Читать книгу Late Capitalist Fascism - Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen - Страница 8

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 Fascism never really went away but continued in the margins of the national democratic societies, in prisons, in ghettoes and, later, in migrant camps, and of course continued full-scale in the former colonies. We can think of it as a kind of slow violence, a violence that is out of view or not deemed to be of central importance to an analysis of a political situation or an era.¹⁴ Anti-colonialists such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon and revolutionary prisoners such as Jackson knew well that fascism never went away and is constitutive for the ‘post-colonial’ world.¹⁵ Excessive violence is used not merely as a last resort but as a normalized, even mundane facet of the reproduction of the social hierarchy, of capitalist accumulation. Fascism is a ghost in the machine, the machine being capitalism. As Jackson wrote: ‘We will never have a complete definition of fascism, because it is in constant motion, showing a new face to fit any particular set of problems that arise to threaten the predominance of the traditionalist, capitalist ruling class.’¹⁶

Let’s be clear: there is not a radical break between fascism and democratic states. We know that not only is the state founded on its exception from the law, it actively employs extra-legal measures whenever there’s a crisis.¹⁷ In a situation of crisis the state goes outside the law it has itself created and upholds; it imposes a state of exception in order to re-create order. The War on Terror was an example of such a crisis situation: the sovereign, George W. Bush, introduced a series of ‘anti-terror’ decrees that curtailed public and private freedoms, procedure took precedence over law and exception became the rule. The Patriot Act and the Military Order made it possible for the US army to detain people who were suspected of terrorist activity for an unspecified period of time, completely revoking these persons’ legal status.

Trump inherited a gigantic imperial war machine, a carceral infrastructure of enormous proportions and a racist police force armed with military equipment. He heightened the repressive and exclusionary politics that are integral to the US empire abroad and at home. But he did not in any way misuse his executive powers. He was just using them in the way they were actually supposed to be used. Trump trespassing on democracy and the constitutional state is just Trump doing what he is supposed to do as sovereign and US president. It was telling that, when Trump in 2020, against the expressed wish of local governors, decided to employ his own storm troopers, it was a combination of neo-Nazi militias and the Border Patrol, which he had flown in. And the Border Patrol was merely doing what it has in fact been doing for more than a century at the border and what the US army has been doing all over the world since the Tagalog Insurgency in the Philippines in the early twentieth century.¹⁸

A Biden presidency will not be a departure from this. Obama increased the number of deportations and launched ten times more drone strikes than Bush. It will be a relief to be rid of Trump and his rambling tweets that explicitly gestured to fascist militias. But Biden will no doubt do his part to expand the mass incarceration and imperialism that is the core of the US state. One or two stimulus packages will not change that.

This book is not only about the extreme right and fascism but also about a crisis-ridden capitalist society that tends towards adopting more and more authoritarian solutions that will inevitably bring more chaos. The decomposition of the national democratic political system has opened the door to the new fascism, which is not only visible in outrageously fear-mongering xenophobic political leaders like Trump, Bolsonaro, Orbán, Salvini and Le Pen. It is also becoming a permanent marker of the ‘extreme centre’ that is trying to keep up with the fascist parties and their ability to address the economic crisis directly, although displacing the cause by scapegoating migrants, Muslims, communists, Jews – in short, the dangerous other. Because fascism today is not isolated in specific fascist parties but is spread out in everyday culture and has become an almost obligatory part of the functioning of the nation state, any attempt to oppose this formation has to combine anti-fascism with anti-capitalism and a critique of the nation state. Critiquing fascism means attacking the authoritarian and racist turn of late capitalism with a possible view to superseding the money economy and the state form. Anti-fascism has to be radical in the sense of going to the roots of the problem: true anti-fascism implies a radical critique of the present order of things.

For a brief period in the second half of the twentieth century the ruling class in the West was able to persuade a large part of the local working class to let go of any revolutionary pretensions, all the while intervening in former colonies, brutally destroying the decolonial movement. Sweet talking the local working class through jobs, culture and commodities and killing revolutionaries in the former colonies went hand in hand. It is this geography of welfare in ‘the North’ and violence in ‘the South’ that is being remade. The two worlds were obviously intimately connected all the way through. But, for a brief period, it seemed as if the violence of the capitalist state was waning or was being replaced by something different, something more subtle. Deleuze’s control society was an analysis of this shift where power was internalized and the institutions of disciplinary society dissolved.¹⁹ Deleuze of course knew this was not the case: the brutal crackdown on the 77 movement in Italy and the fate of the black revolutionaries in the US had shown that the ‘anarchic’ violence of the state had not gone away. It is important not to isolate the post-Second World War era in the North but to see how it has been part of a brutal fascist geography of violence and counter-insurgency. When the economic foundations of the Fordist class compromise disappeared, fascism returned to the North. For a period in the second part of the twentieth century the fascist zone was reserved for the most rebellious subjects, and most people could dissent and protest as they saw fit. This is no longer the case. The repressive side of the capitalist state has returned.

Deleuze was hugely inspired by George Jackson, who was very clear about the connection between a local US fascism that locked up or simply shot blacks and the imperialist US military abroad in places such as Vietnam. They were two aspects of the same state that allowed protests and a certain level of freedom to white people in the US but killed militant African Americans and rebellious Vietnamese. There’s no way to separate the two; it was the same capitalist state which gave local (white) workers jobs and killed the revolutionaries in the ghettos and in the jungle.

This book has two parts. Chapter 1 outlines the various crises that have laid the groundwork for the growth of fascism. It attempts to historicize and contextualize the re-emergence of fascism as an outcome of a longer political economic development characterized by a shrinking economy and a hollowing out of the political system. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to an already credit-inflated economy, and the subsequent political mishandling accelerated what was by then a quite advanced delegitimation of politics as we know it. The political hegemony of neoliberal global capitalism is in tatters and the bourgeoisie has a hard time agreeing on a new course. Because racism and ultra-nationalism have proved themselves to be the only means with which it is possible to uphold electoral politics, fascist parties are gaining ground everywhere. Together this constitutes what the historian of fascism Geoff Eley calls a ‘fascism-producing crisis’.²⁰

Chapter 2 is an analysis of late capitalist fascism. I argue that fascism is not merely a question of political parties and fascist leaders but also something broader – a lived reality and an unfolding process. My analysis therefore takes the contradictory realm of everyday life into account in trying to dissect the ‘intensely superstructural’ character of late capitalist fascism.²¹ Late capitalist fascism is a violent yearning for the return of everything and everyone to their proper, ‘natural’ place, the denunciation and removal of migrants, Muslims and communists who threaten the ‘natural order’. There exists an ‘original’ community. And that community is in danger and needs protecting. The leader has to step up and impose order. This is still the fascist myth. But today this myth circulates through online communities in an infantilized public sphere where politics and entertainment are indistinguishable. In the society of the spectacle, incoherent fantasies of decline and dangerous conspiracies flourish, uniting political leaders and high-school killers and a scared networked population.

I consider late capitalist fascism as an index of the myriad ways that economics, politics and ideology become intertwined at the ‘cultural’ level. I refuse the mechanistic Marxist scheme of interpretation that seeks ‘first’ causes in the economic realm. When people shout racist insults or spit on refugees from highway bridges (as occurred in Denmark in 2015, during the so-called European Migration Crisis when Syrian refugees walked on highways, trying to reach Sweden), they are not simply acting out their distressed economic situation. The white workers’ ideology that all too easily feeds into late capitalist fascism is not merely a reflection of false consciousness. The challenge is to analyse late capitalist fascism as the complex cultural phenomenon it is and try to understand how it produces forms of subjectivity adequate to itself.

An effective anti-fascism has to take the form of radical social change. Only insofar as anti-fascism is embedded in a radical anti-capitalist stance will it be possible to engage in the necessary critique of national democracy’s immanent politics of exclusion. The only anti-fascism capable of confronting contemporary networked fascism is an offensive one that highlights the contradictory function of fascism in a crisis-ridden capitalist society.