Over the past three decades, we have witnessed the rise of right-wing populist parties throughout Europe such as Haider’s Freedom Party in Austria, Victor Orbán’s Fidesz Party in Hungary, and the Polish Law and Justice Party. In one of the most disturbing developments, a long-standing taboo in Germany was recently broken with the neo-Nazi Alternative für Deutschland having just joined a coalition government with an FDP premier in the state of Thuringia. Such a development hasn’t been confined to Europe but is a global phenomenon, as evinced, for example, by the electoral triumphs of Narendra Modi in India in 2014 and of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey as early as 2003. There is also, of course, the stunning victory of Donald J. Trump in the November 2016 American presidential election and the triumph of the Leave campaign (from the European Union) led by the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in June of the same year.
But perhaps the most alarming example of this tendency is the recent election of former paratrooper, Jair Bolsonaro, on the basis of 55% of the popular vote as the president of Brazil. The misogynistic, homophobic and racist Brazilian president has expressed admiration for the torturous methods of the Junta that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985—with the qualifier that it wasn’t quite ruthless enough—has threatened the independence of the Brazilian Supreme Court, and has openly declared war on the Brazilian Left. Recalling Mussolini’s similar remarks about Antonio Gramsci, Bolsonaro has pledged that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known simply as “Lula”), the popular former president and leader of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), would “rot in prison.” Bolsonaro has been successful in convincing many Brazilians that a PT victory would have been worse than a return to the worst days of the military dictatorship. If Pinochet’s 1973 coup in Chile inaugurates the first phase of neoliberalism, then Bolsonaro’s can be seen to inaugurate its second, more ruthlessly genocidal phase (Safatle 2018). This claustrophobic, paranoid style of politics is strongly reminiscent of the 1930s.
It would seem, then, that the present historical conjuncture is haunted by the specter of the 1930s, which is to say by the specter of fascism. How is it possible to understand the return of a specter that was thought to have been decisively exorcized in the last century? One obvious way is to suggest that out-of-joint times produce uncanny repetitions. What we see today is the repetition of the so-called moment of Weimar, that is, the return of zombie democracy squeezed, morbidly, between what Gramsci described as “the old world [that] is dying and the new world [that] struggles to be born.” Holocaust historian, Christopher W. Browning, argues that one witnesses several continuities and one significant discontinuity between events in the contemporary US and the Weimar period in Germany. Then, as now, the US is becoming increasingly isolationist. Then, as now, we see an undermining of the institutions of liberal democracy; the part of Paul von Hindenburg, today, is played by Mitch McConnell. “Like Hitler’s conservative allies,” Browning argues, “McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns in their investment in Trump” (Browning 2018). A key discontinuity, according to Browning, between Weimar and our current conjuncture, however, has to do with the fact that it is not likely that we will witness the rise of an organized, disciplined mass-based fascist movement. He foresees, rather, an incremental and subtler “suffocation of democracy,” that is, the rise of what he calls “illiberal democracy” insofar as authoritarian leaders and movements typically make exclusionary-populist appeals to the “demos” or the “people” on the basis of which they seek to subvert the rule of law and constitutionality, yet still participate in elections.
In the main, Browning’s analysis is cogent, particularly in the argument concerning “illiberal democracy.”1 And if we look at the rise of other authoritarian regimes across the globe (from the US to Poland and Hungary), we can clearly see the undermining of checks and balances provided by the judiciary, the free press as well as political dissent on the executive branch of the state. Democracy is threatened, then, not from without but from within (Adorno 2005, 89–104).
What remains, perhaps unsurprisingly, absent in Browning’s liberal account, is an explanation of the social conditions that led to the rise of fascism in the 1930s and how those conditions might be paralleled by those we are witnessing today. Any convincing account of the specter of the 1930s must link it not only to a determinate political crisis of democratic institutions but also to the distinctive socioeconomic crisis, and not just to the crisis of the 1930s but also to the infamous German inflation of 1924–1925. “If you don’t want to talk about capitalism,” as Max Horkheimer famously put it approximately eighty years ago, “then you’d better keep quiet about fascism” (1939).
Fascism always replaces the general principles on which the theories and practices of modern democracies are based—recognition of a diversity of opinions, recourse to electoral procedures to determine a majority, guaranty of the rights of the minority, etc.—with the opposed values of the submission to the requirements of collective discipline and the authority of the supreme leader and his main agents.
Amin’s definition of fascism constitutes an important framework within which to situate the truly global (rather than merely European/Japanese) re-emergence of fascism today. Yet the definition ought to be modified to reflect that contemporary fascism takes aim not at democracy per se but specifically at liberal democracy, insofar as it purports to embody the “general will” of the people or demos.
To summarize the discussion so far: fascism is a militantly antidemocratic way of addressing the crisis of capitalist social relations. Collective identities and cultural traditions are mobilized in such a way as to confront and indeed undermine formal democratic institutions and the rule of law. The precise manner, however, in which these are defined will depend on the diachronic or historical circumstances of a given society as well as its synchronic, which is to say, structural location within global capitalism as a whole. Amin’s framework is particularly helpful insofar as what we confront today, as alluded to above, is a truly globalized rise of the specter of fascism from the US and parts of Latin America, Brazil in particular, to Europe, Turkey, Egypt and India.
An important account of the crisis of interwar German capitalism and its role in creating the conditions for the rise of Nazism can be found in the Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism (1987) by Alfred Sohn-Rethel. The book is based on documents to which the author had access during his time working at the Mitteleuropäischer Wirtschaftstag (MWT). The MWT was a powerful lobby group which included representatives from all of the powerful German industrial firms. Sohn-Rethel shows how German industry was already pushing as early as 1931—two years before the Machtergreifung—for an imperialist policy towards central Europe. It was driven to do so as a result of the contradictions following from the “irrational” process of rationalization and modernization of German industry via a dramatic acceleration of the forces of production (Sohn-Rethel 1987, 22–30). As a result of this, there was a growing contradiction between the cost of production and prices. Essentially, the relative proportion of fixed to variable capital meant that production could not be properly calibrated to fluctuations of demand within the domestic market. The accelerated development of the productive forces placed unbearable pressure on liberal-bourgeois property relations. The tendency, as Sohn-Rethel shows, was towards cartelization and monopoly based on an uneasy alliance of industrial capital and large agricultural producers (Junkers) against the working class and small peasant producers (Bauern) (Sohn-Rethel 1987, 62–66).
Influenced by figures such as Sohn-Rethel as well as by recently returned exiles Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, West German students drew connections between their present—that is, the Bundesrepublik’s role in the US’s neocolonial Viet Nam War—and the Nazi past. What the West German students had sensed in the period 1967–1977, recent historiography would increasingly confirm and emphasize, namely: the connection between fascism and the logic of colonization, in particular, the experience of African colonization and the colonial imaginary of the westward expansion of the US republic in the nineteenth century (Evans 2015; Dunbar-Ortiz 2015; Naranch and Eley 2014). The colonial imagination was also central to Mussolini’s vision of fascism nurtured as it was on the militaristic fantasies of the Futurists. The Italian bombing of Abyssinia was central to the aesthetics of fascism—understood as an exemplary case of the “aestheticizing of politics” (Benjamin 2006, 122)—the spectacle of war, violence and domination.
The locus classicus for an understanding of the crisis tendencies of capitalism and their imperialistic solution is Rosa Luxemburg’s The Accumulation of Capital (2003). Luxemburg’s argument is that in order to solve the problem of the contradiction between mass production and the non-participation of the working class in consumption, capital is driven into non-capitalist regions. Capitalism, in Luxemburg’s view, leads inevitably to imperialism, militarism and war.
As Ansgar Hillach and his collaborators have shown, in his “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility,” Walter Benjamin draws upon Luxemburg’s argument to suggest that, “if the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war.” They continue: “natural” would be “a harmonious balance” of forces in the sense of a realized “right of co-determination [of technology] in the social order” (Hillach et al. 1979, 120). In other words, absent a democratic determination of technology, its development can only culminate in violence. This becomes particularly important in our own period, with the increasing obsolescence of human labor power through the development of digitization, robotics and AI. What we see, in other words, is a contradictory acceleration of the tendencies that Sohn-Rethel already detected in Germany in the 1930s, yet now within the context of the neoliberal form of capitalism.
The imperialist concept of expansion, according to which expansion is an end in itself and not a temporary means, made its appearance in political thought when it had become obvious that one of the most important permanent functions of the nation-state would be expansion of power. The state-employed administrators of violence soon formed a new class within the nations and, although their field of activity was far away from the mother country, wielded an important influence on the body politic at home. (Arendt 1976, 137)
The guillotine, the abattoir, the Fordist factory, and rational administration, along with racism, eugenics, the massacres of the colonial wars and those of World War I had already fashioned the social universe and the mental landscape in which the Final Solution would be conceived and set in motion. All those elements combined to create the technological, ideological, and cultural premises for that Final Solution, by constructing an anthropological context in which Auschwitz became a possibility. These elements lay at the heart of Western civilization and had been deployed in the Europe of industrial capitalism, in the age of classic (sic) liberalism. (Traverso 2003, 151)
…before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it has been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps and trickles from every crack. (Césaire 1972, 3)
If in the 1930s, the specific contradictions resulting from the accelerated development of the productive forces under the aegis of industrial capital constituted a colonizing logic, today such a logic is impelled by the evermore abstract logic of finance (see, for example, Lapavitsas 2013). This is not to say that finance had no role in the imperialism of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as J. A. Hobson (2005) and Lenin (1969) showed. Following them, Giovanni Arrighi sees the expansion of finance as key to neocolonialism in the post-independence period within the developing world (2010). The World Bank’s strategy in the 1980s and 1990s of structural adjustment played a key role in forcibly liberalizing societies in which the state played an important role in the provision of services and a modicum of wealth redistribution (see Prashad 2007).
This empire of finance also entails the politics of debt (Lazzarato 2012, 2014). But the key point here is that, like twentieth century fascism, it also entails the self-colonization of Europe. Hit particularly hard by the reverberations of the global financial crisis that originated in Wall Street (Tooze 2018), leading to a spiralling sovereign debt crisis, Greece was forced to turn to the Troika for bailout funds or risk economic collapse and possible “Grexit.” The Syriza Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras called for a referendum on whether the Greek people would accept brutally harsh conditions or not. On July 5, 2015, the answer was a resounding Oxi! or NO! (61.31–38.39%). But this was simply not acceptable to the Troika. As Merkel’s Finance’s Minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, put it with arrogant candour: “referendum results cannot interfere with economic policy.” What this amounted to, then, was the dictatorship of finance. So, not only was Greece forced, contrary to the popular will, to accept austerity conditions, these conditions were even harsher than those first proposed. In return for successive instalments or “tranches” of bailout funds, the country was forced to comply with the monetization of valuable assets for the creation of an independent fund from which Greek banks could be recapitalized, although, as a Deutsche Bank strategist made clear, this move was less about meaningful recapitalization and more about furthering privatization. The pensionable age was pushed back to 67, and the highest VAT rate (23%) was extended to cover more goods and services. The government was also made to put into place quasi-automatic spending cuts in order to generate a budget surplus. The Troika ruled out restructuring or “hair-cuts” for investors and therefore insisted upon keeping 240 billion euros on the books. The austerity measures also included further liberalization of the labor market as well as energy and financial sectors and a shrinking of the state (Guardian, July 13, 2015). The “violence of financial capital” (Marazzi 2010) at least in Europe can be further witnessed in Emmanuel Macron’s use of extremely heavy-handed policing tactics against the Gilets Jaunes, who are protesting inter alia austerity in the streets of Paris.
While the neoliberal state seeks to present itself as the antithesis of political extremism, such an illusion can scarcely be maintained any longer. Today, we see a kind of mirroring of White supremacist and Islamist forms of terror, on the one hand, and the terror of finance, on the other. The former often takes on the appearance of the theological negation of the worldly, while in fact it is the manifestation of the cold rationality of means and ends; finance takes on the appearance of the cold rationality of means and ends, while in fact embodying what Marx called the “theological subtleties and metaphysical niceties” of the commodity form which, as Walter Benjamin (1996b, 260) suggests, culminates not in the “reform of being but its obliteration.”
Another dimension of contemporary imperialism that involves financial capital, though indirectly in the form of investments in futures markets, is the massive investment in extractivism. If we look specifically at oil, we can discern how it led the development of the global economy, as the post-war “relationship between the American state and US oil companies … already epitomized ‘globalization’” (Panitch and Gindin 2013, 103). The unity of the global market with the circulation of fossil fuels was further cemented by the linking of oil to the US dollar, and the US dollar to the global financial system (see Mitchell 2011, 30).
Such an intertwined system is, obviously, not without its weaknesses and dangers, and the current “carbon bubble” is “the result of an over-valuation of oil, coal and gas reserves held by fossil fuel companies…. [A]t least two-thirds of these reserves will have to remain underground if the world is to meet existing internationally agreed targets to avoid the threshold for ‘dangerous’ climate change. If the agreements hold, these reserves will be in effect unburnable and so worthless – leading to massive market losses” (Carrington 2013). Thus, the financial mechanisms of the global market are closely tied to resource extraction. This dependency of the financial system on future carbon extraction is sometimes described as “locked-in” climate change and highlights the way in which the current struggle for alternatives is as much a struggle over spaces as it is a struggle over times, that is, the contradiction between the market’s inherent “short-termism” and the “long-termism” of the environmental and climate consequences of market-driven fossil fuel production.
And this brings us back to Césaire’s reflection on the deep connection between imperialism and fascism. Just as surplus labor time is extracted by capital from an increasingly internationalized, racialized and precarious workforce, so, too, are resources forcibly extracted from the earth. The accelerated development of capitalism in the twenty-first century—especially in the area of fossil fuels and resource extraction—has taken this fractured metabolic process to and beyond its sustainable limit, depleting non-renewable resources at an alarming rate, damaging the environmental and social lives of communities, contributing greatly to anthropogenic climate change, and reducing biodiversity to the point at which scientists are speaking of unfolding planetary mass extinctions. Modern industrial-capitalist society, in Timothy Mitchell’s words, “was made possible by the development of ways of living that used energy on a new scale .… Thanks to this new social-energetic metabolism, a majority of the population could now be concentrated together without immediate access to agricultural land” (Mitchell 2011, 12–15). This is what John Bellamy Foster and his collaborators have called, following Marx, the “global metabolic rift,” which refers to the “overall break in the human relation to nature arising from an alienated system of capital accumulation without end” (Bellamy Foster et al. 2010, 18).
Profit cannot be realized, as Marx showed, until such time as the circuit of capital is completed, which is to say, until the commodities produced by industry are consumed. Consumption, extraction, and the production of excess carbon dioxide at current levels did not simply arise to satisfy “needs” or “demand”: It was and is driven by the profit motive and the unevenly developed accumulation of staggering wealth. George Monbiot (2012) refers to current practices as “pathological consumption”: Referring to research Annie Leonard did for her film The Story of Stuff, that shows that only 1% of consumer goods remain in use six months after purchase and “manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production”; furthermore, fossil fuel production and the consumption it enables (the two form a feedback loop) contribute to escalating inequality.
Writing in the aftermath of the global student and worker uprising in 1968, Guy Debord (2008), claimed that late capitalism, in which “capital [is] accumulated to the point where it turned into a spectacle,” culminated in a “Sick Planet.” This, in Debord’s view, entailed the mutuality of the destruction of human and natural environments. In this, he anticipates the idea of the Anthropocene—the geological age following the Holocene—referring to the 200-year period following the Industrial Revolution in which the human being, the anthropos, irreversibly transforms the natural environment.
Gitumten Checkpoint, Unceded Wet’suwet’en Territories, Turtle Island (B.C., Canada) Jan 7, 2020.
Photo: Michael Toledano
Extractive states place unbearable pressure on the extant fault lines of formal democratic institutions and processes. As Mitchell notes, “countries that depend upon petroleum resources for a large part of their earnings from exports tend to be less democratic”; indeed, “existing forms of democratic government appear incapable of taking the precautions needed to protect the long-term future of the planet” because “economic calculation” occupies “the space of democratic debate” (Mitchell 2011, 1, 11).
While Amin (2014) draws attention to the explicitly antidemocratic “values of the submission to the requirements of collective discipline and the authority of the supreme leader and his main agents,” he fails to provide an account of how this is possible. Fascism, as Walter Benjamin argued in his influential essay on “the work of art in the age of technological reproducibility”, permitted the masses aesthetic expression, without altering property relations (2006, 121). As his Frankfurt colleagues would show (see, for example, Adorno 1982; Neumann 2017), this expression also had a profoundly social-psychological component: The insecurity generated by fear, anxiety and frustration of the masses in a period of economic turbulence was actively and consciously de-sublimated by fascist movements and turned against the very weakest and most vulnerable members of society. Today, these are racialized others, Muslims, LGBTQ+ communities and the Indigenous peoples.
As I have discussed elsewhere (Gandesha 2018), Theodor W. Adorno argues that the authoritarian mobilization against democracy emerges from within its interstices and is facilitated by the formation of ever more passive, compliant subjects via the structures of liberal democracy under the aegis of a neoliberal form of capitalism.2 The latter sharpens the contradiction between the democratic principle of equality, on the one hand, and the (negative) conception of freedom that underwrites the processes of deregulation, accumulation by dispossession , and privatization, and leads inevitably to the upward redistribution of wealth. The citizen or homo politicus becomes eclipsed by homo economicus, now understood as an “entrepreneur” of herself (Brown 2017). The latter is forced to take more responsibility for her fate yet, at the same time, has fewer resources with which to meaningfully do so. As a result, individuals fall ever more short of what psychoanalysts call their “ego ideals”, or the selves they strive to become, leading in turn to a proliferation of guilt , anxiety, frustration, and anger, which are then mobilized by the Far Right into fear of a given “enemy.”
Fascism essentially cannot be derived from subjective dispositions. The economic order, and to a great extent also the economic organization modeled upon it, now as then renders the majority of people dependent upon conditions beyond their control and thus maintains them in a state of political immaturity.
If they want to live, then no other avenue remains but to adapt, submit themselves to the given conditions; they must negate precisely that autonomous subjectivity to which the idea of democracy appeals; they can preserve themselves only if they renounce their self…The necessity of such adaptation, of identification with the given, the status quo, with power as such, creates the potential for totalitarianism. (Adorno 2005, 98–99)
The idealization and identification with the aggressor can be regarded as a (false) solution to this contradiction.
As is becoming ever clearer today, fascism de-sublimates the death drive. A global order, dominated by the evermore abstract and accelerated operations of finance capital leading to evermore pronounced forms of anxiety and insecurity, produces an “ontological need” (Adorno 2007, 61–96), a need for a connection to concrete, authentic Being. This need is supposedly met in the form of homogenous collective identities. But these entities are many forms of false concretion whose political nature is deeply ambivalent at best, which Moishe Postone (2015) calls a “fetishized form of anti-capitalism,” taking the form of a personalization of the abstract in the form of the enemy: “That is, the sense of the loss of control that people have over their lives (which is real), becomes attributed, not to the abstract structures of capital, which are very difficult to apprehend, but to a Jewish conspiracy.” And what can be detected here in this conspiracy is a fear and hatred of the alien other as such, rather than the fear of a particular other.
If society has so degenerated through necessity and greed that it can now receive the gifts of nature only rapaciously–that it snatches the fruit unripe from the trees in order to sell it most profitably, and is compelled to empty each dish in its determination to have enough–the earth will be impoverished and the land will yield bad harvests.
There are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a “superfluous humanity”. (Mbembe 2017, 3)
If we take as our definition the classic account of fascism as that reactionary mass movement comprised of an alliance between industrial capital and the petty bourgeoisie against the working class and its political organizations in the context of imperialist rivalries and capitalist crises of over-production, then it is far from clear that what we face today can in any straightforward way be described as “fascism” in this sense. Today, after the defeat of organized labor, there’s precious little resistance to dead labor’s drive to extract surplus value from living labor. Such a deathly drive underlies colonization, militarism, xenophobia, and, ultimately, war against human beings, Indigenous peoples, especially in North America, India, and in Brazil, along with the very planet itself. Far from having to confront the revolutionary force of organized labour today, at least not in Europe and North America (Brazil and India evince different logics), today fascism emerges from the phenomenon of accelerated global migration flows resulting from the economic, social and political violence (new forms of primitive accumulation) attendant upon globalization and global climate change. It also responds increasing ontological insecurity of subjects of these states, whose fear in an age of massive, irreversible climate change, is increasingly mobilized against pariah peoples (see Konicz 2018; von Manalastas 2019). Such mobilization is based on the recognition that, under the late form of neoliberalism, the line between the citizen and migrant, parvenu and pariah, in other words, “genuine” and “superfluous” humanity is coming to be increasingly blurred.
Here, it is appropriate to invoke Benjamin’s notion that behind every fascism is a failed revolution (Žižek 2014). If such a “failed revolution” can be understood not simply in the singular but rather as several failed attempts at completing, realizing and transcending the bourgeois revolutions of 1789/1848, then the task of the Left surely must be to consider its future in the light of its own melancholy past. What does this mean? In the context of fascisms that undermine liberal democracy from within, against the backdrop of a combination of ongoing crisis tendencies of the financialized neoliberal order with the looming threat of ecological collapse, rather than adopting a resigned dismissal of liberal democracy, the Left must make significant efforts to distinguish itself from the Far Right’s attack on these very institutions. The Right engages what we could call an abstract negation, a simple cancellation, of the institutions of liberal democracy in the name of “natural” hierarchies of various sorts. In order to avoid “fascist creep” and offer a genuine alternative, the Left must take up a genuinely dialectical politics of determinate negation, which is to say, it must simultaneously cancel and preserve aspects of the very liberal democracy targeted by the Far Right. It must struggle to defend and preserve civil rights and to expand and deepen social rights while critiquing and limiting bourgeois property rights. While cancelling the separation between the political and economic spheres—the very separation between “liberalism” (negative freedom) and “democracy” (equality), which means also urgently rethinking and reconfiguring the vital relationship between economic production and social reproduction (Bhattacharya 2017)—the Left must insist upon a thoroughgoing democratization of society. This means fighting energetically to maintain and deepen rights and freedoms, especially of association, speech and expression, due process, etc., that are profoundly threatened today around the globe and will only continue to be so under the gathering dark clouds of global climate change. Only thus will it be possible to redeem the promise of the free and autonomous life—one that also necessitates a non-dominating relationship with external nature—that inheres within the revolutionary horizon of the modern era.