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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: Theory Redux
- Sprache: Englisch
What if fascism didn't disappear at the end of WW II with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini? Even more troubling, what if fascism can no longer be confined to political parties or ultra nationalist politicians but has become something much more diffuse that is spread across our societies as cultural expressions and psychological states?
This is the disturbing thesis developed by Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, who argues that late capitalism has produced hollowed-out and exchangeable subjectivities that provide a breeding ground for a new kind of diffuse, banal fascism. The overt and concentrated fascism of the new fascist parties thrives on the diffuse fascism present in social media and everyday life, where the fear of being left behind and losing out has fuelled resentment towards foreigners and others who are perceived as threats to a national community under siege.
Only by confronting both the overt fascism of parties and politicians and the diffuse fascism of everyday life will we be able to combat fascism effectively and prevent the slide into barbarism.
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Seitenzahl: 142
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Introduction
Notes
1 Late Capitalism as Crisis
The financial crisis
The contradictions of late capitalism
The collapse of politics
All the same
Disorder
Authoritarian capitalism and counter-insurgency
Notes
2 The Fascist Spectacle
Fascist pop politics
False promises everywhere
The leader-brander
Micro-politics
All identities
Online fascism
Marxist hunters and lone wolves
Creeping fascism
The thinness of fascism
Notes
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright
Acknowledgements
Epigraph
Introduction
Begin Reading
End User License Agreement
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Theory Redux seriesSeries editor: Laurent de Sutter
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Late Capitalist Fascism
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
polity
Copyright © Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen 2022
The right of Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2022 by Polity Press
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4745-6
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021938608
The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website:politybooks.com
Acknowledgements
Thanks to J. M. Bernstein, James Day, Carsten Juhl, Esther Leslie, Gene Ray, Dominique Routhier, Katarina Stenbeck and Marcello Tarì. Plus Laurent de Sutter and John Thompson.
The simple fact of being without reply has given to the false an entirely new quality. At a stroke it is truth which has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to the status of pure hypothesis that can never be demonstrated.
Guy Debord
The ultimate aim of fascism is the complete destruction of all revolutionary consciousness.
George Jackson
Introduction
With Trump’s defeat in the presidential election in November 2020, many commentators and people all over the world drew a sigh of relief. In the final months of his presidency more and more politicians, commentators and intellectuals had been forced into asking whether Trump was in fact a fascist. In the pages of magazines such as the New York Review of Books and the New Statesman, scholars debated the pertinence of historical analogies, comparing Trump to interwar fascist leaders such as Mussolini and Hitler. The events of 2020 – the employment of paramilitary troops in Portland, the kidnapping of people protesting against police violence, Trump’s call for right-wing militias to protest against the COVID-19 lockdown and the bizarre storming of the Capitol in early January 2021, but also the racially motivated mishandling of the COVID-19 pandemic that hit African American, indigenous and Latinx populations in the US in particular – raised the spectre of fascism. With militias in the streets and the Border Patrol deployed against the will of governors, it seemed as if yet another feature of 1930s fascist movements could be ticked off. Trump was hitting more and more points on the fascist checklist.
This book will argue that we need to dispense with the checklist, always comparing contemporary politicians and phenomena with fascist politicians and their deeds in the 1930s. Fascism today will necessarily not be identical with the interwar ‘epoch of fascism’.1 The checklist, in fact, prevents us from analysing and combating contemporary fascism. We need to historicize and analyse fascism beyond a narrow Eurocentric focus on interwar fascism with a view to the function of fascist tendencies in contemporary crisis-ridden capitalist society. Fascism is obviously different today. It is still violent ultra-nationalism aimed at preventing an attack on the structure of private property through exclusion of foreigners, but its forms, myths and temporality have changed and been adapted to a different historical situation – what I will call late capitalism.2 As the historian of fascism Robert Paxton writes, we are confronted with ‘an updated fascism’, ‘a functional equivalent’, not an ‘exact repetition’.3 We are not dealing with the mass politics we know from Leni Riefenstahl’s films, jackboots, Sieg Heil salutes or Mussolini addressing a huge crowd in front of the cathedral in Milan. Fascism is different today, the swastika and Sieg Heil salutes have been replaced by MAGA caps, Pepe the Frog memes, boat parades or mandatory pork in public schools. We don’t have Nazi extermination camps but, instead, camps for migrants and prisons where guards kill inmates and take humiliating photos of prisoners. Unless we stop comparing contemporary developments to the period 1922–45, we will not even be able to analyse, never mind resist, contemporary fascism. As the political prisoner and black revolutionary George Jackson wrote: ‘the final definition of fascism is still open.’4
Trying to employ the term ‘fascism’ is risky. I use it to describe an extreme nationalist ideology intent on rebuilding an imagined organic community by excluding foreigners.5 Very few people use the word ‘fascist’ to describe themselves today. It was different in the interwar period. Both Mussolini and Hitler used the term, as did many other local fascist movements, for instance the Iron Guard in Romania. This is not the case nowadays. Very few political parties or groups label themselves fascist, and it has become difficult to describe political phenomena with the designator ‘fascism’. The word’s derogatory sense precedes its analytic usefulness. The interwar fascist regimes, primarily Hitler’s Nazi Germany, the Second World War and, most importantly, the Holocaust effectively transformed fascism from being a political term to being an invective. The Nazi war atrocities singularize fascism as the worst political event imaginable – something that it is inappropriate, even impossible to draw comparisons with, something ‘unrepresentable’. Hence fascism becomes something that happened once in history, in one place: something that (with a little help from Stalin’s Soviet Union) was defeated by the democracy we still live in.
But fascism did not come pre-formed in Italy in 1922, and it took time for it to be theorized. It was not in any way a coherent ideology that was subsequently implemented. Mussolini would always stress the flexible character of fascism, that it could readjust itself to new circumstances and integrate seemingly contradictory elements. Up to a certain point, both Mussolini and Hitler allowed for ideological ambiguity, playing off competing reformist and extremist factions and allying strategically with different sectors of the local capitalist classes. Mussolini’s fascism was preventive, using and mimicking the energy of the contemporaneous communist revolutionary wave, while Hitler’s regime navigated a deep economic crisis and warded off the danger of a working-class revolution. Both regimes safeguarded private property and externalized the alienation and exploitation of capitalist industrialization through the exclusion of Jews and other ‘inferior races’. Both regimes were, essentially, counter-revolutionary.6
Today we see something similar happening. We are living through a political rupture. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to global restructured capital and exposed a forty-year-long underlying economic contraction. We now have governments that seem incapable of dealing with the complex issues of a crisis-ridden capitalist society. That the pandemic did not cause a total collapse was the result not of the world’s states but of the mobilization of the creative collective capacities of populations. The mechanisms for social mobilization and political representation are in ruins. Political decision making has fused with finance capital. It is therefore difficult to be accountable to populations. Ultra-nationalist parties have emerged protesting against a political system that is in crisis and seems unable to get the national economies going. These parties protest against the system by gesturing towards an idea of an ‘original’ ethno-national community that can be remade by targeting people labelled as migrants, Muslims and leftists. These are all enemies of the national community that needs protecting. Class conflicts are translated into (more imagined than real) protests against the political system through racism. Late capitalist fascism is national-liberal rather than national-socialist7 – ‘law and order’ combined with market economy.
After forty years of neoliberal global capitalism, the market and individual initiative rule supreme but, confronted with escalating conflicts and a never-ending crisis, need a strong state capable of repressing the racialized elements of the dangerous classes, migrants, Muslims, Mexicans, Jews, etc. The COVID-19 pandemic is only further aggravating things, damaging the economy and rendering more people unemployed. In order to prevent a real shift in perspective, where people turn away from ‘the stabilized animal society’ – that is, the apparatuses and ways of life that mould our species into an animal that can reproduce only through wage labour and capital – fascism emerges, mobilizing the social forces of a fragmented mass society through aggressive nationalism.8
The new fascist parties are not anti-democratic; they function perfectly within the framework of national democracy addressing the ‘real’ population, animating a hollowed-out political system by hitting out at people not deemed to belong to the national community. This is not a fascist aberration; this is merely fascist parties highlighting a contradiction immanent in national democracies. Contemporary fascism wishes to return to a simpler time, most often the post-war era, and it does not have the swagger of interwar fascism; it is less about colonial expansion than about returning to an imagined previous order.
There are other books that discuss the re-emergence of fascism today, typically in political terms. This book, however, takes a slightly different approach by contextualizing fascism within the political economic history of the last fifty years and by expanding and reworking the notion of fascism, freeing it of the narrowly political focus with which it is primarily used today. This is a Marxist reading of fascism: I stress the relationship between fascism and capitalist accumulation, a crisis-ridden capitalist accumulation.
We have had a prolonged economic crisis for the last forty or fifty years. For a long period, this crisis was masked under enormous amounts of credit and the local modernization of South East Asia. But in 2007–8 the crisis became visible for everybody to see, and since then it has been the ‘new normal’. What started as a financial crisis, but was in fact a longer economic crisis, quickly became both a political and social crisis as governments were unable to readjust their policies and just continued with more of the same – that is, an unstable mix of printing money (to the banks) and implementing austerity. The result has been a further hollowing out of a national democratic system that seems to benefit primarily the interests of business and a small elite. The last ten years have been characterized by the return of a global discontinuous protest movement and the tremendous surge of racist agendas and fascist parties that are capable of breathing new life into electoral procedures. The new fascist parties have stepped in and are upholding the national democratic systems they are allegedly protesting against. Fascism is a protest, a protest against the long slow neoliberal dismantling of the post-Second World War social state, or a certain idea of the world of that time. The fascist leaders conjure an image of that time, a better time, before unemployment, globalization and the emergence of new political subjects that threaten the naturalness of the patriarchal order. Migrants, people of colour, Muslims, Jews, women, sexual minorities and communists are perceived as the causes of a historical and moral decline that the fascist leaders promise to reverse engineer by excluding such unwanted subjects and restoring the original community.
But fascism is also a protest against the protests: as the opening epigraph by George Jackson argues, fascism is a preventive cancellation of the possibility of the emergence of more radical opposition against neoliberal globalization and the capitalism–nation state nexus.9 Fascism blocks the genuine anti-capitalist front we can see in embryonic form in the many protests, riots, multitudes and assemblies that keep taking place in a stop-and-go pattern across the planet.10
The classical Marxist analyses of fascism tend to underestimate its cultural and ideological dimensions, describing it as a plot to save capitalism, as if fascism is the armed wing of capital. But political structure and ideology cannot simply be deduced from the economic system. Ideology plays an important role in the ascension of fascism, the way it is capable of mobilizing and governing, and in order to analyse fascism it is important to look closely at both the ideological crisis that prepares the ground for the emergence of fascist tendencies and the specific character fascism acquires today. Both as a movement and as a regime, fascism has a certain autonomy from the direct control of capitalist interests.11 It is a particular form of reaction, and its aggressive nationalism is related to different, historically specific national economic and political structures, ‘national’ contexts, within a crisis-ridden capitalist economy. That being said, fascism remains incomprehensible unless we analyse the crisis tendencies of late capitalism and its political and cultural ‘effects’.12 Capitalism is a crisis-driven system, and I’ll argue that fascism is the disastrous consequence of the political contradictions of late capitalism. To analyse fascism, we have to start from an understanding of the economic, political and ideological conditions of late capitalism. The analysis has two intertwined dimensions: I will examine both the conditions that make the ascension of fascism possible in the present historical context, scrutinizing late capitalism and the ideological breakdown of neoliberalism, and the contemporary forms of fascism, what fascists are saying and doing today. To arrive at a workable definition of late capitalist fascism I thus combine the analysis of the political-economic conditions of fascism with an investigation of how it travels into the political mainstream today.
This book turns on the concept of late capitalist fascism of which Trump is probably the most obvious expression. But late capitalist fascism is a much broader phenomenon that manifests itself not just in right-wing nationalist politicians but also, and especially, in the field of culture, everyday life and online. It is necessary to distance oneself from the fascist checklist and an understanding of fascism that is too narrowly political. If we understand fascism only as a question of politics and politicians, we will forget that it did not really magically disappear after the defeat of the European fascist regimes in the Second World War but actually lived on in the form of the fascist zones to which the black revolutionary prison activist George Jackson pointed in his analysis of prisons in the US.13
