to be young Bernie Sanders! But, the thing is, Bernie has been preaching the same message for years now; the fundamentals haven’t really changed. The problem is, neither have the Democratic party! Which is why young Bernie now runs as an Independent.
So, the Democrats really need to — and forgive the cliche — wake up and smell the coffee, and get back to their roots. They’ve got to ditch their elitist platform and get back in touch with the people of America again. And the man to show them how that’s done is young Bernie. He has a willing and capable advocate in AOC, but the staid, and painfully constipated Democratic hierarchy are too fearful of their progressive messaging and what it might mean for their, Oh! so vital, fundraising efforts. But really, how much worse does it need to be before they actually understand that the people do not get, or want their existing platform?
As Micah Sifry writes in the NYT, in the absence of any leadership or fight back from the Democrats, the people are taking things into their own hands and organising their resistance from the ground up. And if the Democrats are serious about ever winning back the Presidency then I would suggest that it is from the ranks of these pockets of resistance they should be recruiting their next generation of representatives, and stop looking at out of touch Harvard and Yale grads with their million dollar educations. They need workers who will walk the neighbourhoods and talk to the real people about real problems; not drive round and wave at them from behind the tinted windows of their chauffeur-driven limos. Relying on Trump to self-implode, then coming back with the same tired old tropes and the same out of touch faces is just not a winning strategy.
Beyond Bernie and AOC — and to some extent, Cory Booker, who, rather annoyingly ‘capped his heroic (25 hour speech) effort with a volley of texts and emails asking for money.’ As Micah rightly confirms, ‘that’s not how you build a movement!’ — there seems to be little stomach for a fight that will likely pull Democrats into the political gutter to slug it out with the malodorous guttersnipes from the Tramp party…sorry, Chump…oops! Trump Party.
I digress…
Umberto Eco, like many others, saw such times and worse before, and lived through them to pass on his wisdom, observations and warnings. The demise of fascism cannot be taken for granted. It will not go away on its own. If left untreated, it will grow and metastasize like a malignant cancer, and like a cancer, it will eventually kill its host one way or another.
And perhaps we are seeing the first signs of this. New polls by Fox News and AP showing plunging support for Chump’s economic policies, along with a falling approval rating, high disapproval of the indiscriminate nature of immigrant deportations, election losses, Musk’s soaring unpopularity, the rising price of eggs, and growing lawlessness, all indicate things are not looking so sunny for the Florida Orange, whose disgusting and evident display of gloating over the chaos he ensues shows observable and well worn signs of a grating mental illness that would explain much.
And whilst I’m aware that many dismiss allegations of growing fascism today as overblown hyperbole, but I would suggest that refutation comes from a standpoint of ignorance in respect of what late-fascism is, and the many forms it can take. Yet, this is the very reason why recognising the many changing faces of fascism within our societies is so vital in the fight against the swell of right-wing extremism and rising authoritarianism everywhere.
In order to dismiss fascism it is first necessary to see it for what it is. If, one then decides to reject it as a force of consequence today, then at least that is being done from a certain point of knowing and seeing, and that rejection would be either because one sees other causes to explain what we are witnessing in our politics, or because one agrees with one or aspects of the fascist take on things.
For myself, I think our world is in peril. I listen and try to grasp the words and meanings of those who know more, and have seen such things before. Men such as Umberto Eco, who implores us to let this be our motto:
‘Do not forget.’
ʻDoes the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken.ʼ
The rhetorical question posed by Theodor Adorno in respect of post-War fascism; The Meaning of Working Through the Past, 1959 (4).
What fascism is…
Harry Harootunian suggests (3) that the academic twinning of ‘fascism into Marxism, and both Nazism and Soviet Communism into totalitarianism’ as a way of drawing up clearly defined battle lines during the Cold War between the West and the Soviets, had the effect of sweeping fascism under the carpet of Communism, rendering the ‘epoch of fascism’ to a footnote, and vanquished one at that, on the historical stage, to be forgotten and consigned to the musty archives of ideological failure.
In so doing, it deprived many of today’s social and political theorists of the tools to fully weigh and consider post-Cold War regimes and movements in respect of fascism.
In particular, a post-WWII re-classification of capitalist accumulation as part of democratic modernisation theory suppressed understanding of the ‘crucial relationship between capitalist crises and the variety of attempts to resolve them or evade their baneful effects on political society (3).’ The immense social disruption caused by developmental unevenness, for example, was put down to under development rather than the rise in inequality many now, quite rightly, see it for. ‘It was in this context that democracy was identified with market capitalism, as a natural relationship, when before the war they were considered incompatible (3).’
Some thinkers continued to warn us that fascism had not been defeated; had not just — to coin a Leninism — withered away and died. Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, in his last eminent work, ‘The Drowned and the Saved,’ before the apparent tragedy of his suicide, and Theodor Adorno among them, warned that the socio-political conditions that gave rise to fascism continued to exist even after the war.
Emphasising the inherent incompatibility of democracy and capitalism, Adorno wrote (4) that ʻthe economic order, and to a great extent also the economic organization modelled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains things in a state of political immaturity.’
Most people then, still did not recognise their own individuality within the political machine, seeing themselves, and their vote, as subject to ‘a political process;’ their electoral choice, picked from an assortment of political fare on the table, had the effect of negating ‘the autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals (3).’ The individualistic universalism that underpins democracy, and particularly, liberal democracy, was being undermined by appeals to the collectivity. Thus, within the fascist collectivity atomisation on an individual basis was still felt, but many felt unable as individuals to resist the mass appeals and movements, and so got swept along with tide.
Harootunian reminds us that Karl Polanyi, as far back as 1936 (5), had pointed out that the obvious end point of democracy was socialism, and to stymie that possibility, fascism sought to destroy the former before its ‘transubstantiation’ into the latter. Thus, ‘fascist anti-individualism derived from a rationale founded on the belief that capitalism and democracy were incompatible (3),’ thereby facilitating the destruction of democracy before it took hold.
Fascism then became ʻ…condoned as the safeguard of liberal economics through the elimination of a democratic political sphere and the subsequent reorganization of economic lifeʼ — market capitalism — on the template of different branches of industry to become the ʻwhole of society’ (5).
‘For both Mussolini and Hitler, the principle of democratic equality in politics and the principle of private ownership of the means of production in economic life had created the contemporary crisis (that brought them both to power) and underscored the widespread belief that democracyʼs moment had passed (3).’
And whilst that assumption may have gained some traction for a time, democracy had not been totally destroyed, and lived to see another sunrise, but only in the yawning shadow of a volcano of capitalist accumulation that held the destructive power of the fascist lava, bubbling in its magma chamber, unseen, waiting for the right moment to once again spew forth its white hot hatred on to the levelling wrought on the democratic plains.
Thus, for Umberto, Primo and Theodor who all lived through the epoch of fascism, forgetting was just never a consideration or possibility. Indeed, the immense weight of ‘survivors guilt’ is often suggested as the reason for Levi’s tragic ‘fall,’ that was, rightly or wrongly, called a suicide by the coroner.
For those of us who came shortly afterwards, but who have only ever read about, or tried to understand that epoch from books or newsreels, our comprehension of the tragedies was always limited by the sources we read, and the strength of our own imaginations. One cannot forget what one never knew!
For today’s Gen- Z, relating and comprehending such events almost a century after they occurred, and in 280 characters or less is an exercise in futility. Why read a book when I can find out all I need to know by asking Google and reading the three line search result? Fascism is just another dirty, historical word from the era of Hitler and Stalin, to be bandied about and thrown around inconsequentially online without ever grasping what it truly means, only to be dismissed as online hyperbole and trolling.
Indeed, this lack of remembering is what fascist modernists rely on; the fascist myth, though seemingly rooted in the past, is merely a reconfiguration the past for tactical and strategic gain in the present. Therefore, where there remains a gap or a hiatus in the memory, fascists look to fill that void with a reconfigured past that fits the narrative in the present. Thus, America/Germany/France/Britain can be great again, if we go back to a time when the country was white, and immigrants of other persuasions were not allowed in.
In Israel a similar myth is perpetuated by portraying the indigenous Palestinians as interlopers in their own land; a land that had been designated as Jewish by God. In either case, the mythical past as viewed from the present authorises the use of terrible societal violence to regain a past that never was.
Today then, our inability to remember, rather than to passively forget, continues to fuel the rise of alt- and extreme right everywhere. Fascism has crept back into our lives, disguised in various despicable forms; racism, misogyny, ultra-masculinity, Traditionalism, patriarchy, nationalism, ethnonationalism, white supremacy, racial capitalism, elitism, antisemitism, Islamophobia, settler colonialism, soaring economic inequality, and many more, and all while we debate, discuss, deliberate and try to determine what, who, and where fascism and fascists do or do not reside today.
Some of these conditions have been ever present, but stilled or quieted by the ideological conflict of the Cold War, and perhaps, at its end, also temporarily blinded by the fleeting moment in the sun provided by the optimism of liberal democracy in the early 1990's.
Arguably, that brief ‘end of history’ moment in the sun was clouded out by the momentous events of 11 September, 2001, and the brutality of the American response. The war on terror, and its continuing consequences effectively unshackled all the latent fascisms that had been lurking, grumbling in its magma chamber, the giveaway smoke masked by the ideological mists of the Cold War.
The transgressive lawlessness of both camps in the war on terror changed the political and cultural landscape beyond recognition. Yet remarkably, both bin Laden and George Bush drew ‘from an ideologically rationalized economic infrastructure’ founded in neoliberalism, that saw both leaders ‘transnationalize their respective militaries, not only to gather more allies by crossing borders but also to propagate an internationalist rhetoric that distract(ed) attention from each camp’s exploitation of the masses economically, politically, religiously, and physically (6).’
What united Bush and bin Laden in their divergent aims were, ‘mirror strategies of imperial power politics.’ Agathangelou and Ling (6) suggests that American assumptions of their own national security and national wealth crumbled in the attack on 9/11. ‘How could the world’s richest, most heavily armed state have been so vulnerable?’
Bin Laden had effectively breached America’s proud self-image, that of its globally dominant masculinity. By challenging America’s masculinity in such a shockingly violent and destructive manner, bin Laden effectively broke through the nations patriarchal dam, which, as Cara Daggett insists, was to be resisted at any cost.
And so it was.
For bin Laden the fight was the historic revitalisation of the struggle against colonialism, while for Bush it was imperialistic colonialism renewed. For one, it took the form of a ‘global jihad,’ and for the other it was a ‘global war on terror.’ In both instances heinous crimes were justified using civilisational and religious symbolisms to ensure their respective desires for security based on the politics of neoliberal globalisation and the brutality of transnational violence to inflict insecurities onto their enemy(s), both real and imagined (6).
Both the jihad and the war on terror were funded using neoliberal capitalist means and methods, but both sides blurred the desire for security with need for neoliberal wealth and capitalist accumulation to commit their respective forms of violence; in effect, ‘the one (came) to mean the other, regardless of the outcome (6).’
The subsequent waves of displaced persons and refugees turbo-charged the rise of alt- and extreme right movements across the globe, but most particularly in Europe and the U.S..
Building on a far-right trend to demonise the non-white ‘immigrant’ arguably begun by Jean-Marie Le Pen in the first decade of this century. Andreas Malm asserts that Le Pen had revived the fascist patient from its Cold War induced coma by ‘revamping ethnonationalism and directing political energies towards immigration’ as the fundamental issue facing the white West today (7), a torch taken up by right-wing parties everywhere as the victims of the West’s war on terror multiplied exponentially, and washed up on Europe’s shores in ever greater numbers.
The myth of Muslim replacement was gaining traction…
Indeed, as if to emphasise the point, we had the absurd spectacle last week of Netanyahu and Orban declaring a ‘spring of the Right,’ with Netanyahu claiming that Israel and Hungary are fighting the same battle ‘for the future of our common civilization. Our Judeo-Christian civilization, Western civilization as we understand it, it’s under assault right now from one powerful corner and that is radical Islam.’
The supposed threat posed by illegal migration from two countries that have never been at risk from from the waves of Muslim refugees caused by the war on terror, and the subsequent civil and sectarian conflicts that arose as a result of the chaos, is not just stretching the truth, it is utter fabrication. Both Orban and Netanyahu have always had a tenuous, highly strained and largely imperfect relationship with the truth over the years, and neither have ever been given any reason to change that by their respective electorates.
Having already resigned from the ICC so the fugitive war criminal Netanyahu would feel safe visiting Hungary, Liza Rozovsky writes the leaders asserted ‘this is a spring that heralds a global renunciation of universal justice, liberalism, and individual rights in favor of retreating behind the walls of nationalism and patriarchy.’
Perhaps such joint statements would not appear so absurd were it not the high levels of antisemitism in Hungary. In Mid-2023, The Times of Israel reported on an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) survey conducted across 11 countries in Europe, that found that Hungary had the highest rates with almost 40% of respondents passing the threshold of expressing ‘antisemitic attitudes,’ with those rates being ‘higher on the political right than the political left.’
The ironic irrationality of turning a blind eye to the racist mindset that gave rise to the tragic genocidal history of one’s people in order to gain support for and promulgate a similar racist ideology that promotes the validity of committing another genocide on a second people by the original victims is not lost on me.
The irony aside, Andreas Malm (7) cites the work of Michelle Hale Williams (I am unable to access her work where I live sadly, so I cannot quote directly) conceptualised immigration as the ‘funnel issue’ of today’s far-right; the problem through which all other must pass, en route to becoming a link in the chain of fascist solutions to the problems of the world.
Thus, unemployment is a symptom of immigration and would come to an end with the eviction of all non-whites. ‘The same with rampant crime; sexual violence, segregation, poverty, anomie and decay and any other malady society suffers from (7).’ So, any matter whatsoever, must pass through the funnel of immigration, even with issues that are deemed to be ‘non-issues,’ such the climate hoax.
Here once again we see the hand of Le Pen at work; climate change he asserted in 2007 was a ‘scam;’ ‘a ‘catastrophism’ and ‘crime’ contrived by socialists and environmentalists to increase taxes and, more importantly, open the borders further still. The buzz around climate ‘is meant to justify the reception of an increased number of refugees, since their situation was created by us who over-consume and have contributed to the destruction of the environment of these so-called climate refugees,’’ whether they were climate refugees or not.
Climate change he added, was a ‘conspiracy’ perpetrated against ‘whites’ and developed nations who were being held responsible for all the misery in the world. And then with grim irony Malm writes, ‘the black witch doctor was on his way (7).’
Thus, racism and Islamophobia are the driving forces of today’s fascist movements and parties, and it is through that lens that all other grievances are seen, magnified and distorted.
Fears of a ‘white genocide,’ cultural and religious ‘replacement,’ added to the insecurity and demasculinisation many white males felt they had undergone with the globalisation and liberalisation of society, the emancipation of women from their traditional role, and the ascendance of what they saw as radical leftism, gender politics and cultural Marxism, all coalescing in what the right called the climate hoax.
Where previously the industrial/bread winner masculinities had been hegemonic, they were now finding themselves threatened by the rising tide of migrants, ‘climate change, capitalist crises, and the advances of feminist and anti-racist politics,’ and have responded by politicising masculinity in a way that is best understood as hypermasculinity.
Ernst Bloch saw the inevitable return of fascism’s ‘orgies of cruelty,’ arguably given voice today in the vile treatment of immigrants and migrants all across the developed world from Australia to the U.S.. The hyper-masculine driven, and woefully virulent anti-migrant, anti-immigrant narratives that so disgracefully pockmark our American and European political landscapes with hypocritical scars, the stains of millions of desperate, tortured lives that have resulted from our denial of the overwhelming part our imperialist, colonial political history and wars have wrought on the poorer nations and peoples of the world.
The legacy of our political histories for the post-colonial peoples of the world is one of ethnic cleansing and genocide that continues today, and all from a position of white superiority. Having stripped the colonial nations of all wealth and resources, we then heaped inescapable debt on the newly independent nations to keep them financially dependant on their erstwhile colonial masters. These neo-colonial strategies, and the unavoidable poverty they birth, following decades, sometimes centuries, of wilful social and cultural destruction, merely perpetuate the economic theft and exploitation of generation after generation of black and brown-skinned peoples.
And perhaps most damaging of all, stripped of all ability and resources, the post-colonial nations are left unable to fightback against the devastating effects of ongoing and ever-worsening climate change that they not only had no part in making, but has already left so many with no choice but to flee north for salvation and some sort of life, a situation that will only worsen exponentially over the next few decades if the developed world continues to ignore the consequences of its capitalist greed and criminal over consumption.
‘If the winds of fascism are howling louder at present,’ says Jordy, ‘or seem to be, it is because the demonic tantrums that have long defined the core techniques of American power are being summoned, unmasked and en masse, into the daylight. So we unsurrender hell. Fight demons with demons.’
And to fight back against all that would send our world to where Bloch’s violence and cruelty are the abiding and overriding concerns, we need the same force of ‘desire.’ To counter the fascist demonic desire for violence and destruction, our desire needs to be every bit as forceful, every bit as powerful.
Or, to put it another way, to fight back against the irrationality of fascism in all its many late-forms the rational just won’t cut it. ‘We need desire ,’ insists Jordy, ‘that messy, sometimes un-gentle, self-shattering descent into the underside of reason.’
Because quite simply, fascisms are everywhere, all the time; they are ubiquitous in the irrationality of its many late-forms, of the many and novel ways its practitioners find to hate while presenting the world with a demeanour of calm, yet wholly unreasonable reason. And whilst the U.S. may have been somewhat tardy arriving at this world ending party, Trump is now making up for lost time, and just by virtue of the position of the U.S. economically, politically, and culturally in the world today, there is no doubt that America is now the leading light in all things alt-, extreme-, and fascist-right.
As Bratich explains (11) in reference to the U.S., ‘fascist and reactionary populist forces have undeniably swelled in the US in recent years. To effectively counter fascist movements, we need to understand them beyond their most visible and public expressions.’ And he was writing long before Trump’s recent resurrection and the economic, bureaucratic, and cultural brutality of his renewed America first regime.
The other worldly, upside-down vision of this Trumpian utopia becomes more unreal every day; almost as if I’m living in the nightmare alternate universe of Walter Bishop and Agent Dunham in some grizzly episode of ‘Fringe.’
The dystopia of the Trumpian world is dredging up the ghoulish spectre of Walter Benjamin’s commodity-capitalism in suicidal overdrive; where consumption has become ‘a sadistic perversion of disaster relief,’ that sees the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Gaza and its indigenous peoples as subordinate to the commercialisation and Rivierization of the Middle-East; where ‘drill baby drill,’ as America self-immolates, becomes a metaphor for not just climate scepticism or denial, but civilisational annihilation as the gas-guzzler fetish, with all its incipient nomenclature, prized brands and desirous labels, so that hazardous smoke stacks can be paraded out again to be admired anew; where a billionaire administration is creating the quintessential anti-social nation, with the entire administrative state being put in the hands a few uber-wealthy individuals to administer as their own private fiefdom and further consolidate the theft of America’s wealth and its burgeoning oligarchy; where fawning, gutless tech-magnates, push the collective benefits of the A.I. and super-biased algorithms they own and control, but wield ruthlessly to trample the little guy by offering an illusion of ‘tailored content’ and ‘consumer choice’ on a conveyor belt of endlessly scrolling images of useless, must-have-clap-trap to be desired, stroked and exhibited alongside other useless fetishised clap-trap, whose function in reality is only to further consolidate capital, wealth and power in the hands of the few — as Marx would say, this is ‘capital-in-motion’ — while the masses are fooled into a dead-end of ever diminishing choice, yet conversely, ever expanding consumerism, as something approximating user satisfaction becomes the tainted foil with which the few gain ever increasing control over the many.
And the interpellation of the economics of consumerism is perhaps only matched by the magic of fossil fascism, which hides the truth behind billion dollar lobbies while the wizards of petro-masculinity deny there is a climatic warming trend, and if there is, that man’s activities are behind it, and even if they are, they are likely beneficial, having only a positive impact on humankind.
‘Such is the inverted ABC of what is often referred to as ‘climate scepticism’, but as scholars who study it have pointed out, ‘scepticism’ is an undeservedly generous term. It suggests that proponents are animated by the rational virtue of being sceptical about general assertions, engaged in noble scientific methodology, inclined to ask critical questions and open to unexpected answers. But that is not how they comport themselves. No matter how large the mountains of evidence dumped on them, they stand firm in their beliefs — the antithesis of a rational and scientific disposition. They are no more sceptical about climate change than an incorrigible Holocaust-denier is sceptical about the facticity of the Holocaust. This is so because, at the bottom of their hearts, they are motivated by ‘an abiding faith in industrial science and technology, free enterprise, and those great institutions’ of modern capitalism endangered by the pursuit of climate action. Hence, Peter J. Jacques argues (12), ‘denial’ is the more appropriate term. In the case of the far right, however, another object of faith is superimposed on these institutions. It consists of a racially defined nation powered by fossil fuels (7).’
Toscano (10) writes that, ‘fascism is grounded in a modality of preventive counter-violence, its desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilisational, demographic and existential. The epochal panic about the ‘rising tide of colour’ and the ‘coloured world revolution’ that seeded the rise of fascism after the First World War has morphed (barely) into narratives of replacement, substitution or cultural suicide shared by mass shooters and European prime ministers alike.’
Contemporary fascisms, squeezed through the eye of a racial needle, merge and crystallise into forms of what Toscano calls, ‘border fascism.’ ‘Whether that border be a physical demarcation to be walled and patrolled, or a set of fractal fault lines running through the body politic and multiply marked and policed, there is no circumventing the fact that, as ‘the cycles of capitalism driving both mass migration and repression converge with the climate crisis’ and a racial-civilisational crisis is spliced with scenarios of scarcity and collapse, the extreme and authoritarian right will map its politics of time — and especially its obsession with epochal loss of privilege and purity — onto the space of territory. It will also, like its twentieth-century forebears, seek to gain control over the borders of the body, to patrol the demarcations between genders and sexes (10),’ as we are already seeing in the U.S. with the overturning of ‘Roe’ and an ever-growing number of restrictions on the reproductive freedoms of American women, but more particularly those at the bottom of the economic scale.
Fascism then grows out of a capitalist ethic that cannot do other than create economic inequality, and this inequality is enshrined by the racism that underpins and provides the fascist/fascism with the driving force it needs. Fascism is ‘a politics and a culture of national-social entrenchment, nourished by racism, in a situation of real or anticipated social catastrophe (10),’ just as Chump is creating across so many spheres of American life right now.
‘To people who feel deprived of a clear social identity, Ur-Fascism
says that their only privilege is the most common one, to be born in
the same country. This is the origin of nationalism. Besides, the only
ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies.’Umberto Eco, Ur Fascism, 1995.
Fascism today…
In the broadest sense fascism derives from the many hatreds and dissatisfaction’s of everyday life, and as such can disappear into the fabric of everyday life unseen, as discussed above. Umberto Eco tells us (2) that ‘the term ‘Fascism’ fits everything because it is possible to eliminate one or more aspects from a Fascist regime and it will always be recognisably Fascist. Remove the imperialist dimension from Fascism, and you get Franco or Salazar; remove the colonialist dimension, and you get Balkan Fascism. Add to Italian Fascism a dash of radical anti-Capitalism (which never appealed to Mussolini), and you get Ezra Pound. Add the cult of Celtic mythology and the mysticism of the Grail (completely extraneous to official Fascism), and you get one of the most respected gurus of Fascism, Julius Evola.’
And for many, the thought of fascism at every turn, in every facet, in every, and in all guises is a step too far; it is overkill. A massive exaggeration. An unbelievable, untenable notion; one that invites ridicule and mirth. ‘Where is today’s Hitler?’ they cry. ‘Where are the stormtroopers?’ ‘There is no Mussolini. No Black shirts. No swastikas.’ ‘It’s all overblown rhetoric and liberal hand-wringing; nothing but weak, leftist-panic-making.’
But this is how it sneaks in; hidden behind, and within the ridicule, amid the gruff, puffed up denials, and the inevitable, laughable, inaccurate non-comparisons with Hitler, with the Nazis, with Mussolini, the lack of a totalitising regime, the absence of an emboldened dictator, the dearth of concentration camps.
Fascism, my arse! What are you on about?
There is, of course, no modern day Nazi exemplar. Hitler has not been reborn or reinvented, and neither has Nazism (though, sssshhhh! 🤫 Don’t tell admirers of alt-right high priestess Savitri Devi that). As Toscano explains in his eye-opening book, ‘Late Fascism’ (10). the relationship between ‘historical fascism and contemporary signs of fascisation’ can only be illuminated by allowing the history and the present to interact contrapuntally, and not be confined by the constant, overbearing comparison of epigones to the exemplar(s).
‘In other words,’ says Jack Bratich, ‘if we fixate on the expected characteristics that match other eras, we miss out of perceiving the particularities of the current one (11).’
‘Fiercely, viciously identitarian, fascism also evades exhaustive identification. It repeats but with differences, scavenging the ideologocal terrain for usable materials — not uncommonly from its antagonists on the left. It can flaunt its relativism while trading in absolutes. And for all its Cold War association with the hyper-statist logic of totalitarianism, it breeds its own forms of pluralism and its own visions of freedom. (10)’
For example, J.D. Vance, ‘in his much-discussed speech at the Munich Security Conference during the same trip, the vice president lambasted European leaders not for their foreign but rather their domestic policies, taking them to task for marginalizing far-right movements and squelching free expression.’
And for many he might have a point; this liberalising conundrum is one that liberals have yet to fully solve. But then, in the same breath, this freedom spouting administration turns round and evicts green card carrying students who do just that, and speak their mind; or threaten and coerce institutions who seek to protect their members First Amendment rights for utilising their right to free expression, often in support of those being slaughtered or victimised by other right-wing extremist governments.
Free speech it seems is only free when it tracks the right-wing rails and the reaction to any dissent in this respect highlights the growing Putinization and authoritarianism present in Trump’s America. And while the woefully blatant hypocrisy of Trump’s administration is nothing new, the severity of their reactionary stance against those who express a different point of view, most certainly is.
I digress…
Following Ludwig Wittgenstein, Umberto likens fascist identification and labelling to a game.
‘What happens with the notion of ‘Fascism’ is what happens with the notion of ‘play.’ A game can be competitive or otherwise, it can involve one or more people, it may require some particular skills or none, there may be money at stake or not. Games are a series of diverse activities that reveal only a few ‘family resemblances.’ Let us suppose that there is a series of political groups. Group 1 is characterised by the aspects abc, group 2 by bcd, and so on. 2 is similar to 1 insofar as they have two aspects in common. 3 is similar to 2 and 4 is similar to 3 for the same reason. Note that 3 is also similar to 1 (they share the aspect c). The most curious case is that of 4, obviously similar to 3 and 2 but without any characteristic in common with 1. Nevertheless, because of the uninterrupted series of decreasing similarities between 1 and 4, there remains, by virtue of a sort of illusory transitiveness, a sense of kinship between 4 and 1.’
‘The term ‘Fascism’ fits everything because it is possible to eliminate one or more aspects from a Fascist regime and it will always be recognisably Fascist (2).’
Umberto goes on to list fourteen characteristics of fascism — though given today’s many mutable late-fascisms, I could probably now add one or two more to that number — some of which are more easily recognisable, more accessible than others, and many of which I have discussed in some detail over the last series of posts here, perhaps going back to the the first post in my Trump series, ‘The Second Coming: The Resurrection’.
However, I do not have the space here to discuss these fourteen points in more detail and may return to this in a later post.
Furthermore, Toscano (10) insists that today’s fascisations cannot be understood without understanding the ‘fascisms before fascism’ that accompanied the imperialist, colonising regimes that consolidated the capitalist world-system, a fact alluded to at the time by exemplary’s such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Aimé Césaire, among others, who called out Nazism as being none other than the radical ‘twin’ of imperialism, and as such, was known all too well by the colonial and post-colonial subjects of the non-European world.
And to understand the many faces of, what is now, very late fascism, is to be able to fight back against it. To dismiss, ignore, or shrug away the likelihood of a fascist event, action, meeting, protest, movement having been, or come into being, is to let it slither back into our lives. Or as Umberto says, to let one aspect of fascism in, is to allow a ‘fascist nebula to begin to coagulate (2). ‘
And yet, for my part I wish to stress, the point here is not to convince you, the reader, that fascists are on every street corner waiting to mug us, because they are not. But, if one considers oneself to be in any way, at any level, anti-fascist, then my posts here are to get you to ask yourself to consider the possibility that certain actions, meetings, movements, words, and phrases might in some way have fascist tendencies, leanings or roots. Whether you agree with me or not is not the point — I am merely trying to provoke the awareness that fascism is not only alive and kicking today, it is positively thriving. It is among us whether we choose to see it or not, and that awareness, that ability to recognise, can often be all that is needed to point out and arrest the growing fascisms in our lives.
As Bezos brings the shutters down on free speech at The Washington Post, its motto, ‘Democracy dies in darkness,’ can be prodded to fit today’s rising facsisms; ‘Fascism thrives in ignorance.’
But let’s be clear — antifascism is an active, not a passive stance. Antifascism is not found in chats and muted conversations about the alt-right over a coffee, deploring its violence, its misogyny, its racism, its ‘othering,’ and then passively ignoring those it tears apart because its none of your concern.
Ernst Bloch, Jordy Rosenberg reminds us, wrote in 1935 that ‘the stench of this (fascist) scene is age-old!’ And that was in 1935 — just think about that for a second!
Indeed, it is as old as imperialist capitalism itself, and yet the stench lingers still; antifascism has always been tacit and accepting of fascism’s entrenchment within capitalism because it fits the capitalist, profit-driven narrative we all like to hear and live by.
Max Horkheimer famously said, ‘whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism.’ Nicos Poulantzas offered a potentially useful addendum to this, one which Aimé Césaire would, no doubt, have been proud. He said that ‘strictly speaking, (Horkheimer) is incorrect: it is he who does not wish to discuss imperialism who should stay silent on the subject of fascism.’
For my part, they are both accurate; you cannot have capitalism without imperialism, nor imperialism without capitalism. They are mutually inter-dependant, symbiotic if you will; remove one disgraceful leg and the other will topple disgracefully.
The fact we have chosen for centuries, and continue to choose today, not to see or acknowledge this fact, does not make it any less of a truth. It just makes it an unspoken one.
But why is it unspoken? Why has the truth remained out of reach, and even when it does surface, why is it so vociferously denied?
Because quite simply almost everything in modern life is a product of the capitalist system. It has built, fetishised, and made the crap we fill our lives with to be indispensable to us; the consumer, is unwittingly 100% tied into fascism through capitalism. To acknowledge the inherent truth in capitalism is to destroy our world as we know it. In fact, it is more than this; it is the mutually assured destruction that the world fought against for almost five decades during the Cold War.
But this is not nuclear destruction; this is mutually assured destruction by capitalism as a consequence of runaway climate change. ‘The doctrine at stake — the credo and communion of fossil capital — can most simply be summarised as ‘fossil fuels are good for people (7).’’
And that lie could well be the end of everyone, just as surely as if the world were to be engulfed by nuclear holocaust. Is this why Musk is so busily putting NASA out of business and securing their funding, and has got Trump spouting about Mars, just as Kennedy once did about the moon? Is this the truth of it; that those at the top are prepared to risk our collective future because they see the truth behind the lies they tell us? Is there safety, of some description or other, for the elites, for the billionaire class on Mars, while the rest of us are left to burn here on the earth that they knew all along was being destroyed by their activities? Is the perpetuation of fascist capitalism the only way those in the know can save themselves? The lies, the denials, the business as usual, the drill baby drill, a capitalist necessity for the few in order for them to one day power their one-way trip into space?
This is pure speculation on my part. But even so…could it be…?
Thanks for reading.
- Religion in Politics; Eqbal Ahmad, Dawn, 31 January, 1999.
- How to Spot a Fascist; Umberto Eco, 2020. Translated by Richard Dixon and Alastair McEwan.
- The Future of Fascism; Harry Harootunian, 2006. Radical Philosophy 136, Mar/Apr 2006.
- The Meaning of Working Through the Past; Theodor Adorno. 1959. In Critical Models, translated by Henry Pickford, 1998.
- The Essence of Fascism; Karl Polanyi, 1936. In Christianity and the Social Revolution, edited by K.Polanyi, J. Lewis & D.K.Kitchin, 1936.
- Power, Borders, Security, Wealth: Lessons of Violence and Desire from September 11; Anna M. Agathangelou, L. H. M. Ling, International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 48, no.3 (Sep., 2004).
- White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism; Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective, 2021.
- Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol.I.; Karl Marx, 1867. Translated by Ben Fowkes, Republished 1992.
- Political Power and Social Classes; Nicos Poulantzas, 1978.
- Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis; Alberto Toscano, 2023.
- On Microfascism: Gender, War and Death; Jack Z. Bratich, 2022.
- A General Theory of Climate Denial; Peter J. Jacques, Global Environmental Politics: 12, 2012.
