I recently received from a friend a link to an article in the UK Guardian on the rise of the AFD (the Alternative For Germany) in Germany. Reading this got me thinking about what explains the rise of fascism in the world today, especially in relation to reading and podcast-listening I’ve been doing of the books “Hayek’s Bastards” and “Crack-Up Capitalism” by Quinn Slobodian.
I highly recommend these two books in trying to understand the development in intellectual and academic right-wing libertarian, neo-liberal/capitalist circles of significant trends politically and ideologically that I think underly the rise of modern fascism in the world in the context of a deepening capitalist crisis.
There’s much more I want to understand on these topics, including about the links of these schools of thought to Trumpian and other fascist trends worldwide, as well as the connections to the current contradictions confronting international capital. But I offer here some initial thoughts based on reading and listening to the above, as well as other current podcast interviews with Slobodian.
It’s unbelievable and unimaginable, at least in a sense, that fascism could be arising again in Germany given the experience and horrors of Nazism. But I think digging deeper into the roots of capitalism and its current deepening crisis and trying to understand why it’s happening, etc., one can see some of the underlying reasons for this.
Capitalism thrusts forward a trend or section of the ruling classes, especially when in crisis, that sees fascism as the best solution for its contradictions.
Some Features of Trumpian Fascist Capitalism and It’s “Ideological” Roots
Here in the U.S, this trend is connected with the desires of a powerful section of the elites over decades to remake the social contract completely and do away with state-sponsored social welfare, which they see as no better than, or essentially different than socialism. It also combines with the twisted historic roots in the “American experience” of slavery, genocide of native peoples, settler-colonialism, and in general white supremacy and right wing Christian nationalism.
At this moment in time, it also connects to the ascendance and rising to power of a particular peculiarly twisted lunatic to leadership of these fascistic elements. The last mentioned, an extremely depraved and increasingly demented and desperate pathological narcissist who’s managed to capture the longings of the most backward sections of American life for a “return to the old days”, even as the fascists grouped around him have no intention of even fulfilling those wishes, reactionary as they are.
The fascist base hold views of a harkening back to a simpler, less “complicated” life, and a traditional morality guided by Biblical obscurantism, white supremacy, and men dominating women. Also, a deep- seated , but largely created and fostered fear of urban life and the imagined dangers of encountering a changing racial demographic.
But underlying these reactionary views, some of which various of the fascist capitalists in power have to varying degrees belief in, or at least use for themselves, the actual material goal of the most “far-sighted” (if one could call them that) of these representatives of capitalist fascism is to create an ultimately unachievable vision for the capitalist “makers”-(as they see themselves and their allies)- of unchallenged supremacy, including U.S. supremacy over the world.
The most “ideologically driven” individuals among these elements envision a new capitalist order without hindrance of democracy, environmental protections, labor law, social programs, or civil rights. In short, a new “paradise” of unbridled capital expansion not hindered by the limits or “niceties” of traditional bourgeois democracy.
An order is imagined where all human relations are defined by what one owns, what one controls, and what one can force or compel others to do. An order where no necessity exists for the “makers” to give anything to, or provide for those without property or capital-the “takers”, as they are seen, who have not been able to themselves accumulate the capital needed to provide the necessities of life including food, shelter and healthcare. An order, where capital relations- one’s relation to or ownership of capital- defines all human relations, and where might openly and unapologetically trumps right.
Mixed in here too and underpinning much of this view ideologically, (as the Slobodian book “Hayek’s Bastards” brings out), are views that capitalist relations are the highest form of social order. And that these relations are ordained by human nature, the apotheosis which is only concentrated in white European “civilization”, and can’t be created by other, essentially less than human, non-white, non-European cultures.
One can see how from these worldviews spring Trump’s despicable comments on people from Somalia being “garbage”; his view of poor countries as “shitholes”; the fascist Gestapo kidnapping, mass incarceration and deportation by ICE and related police agencies of immigrants and assaults on anyone with brown skin; the Trumpian/Steven Miller directed attempts to strip birthright citizenship in the U.S. from children of immigrants and reverse naturalized citizenship for others; the Trumpian advice to European societies to rid themselves of immigrants or face their inevitable civilizational downfall; Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson’s promotion of the “civilizational danger” of “great replacement” to America; and the gutting of the federal workforce, SNAP benefits, social programs and scientific research.
There’s a belief among the “intellectual” circles and think tanks that have been fostering these politics over the last decades in the outmoded and anti-scientific social Darwinist, eugenicist views of a century or more ago. But now, “updated” with a desperate attempt to claim support within modern genomic science, the alleged “coding of human behavior” in the genes.
Another component in the economic sphere here, at least in the U.S., is the rise of the capitalist tech industry, and an accompanying cult-like worship of technology-one might say the dream of a data-center driven AI-guided technocratic utopia. Here, the actual real world constraints and limits of natural ecosystems including due to water depletion, carbon production and the resultant failure of climatic conditions supportive of life, and the destruction of interwoven planetary life and ecosystems necessary for human existence are imagined away by the supposed boundless abilities of human tech breakthroughs to supersede them. (As a side note, resistance to the expansion of AI driven data-centers appears to be developing in some areas.)
The rise of Big Tech, as well as the escalating unleashing of fossil fuel, speculative finance capital, cypto and other related “smash and grab” sectors of capital, appear to be key economic features of what one might called Trumpian fascist capitalism in the U.S.
Together these features and their impact on nature and humanity may be seen as a particularly extreme concentration of Marx’s 19th century insight that “Modern bourgeois society with its relations of production, of exchange, and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.”
Given especially the stakes of the climate and biodiversity crises on our planet today, the current form of rule could be rightly seen as the ascendance of a society hell-bent on self-annihilation.
These sectors and the culture generated in the Trumpian power centers are gleefully unconcerned with worry over their transparent corruption, trading of government largesse, contracts or subsidies for political favors or their investment in personal enterprises of leading officials.
And so for example the Trump pardon of the former Honduran President Hernandez who was convicted in the U.S. of narco-trafficking of tons of cocaine and had ties to the Sina Loa drug cartel after Trump ally Roger Stone urged Trump to do so to “energize” Hernandez’ right wing, Trump-aligned National Party. The pardoning done cynically, at the same moment Trump claims to be targeting Venezuela to prevent narco-trafficking.
Trump also pardoned the billionaire crypto founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao. According to FactCheck.org, Trump claimed “’I don’t know who he is’ and ‘I know nothing about the guy,’ though Zhao’s company assisted in business dealings that benefit World Liberty Financial, the crypto venture run by Trump’s sons, Eric and Donald Jr.”
The Root of the Capital Relation
Marx famously said, “the soul of the capitalist is capital personified”. In this is a concentrated expression of the capitalist mindset as well as the root of current capitalist/fascist aspirations and dreams. The mindset derives from the root of the capital relation-the founding of all products and services as commodities, where human labor power is itself a commodity, and the process of commodity production for profit and exchange that is driven ahead by the inherent drive for capital to accumulation and to outcompete rivals in pursuit of that accumulation.
It’s from this root that unfolds the “flowering” of deepest depravity-whether it be declaring whole people’s non-human and even prosecuting their wholesale genocide, exterminating thousands in a nuclear flash, carpet bombing whole countries, lining up oppressed non-white peoples to be shot en masses before being dumped into a ditch, raping and abusing young girls as if they are meaningless “things” to be used and cast aside as garbage by powerful men, or destroying life on the planet by burning fossil fuels without limit or thought, and annihilating habitat and ecosystems.
From the root of the capital relation flows the real world outcome-from Wounded Knee and the U.S. extermination of Native peoples, to Nazi extermination of the Jews to Israeli-U.S. genocide of the Palestinians. From the Nazi Gestapo, to the ICE Gestapo. From Hiroshima and Nagasaki, to My Lai, Vietnam, and Iraq. From Venezuelan boat strikes to Epstein-Trump child-rapes. From IMF imposed austerity programs, to the cutting of SNAP benefits, the elimination of health care subsidies and programs to feed children, fight disease and provide medicine to combat AIDS.
In short, a relation and a system that has long since outlived any usefulness or benefit to humanity or planetary life and urgently needs to be uprooted and replaced with a society where humanity and life on the planet can not just survive, but flourish.
For the Planet and Humanity 