Late Capitalist Fascism. Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen
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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