The Different Faces of Fascism

On the Fascism of Our Time

Primo Levi, Italian writer and Holocaust survivor. Phot credit: Leonardo Cendamo

Primo Levi used to say that every era has its own fascism. What is the fascism of our time? I define fascism as the socio-political condition of capital concentration which, without democratic control, legitimizes total indifference to the humanity of others. Therefore, fascism is a phenomenon specific to capitalist societies. I’ve been making a distinction between societal fascism (when one social group holds the right of veto over the life of another group) and political fascism (a type of authoritarian regime). Today, I think we are moving towards fascist assemblages in which previously distinct components (cultural, economic, social and political) are combined. The fascism of our time has the following faces: social neo-Darwinism, political religion, the traditional far right, lawfare, acedia individualism. Any of them is compatible with democracy, as long as democracy is not much more than a game of appearances 

Social neo-Darwinism. Neoliberalism, as an economic policy, is a device for concentrating wealth through transfers from the poor and middle classes to the upper classes by reducing the freedoms proposed by liberalism to economic freedom. As a social policy, neoliberalism translates into neo-social Darwinism: sacralization of individual autonomy in parallel with the denial of the conditions for being effectively autonomous, which leads to defending the incapacity of the state to alleviate inequalities of opportunity; glorification of order, security and tranquillity guaranteed by police repression and the mass incarceration of discontents or nonconformists; conversion of wealth and economic power into privileged criteria of human dignity; cooperation and altruism are unnatural; the means are always more contingent and disposable than the ends; the production of death is collateral damage in the struggle for success or power.

Political religion. Nazism, fascism and even Soviet or Chinese communism have been seen by some of their ideologues and opponents as secularized religions. In the sense proposed here, political religion is the conversion of a conventional religious creed into an anti-secularist and anti-pluralist political ideology. This conversion lies in the mobilization of religious belief, faith and ritual to create a community of the elect whose mission is to save humanity from a threatening and imminent apocalypse. This conversion may or may not be associated with ideas of racial superiority or a chosen people, but its vocation is always anti-democratic. When it dominates the state, it tends to turn into a theocracy. Political religion today comes in three main versions: neo-Pentecostalism, Zionism, and radical Islam. 

Although the term is controversial, neo-Pentecostalism was born out of a “charismatic renewal” of Protestantism mainly in the USA and, through their influence, throughout Latin America, particularly since the late 1960s. Being a heterogeneous phenomenon, its dominant manifestations are characterized by the strong emotional investment of believers (trances and glossolalia), idolatry of economic prosperity and individual blame for poverty, corporate conception of churches (the sacred surplus value converted into multinational mega-churches) and active conservative and ultra-conservative political involvement, namely through the creation of religious parties, homophobic and sexist proselytism and the demonization of left-wing policies converted into ghosts of communism, i.e. apocalyptic doom. Financed by ultra-conservative and even far-right organizations, neo-Pentecostalism, while not rejecting democracy, has an instrumentalist conception of it: it accepts it to the extent that it can put it at the service of its “mission”.

Zionism was born as a nationalist Jewish movement (the first Zionist congress was held in Basel in 1897 and its inspirer was Theodore Herzl) with the aim of creating a Jewish state in Palestine where Jews, always persecuted despite (or because of) being the chosen people, could live in security. The original political ideology was predominantly socialist (Labour Zionism) and very much a minority within Judaism, criticized by both the Jewish left (Bundists) and the right (Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox). The Holocaust produced a profound ideological change in Zionism, and the construction of the State of Israel through the expropriation of the Palestinians and everything that has followed up to the present day shows the extent to which Zionism has become a right-wing and extreme right-wing movement and, to that extent, has come to be supported by converging political forces, albeit non-Jewish (Christian Zionism), and with great economic power, especially in the USA. From the horror of the Holocaust to the horror of Gaza, there is a statistical difference that is never decisive in the face of the “sacredness of life”, to use an expression by Hannah Arendt. Ideas of ontological privilege, whether that of the chosen people or the superiority of the Aryan race, when transformed into a political ideology, tend towards “final solutions” for enemies.

Radical or fundamentalist Islam is a version of Islam committed to the rejection of Western culture and the colonialism and imperialism that has conveyed it in the Islamic world from the 15th century (not counting the time of the Crusades) until today. Internally very heterogeneous, it is generally manifested by a profound anti-colonialism, the rejection of secularism and the application of Islamic law (sharia) in both the private and public spheres. Its expansion over the last hundred years stems from the failure of the secular left and nationalist liberal movements, which were seen as complicit in the frustrations of developmentalism, secularism and modernization promoted by Western capitalist countries and Islamic reformism. Radical Islamism is a phenomenon of capitalist societies, as resistance against Western modernity and capitalism, although some of its versions (Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia) coexist with the most predatory forms of capitalism. In its most radical political version, it aspires to be a theocracy that only admits very truncated forms of pluralism and democracy. It is patriarchal and represses Islamic feminism itself.

Traditional far-right. It is heir to the fascism and Nazism of the first half of the 20th century. After the historic defeat of these political regimes, it remained the ideology and practice of small groups, sometimes clandestine, with criminal acts of a racist and xenophobic nature. In the last fifteen years it has expanded remarkably, largely as a result of the crisis of social democracy induced by neoliberalism, the self-(un)regulated globalization of financial capital and the increase in migratory movements. Like fascism and Nazism, the far right has an instrumentalist conception of democracy, which it sees as a means of rising to power. Once in power, it neither exercises it nor relinquishes it democratically, as has been made clear in the cases of Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro. It is nationalist, racist and xenophobic, but it accepts neoliberal globalization, which is why it tends to be financed by big business, just like Hitler.

Lawfare. This face of fascistic authoritarianism is the most recent and is in contradiction with the opposite attempt by conservative governments to limit the independence of the courts (Poland, Hungary, Israel). Since the 1970s, there have been two changes in democratic theory which, in general, have aimed to eliminate the ability of popular sovereignty to put limits on capitalist accumulation. This weakening of democracy may seem strange, given that it was in that decade and the following decade that many countries ended dictatorships and adopted democratic regimes (Portugal, Spain, Greece, Brazil, Argentina, Chile). The truth is that they all had to face two ongoing changes. The first was to eliminate the idea that democracy presupposes economic and social conditions in order to function effectively. Instead, democracy, understood in the less dense liberal version (civic-political rights), became the condition for socio-economic development. The second consisted of a complex and insidious manipulation of the organs of sovereignty in order to free governance from effective democratic control. It took place in two phases. The first consisted of transferring real political power from parliament to the executive, which was considered less vulnerable to popular pressure. The second consisted of transferring real power from the executive to the judiciary, the organ of power most immune to democratic control and pressure. This change has mainly taken the form of “soft coups”, so called because they appear to take place within constitutional frameworks, to remove political forces that are potentially more hostile to neoliberalism from government by judicial means (selective fight against corruption). This change became evident in the coups in Honduras in 2009, Paraguay in 2012, Brazil in 2016, followed by Operation Car Wash. Lawfare, a term of military origin, consists of the aggressive activation of the judicial system, not to achieve justice, but to neutralize political enemies. It usually involves violations of criminal procedural law and uses the media hostile to the government as its main weapon. It is a form of trickle-down fascism.

Acedia individualism. Acedia is a socio-psychological condition of emotional exhaustion, of indifference, of giving up looking for rewarding alternatives beyond the individual body conceived as primordial territory and the small, predictable and comforting world of virtual friendships. The individual-fortress, made up of (un)conscious weakness in the face of a hostile and irreformable world, becomes more permeable to defensive exclusions than to risky inclusions, to a preference for mini-certainties rather than big doubts, to the clarity of hatred against the ambiguity of fraternity. It may seem strange to include a socio-psychological condition among the new faces of fascism when acedia has nothing to do with fascism in the sense adopted here. I fear, however, that this condition, if generalized, will become a fertile recruiting ground for the apparently easy and radical experiments in nonconformism and anti-systemic rupture that the extreme right and fundamentalisms herald. It’s as if the new fascism began in the depths of the human condition to which neoliberal and nature-predatory capitalism subjects individuals. A self-fascism.