Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen - Late Capitalist Fascism

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.

1 1. Ernst Nolte: Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche. Munich: Piper, 1963; Eng. trans. as The Three Faces of Fascism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1965.

2 2. Taking the concept of late capitalism from Ernest Mandel, Theodor W. Adorno and Fredric Jameson. Ernest Mandel: Late Capitalism. London: New Left Books, 1975; Theodor W. Adorno: ‘Late Capitalism or Industrial Society?’, in Meja Misgeld and Nico Stehr (eds), Modern German Sociology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987, pp. 232–47; Fredric Jameson: Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso, 1991.

3 3. Robert Paxton: The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2004, p. 175.

4 4. Jackson continues: ‘We have already discussed the defects of trying to analyze a movement outside of its process and its sequential relationships. You gain only a discolored glimpse of a dead past.’ George Jackson: Blood in My Eye. New York: Random House, 1972, p. 135.

5 5. I thus follow Roger Griffin’s definition of fascism as palingenetic ultra-nationalism. Griffin argues that the rebirth myth was ‘the key definitional component of fascism . . . that in the extreme conditions of interwar Europe endow some variants of nationalism and racism with extraordinary affective and destructive powers, Roger Griffin: Modernism and Fascism: The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007, p. 2. Griffin first developed his definition of generic fascism in The Nature of Fascism. London: Routledge, 1996.

6 6. I stress the counter-revolutionary dimension of fascism following Western Marxists such as Karl Korsch and Walter Benjamin. Fascism blocks and diverts the energies of socio-political revolution, filling the void of an absent or failed revolutionary event. As Benjamin wrote: ‘The masses have a right to changed property relations; fascism seeks to give them expression in keeping these relations unchanged.’ ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’, in The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 41.

7 7. Jean-François Bayart has coined the term national liberalism to describe how liberalism and nationalism go together in the present political-economic order. Globalization and national sovereignty constitute an unstable ideology. Liberalism for the rich and nationalism for the poor. L’impasse national-libérale: globalisation et repli identitaire. Paris: La Découverte, 2017.

8 8. The notion of ‘stabilized animal society’ is developed by Giorgio Cesarano: Manuale di sopravvivenza. Bari: Dedalo, 1974, p. 66. And later put to use by Tiqqun: The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2020, p. 48.

9 9. Jackson: Blood in My Eye, p. 137.

10 10. The best balance sheets of this new phase of class struggle are the books by the Invisible Committee: The Coming Insurrection. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009; To Our Friends. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2015; Now. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2017.

11 11. Unorthodox Marxists such as Walter Benjamin understood this quite early on, but it is largely the work of scholars such as George Mosse who have shown the importance of the cultural dimension of fascism. Mosse: Nazi Culture: Intellectual, Cultural and Social Life in the Third Reich. New York: Schocken Books, 1966.

12 12. Enzo Traverso’s very useful The New Faces of Fascism tends to skip the cultural dimension of the new fascism. The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right. London: Verso, 2019.

13 13. ‘We are being repressed now. Courts that dispense no justice and concentration camps are already in existence. There are more secret police in this country than in all others combined – so many that they constitute a whole new class that has attached itself to the power complex. Repression is here.’ Jackson: Blood in My Eye, pp. 45–6.

14 14. Slow violence is Rob Nixon’s term. He uses it to describe the violence of climate change and other environmental catastrophes. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.

15 15. As Aimé Césaire wrote:And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss. People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: ‘How strange! But never mind – it’s Nazism, it will pass!’ And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had 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.Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000, p. 36.

16 16. Jackson: Blood in My Eye, p. 118.

17 17. See Giorgio Agamben: State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.

18 18. For a good account of the Border Patrol (and the founding myth of the frontier in the US), see Greg Grandin: The End of the Myth: From the Frontier to the Border Wall in the Mind of America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2019.

19 19. Gilles Deleuze: ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October, no. 59 (1992): 3–7.

20 20. Geoff Eley: ‘Fascism Then and Now’, in Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (eds), Socialist Register 2016: The Politics of the Right. London: Merlin Press, 2015, p. 93.

21 21. ‘Intensively superstructural’ is Alberto Toscano’s phrasing in a really good early stab at analysing the new fascist conjuncture. Toscano: ‘Notes on Late Fascism’, 2 April 2017, www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/notes-late-fascism.

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