Will We Ever See Fascism Again?

We republish this article several months after the Nov 2020 elections in the U.s.. Trump is no longer in office, thus putting an terminate to an iv-twelvemonth administration with clear authoritarian tendencies. All the same, the assay Robinson develops here goes far beyond the sole Trump presidency, and helps u.s.a. understand and explain a global tendency, that of far-right political movement emerging all throughout the globe, whether they are or not in power.

Prior to reading this commodity, it seemed important to define what we mean by « fascism » : in the United States and in French republic, the notion doesn't conduct the same historical and symbolic weight. It is ofttimes misleadingly used to delegitimize political personalities, narratives or tendencies contrary to one'south convictions. Ugo Palheta, a French sociologist, reminds united states that "fascism tin can exist traditionally defined every bit an ideology, a movement and a government, all at the same time", and that a "definition allows u.s. to plant a continuity between historical fascism, which developed during the inter-state of war menses, and what we'll phone call here a neofascism, that is to say, the fascism of our time" without "being blind to the differences in context". [1] Continuing as a reactionary project aiming at "regenerating" a fantasized national customs, fascism claims to be a way of challenging the "system": information technology is a greatly contradictory project which combines subversive tendencies confronting an established order, with a sort of ultraconservatism aiming at preserving gender, class and racial hierarchies. William I. Robinson reminds the states that beyond these differences in context, fascism involves "a triangulation of far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist forces in ceremonious society, reactionary political power in the land, and transnational corporate capital, especially speculative finance majuscule, the military–industrial–security complex, and the extractive industries, all 3 of which are in plow dependent on and interwoven with high-tech or digital capital letter." [ii]

A protest sign states : "Wake upward and smell the fascism". Credit : Abhisek Sarda (CC BY 2.0)

"I tin tell you that I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump," warned U.S. president Donald Trump this past March, in defending his contrived annunciation of a national emergency forth the U.S.-United mexican states border. "I have the tough people, but they don't play it tough – until they go to a certain point, and and so it would be very bad."

The threat to utilise state violence confronting opponents should be lost on no ane. The increasing influence around the earth of neo-fascist, authoritarian, and rightwing populist parties and movements, symbolized above all by Trumpism in the United states, has sparked a flurry of fence on whether fascism is over again on the rise.

Fascism, whether in its classical twentieth century form or possible variants of 21st century neo-fascism, is a detail response to capitalist crisis, such every bit that of the 1930s and the one that began with the financial meltdown of 2008.

Global capitalism is facing an organic crisis, involving an intractable structural dimension, that of overaccumulation, and a political dimension, that of legitimacy or hegemony that is approaching a full general crisis of capitalist dominion.

This unprecedented crisis of global capitalism has resulted in a sharp polarization effectually the world between insurgent left and popular forces, on the i hand, and an insurgent far right, on the other, at whose fringe are openly fascist tendencies. The class graphic symbol of fascism remains the aforementioned in the 21st century every bit information technology was in the 20th – a projection to rescue uppercase from this organic crisis – but the item historical character of earth capitalism and of its crisis is substantially different at this time than in the previous century.

The Crisis of Global Capitalism and Global Law State

Capital responded to the structural crisis of the 1970s past going global, which paved the manner for a qualitatively new transnational or global stage of world commercialism characterized by the rise of truly transnational capital and a globally integrated production and financial system. By going global, an emerging transnational capitalist form (TCC) sought to suspension gratuitous of nation-land constraints to profit making and to shift the correlation of class and social forces worldwide in its favor.

Globalization may have resolved the crunch of the 1970s but information technology generated the conditions for a new, and deeper, crisis of overaccumulation in the new century. By freeing capital from nation-state regulation and redistribution, globalization resulted in unprecedented social polarization worldwide. According to OXFAM, in 2015 just one percent of humanity owned over one-half of the world's wealth and the top 20 percent ain 94.5 of that wealth, while the remaining fourscore per centum must make due with just 4.5 percent.

This extreme concentration of the planet's wealth in the hands of the few and the accelerated impoverishment and dispossession of the majority means that the TCC cannot detect productive outlets to unload enormous amounts of surplus it has accumulated. The Great Recession marked the onset of a deep structural crisis of overaccumulation, which refers to accumulated upper-case letter that cannot observe outlets for profitable reinvestment.

Neo-liberal states have turned to several interrelated mechanisms in recent years to sustain aggregating in the confront of stagnation. One is debt-driven growth. A second, closely related, is the reconfiguration of public finance through austerity, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and deficit spending equally governments transfer wealth directly and indirectly from working people to the TCC. A 3rd is an escalation of fiscal speculation. A quaternary has been ongoing waves of investment in the over-valued tech sector, which is now at the cutting edge of capitalist globalization and is driving the digitalization of the entire global economy.

Only none of these mechanisms can resolve the crisis of overaccumulation – and of legitimacy – in the long run. Many among the TCC and their political agents fear that the crisis will atomic number 82 to an uncontrollable defection from below. Unprecedented global inequalities can only be sustained by e'er more repressive and ubiquitous systems of social control and repression. At that place is a convergence around the system'due south political need for social control and its economic need to perpetuate aggregating.

The TCC has caused a vested involvement in war, conflict, and repression as means of accumulation. The global police force state refers to the always more omnipresent systems of mass social control, repression and warfare promoted by the ruling groups to contain the existent and the potential rebellion of the global working class and surplus humanity. But it also refers to how the global economy is itself based more than and more on the development and deployment of these systems of warfare, social command, and repression simply as a means of making profit and continuing to accrue capital letter in the confront of stagnation – what I term militarized accumulation, or accumulation past repression.

The bogus wars on drugs and terrorism, the undeclared wars on immigrants, refugees and gangs (and poor, dark-skinned, and working-grade youth more mostly), the construction of border walls and immigrant detention centers, the spread of prison-industrial complexes, deportation regimes, and the expansion of law, armed services, and other security apparatuses, are major sources of state-organized profit making.

The TCC and land apparatuses at its disposal attempt to resolve both the economic crisis of overaccumulation and to manage the political weather of that crisis, that is, the spread of global defection and the potential – non yet realized – of that global revolt to overthrow the organisation. Hence in that location is a built-in war drive to the current course of capitalist globalization. Historically wars have pulled the capitalist organisation out of crisis while they have likewise served to deflect attention from political tensions and issues of legitimacy.

The global police force state and 21st century fascism are interwoven. The global police state generates weather propitious to the ascendance of fascist projects.

Twentieth and Twenty-Starting time Century Fascism

Fascism in the 20th century involved the fusion of reactionary political power with national uppercase. By contrast, 21st century fascism involves the fusion of transnational capital letter with reactionary and repressive political power in the land – an expression of the dictatorship of transnational capital letter.

In add-on, the fascist projects that came to power in the 1930s in Deutschland, Italia, and Kingdom of spain, as well as those that vied unsuccessfully to win power elsewhere, had equally a fundamental objective crushing powerful working class and socialist movements. Merely in the United states of america, Europe, and elsewhere, the left and the organized working course are now at a historically weak indicate. In these cases, twentieth century fascism appears to be a preemptive strike at working classes and at the spread of mass resistance through the expansion of a global police force country.

Moreover, the global constabulary state is centrally aimed at coercive exclusion of surplus humanity. The mechanisms of coercive exclusion include mass incarceration and the spread of prison-industrial complexes, pervasive policing, anti-immigrant legislation and deportation regimes, gated communities and ghettos controlled by armies of private security guards and technologically avant-garde surveillance systems, ubiquitous, often paramilitarized policing, "non-lethal" crowd command methods, and mobilization of the civilisation industries and country ideological apparatuses to dehumanize victims of global capitalism every bit dangerous, depraved, and culturally degenerate.

The Social Bases of 21st Century Fascism

The cadre social base of twentieth century fascism was the heart classes and the niggling-bourgeoisie, a pregnant portion of the population that was experiencing a destabilization of their status and the threat of downward mobility into the ranks of the proletariat.

These strata were reduced in the cores of world capitalism to pocket-size pockets as proletarianization accelerated in the latter half of the 20th century and specially in the age of globalization. Twenty-first century fascist projects seek to organize a mass base among historically privileged sectors of the global working class, such equally white workers in the Global Northward and urban middle layers in the Global South, that are experiencing heightened insecurity and the specter of downwardly mobility and socioeconomic destabilization.

Every bit with its 20th century predecessor, the project hinges on the psychosocial mechanism of displacing mass fright and anxiety at a fourth dimension of acute capitalist crisis towards scapegoated communities, such equally immigrant workers, Muslims and refugees in the United States and Europe, southern African immigrants in South Africa, Muslims and lower castes in India, Palestinians in Palestine/Israel, or the darker skinned and disproportionately impoverished population in Brazil.

Far-right forces practice and then through a discursive repertoire of xenophobia, mystifying ideologies, an idealized and mythical past, millennialism, a militaristic and masculinist civilization that normalizes, even glamorizes war, social violence and domination, and a contempt rather than empathy for those most vulnerable. The cardinal to this neo-fascist appeal is the promise to avert or reverse downward mobility and social destabilization; to restore some sense of stability and security.

Twenty-first century fascism, like its 20th century predecessor, is a violently toxic mix of reactionary nationalism and racism. Yet in that location is a critical stardom to be made betwixt the conjuncture of fascist projects in the last century and this century. Fascism in Germany and Italy arose at the tiptop of nation-land capitalism and information technology did offer some cloth benefits – employment and social wages – to a portion of the working grade through corporatist arrangements even as information technology unleashed genocide on those outside the chosen group. In this historic period of globalized capitalism there is little possibility in the The states or elsewhere of providing such benefits, so that the "wages of fascism" at present appear to be entirely psychological.

In the regard, the credo of 21st century fascism rests on irrationality – a promise to deliver security and restore stability that is emotive, not rational. It is a projection that does not and need not distinguish between the truth and the lie. The Trump government's public discourse of populism and nationalism, for example, bore no relation to its actual policies. In its starting time year, Trumponomics involved deregulation – the virtual smashing of the regularly state – slashing social spending, dismantling what remained of the welfare state, privatizations, taxation breaks to corporations and the rich, and an expansion of land subsidies to capital – in short, neo-liberalism on steroids.

In sharp distinction to this fusion of German national capital letter with the fascist country, Trumpism has sought to open up up vast new opportunities for profit making inside the U.s. (and around the globe) for transnational capital. The Trump White House has called for transnational investors from effectually the world to invest in the United States, enticed by a regressive tax reform, unprecedented deregulation, and some express tariff walls that would benefit groups from anywhere in the globe that establish operations behind them.

Finally, an essential condition for 20th and at present for any 21st century fascism is the spread of fascist movements in civil society, as we are seeing effectually the globe, and their fusion at some point with reactionary political power in the state. Twenty-commencement century fascism and global constabulary state involve a triangulation of far-right, authoritarian, and neo-fascist forces in civil club, reactionary and repressive political power in the country, and transnational corporate upper-case letter.

Trumpism and Xx-First Century Fascism

In the U.s.a., fascist movements expanded chop-chop since the plough of the century in ceremonious society and in the political system through the right wing of the Republican Party. Trump proved to be a charismatic figure able to galvanize and embolden disparate neo-fascist forces, from white supremacists, white nationalists, militia, and neo-Nazis and Klans, to the Adjuration Keepers, the Patriot Move, Christian fundamentalists, and anti-immigrant vigilante groups.

During a protest in favor of abolishing ICE, a sign says : "Trump is a fascist". Credit : Charles Edward Miller (CC Past SA 2.0)

These groups began to cantankerous-pollinate to a degree not seen in decades every bit they gained a toehold in the Trump White Business firm and in state and local governments around the country. Paramilitarism spread within many of these organizations and overlapped with state repressive agencies.

Trumpism and other far-correct responses to the crisis of global commercialism are a contradictory attempt to re-establish state legitimacy under the destabilizing conditions of backer globalization.

Nation-states face a contradiction between the need to promote transnational capital aggregating in their territories and their demand to achieve political legitimacy. As a result, states around the world have been experiencing spiraling crises of legitimacy that generate a bewildering and seemingly contradictory politics of crunch management that appears as schizophrenic in the literal sense of conflicting or inconsistent elements.

This schizophrenic crunch direction likewise helps explain the resurgence of far-correct and neo-fascist forces that espouse rhetoric of nationalism and protectionism even as they promote neo-liberalism. In the United States, the TCC is delighted with Trump's neo-liberal policies but divided over his advised, buffoon-like conduct and his neo-fascist political inclinations.

To paraphrase the slap-up Prussian armed forces strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, who famously said that "war is the extension of politics by other means," Trumpism, and to varying degrees other far-correct movements around the world, were the extension of backer globalization past other means, namely by an expanding global police state and a neo-fascist mobilization.

Yet Trump's populism and protectionism has no policy substance; it is almost entirely symbolic – hence the significance of his fanatical "build the wall" rhetoric, symbolically essential to sustain a social base of operations for which the state tin provide little or no material bribe.

There is indeed a mounting backlash against capitalist globalization among the popular and working classes and more than nationally-oriented sectors of the elite, as well as from right-wing populists, equally evidenced in the 2016 Brexit plebiscite and the rise of right-wing populist movements throughout Europe that call for a withdrawal from globalization processes. But neo-fascist groups in civil guild by themselves do not amount to fascism equally a organisation. For fascism to emerge, these groups must fuse with majuscule and the state, notwithstanding the TCC has no interest in economic nationalism.

A fascist effect to the crisis of global capitalism is non inevitable. Whether or not a fascist project manages to ossify is contingent on how the struggle among social and political forces unfolds in the coming years. To fight back against the global police state and 21st century fascism to exist successful, we need to build a united front end against fascism. Simply any strategy of broad anti-fascist alliances must foreground a revitalized critique of global capitalism and its crisis.

mcgonagleanderem.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.ritimo.org/Can-Twenty-First-Century-Fascism-Resolve-the-Crisis-of-Global-Capitalism

Share this post