Understanding Fascism Today: Nationalism, Group Psychology, and the Return of the Old

Abstract

This essay attempts to grasp the implications of thinking the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed alongside the Marxian concept of the return of primitive accumulation. By examining the ambivalence of the totemism that results from trauma and then juxtaposing this incipient nationalism with the process of primitive accumulation, the essay attempts to show the inadequacies of traditional understandings of fascism. It not only becomes untenable to reduce fascism to the juridical and political phenomena of a single nation state, it also becomes impossible to deny just how much contemporary liberalism is complicit in the intensification of the fascist social condition. When one accordingly compares the racist and sexist features of the colonial period to those of the postwar period and present historical moment, one is forced to conclude that we are living in the midst of the latest instantiation of an old process.

Key Words:

• Fascism
• Nationalism
• Primitive Accumulation
• Racism
• Return of the Repressed

Notes

1 For further analysis of what is tantamount to the blackmail of playing the politics of respectability—that is, continually claiming one’s innocence before the violence of the juridical and repressive apparatus—see Wang (2018, 260–95).

2 For further consideration of this suppression of a burgeoning leftist populism, especially as it unfolds via the links between traditional conservativism and emerging fascist elements, see Paxton (1998, 1–23).

3 Very little scholarship has attempted to think the relationship between Debord’s conception of the spectacle and the contemporary form of domination under the culture industry. For an exception, see Weiss (2018).

4 For a further look at this socially necessary logic of “personalization,” see Adorno (2017, 122–3).

5 For more on the role of the Democratic Party in implementing the current carceral state, see Hinton (2016).

6 I use the philosophical concept of a “moment” in the Hegelian sense here and throughout this essay. For further understanding of how this concept figures in Hegel’s dialectical understanding of the movement of the totality, see Jameson (2008, 33–42).

7 For further discussion of this psychoanalytic understanding of temporality, especially vis-à-vis the manner in which the mythical past is in reality a retroactive (nachträglich) projection from out of the latest trauma, see Johnston (2005, 9–10).

8 For an inquiry with less emphasis on the lineage of Freud and more concern with how social theory should understand Marx’s concept of primitive accumulation, see Read (2003).

9 As Tomšič (2015, 141) has shown, the unfulfilled labor of the one powers the unfulfillable labor of the other. Or, playing on Tomšič’s Lacanian terminology, the liberal subject that is supposed (sujet supposé) to enjoy freedom, if only the misbegotten opinions of the authoritarian individual would finally subside, is as equally mythical and equally caught in a vicious circle blind to its material preconditions as the nursery rhymes that legitimate a process of accumulation supposed to flow and accumulate undisturbed, without requiring (preceding) acts of unimaginable, extraeconomic violence.

10 This disavowal of one’s ambivalence runs parallel to what Griffin (2012) describes as the Manichaean perspective of the fascist “terrorist” or vigilante who fights for the purification and restoration of the “good” nation against a perceived “evil.”

11 This is, of course, not a discrete moment but a series of moments that were often discontinuous and separated by long intervals, depending on the context. The essential point is that primitive accumulation was always exceedingly traumatic, and it was almost never implemented without vehement, often militantly organized opposition.

12 For further examination of this “new” conception of primitive accumulation and its possible connection to the return of the repressed, see, e.g., Harvey (2003), Federici (2004), Wacquant (2008, 18–39), and McNally (2011).

13 For further consideration of how this return of primitive accumulation is nonetheless an internally different return—that is, a repetition that embodies a distinct form of capitalist wealth accumulation and therefore a distinct relationship to the state—see Roberts (2017).

14 For further analysis of how, far from being an economistic theorist, Marx was already pointing the way to thinking the intersections of race, gender, and class, see Hennessy (2000, 16–17).

15 I do not here intend to imply that there is a one-to-one correspondence or a direct economistic link that somehow causes the reactionary upsurge. Obviously, there are horizontal power dynamics at play in this struggle for women’s rights, too. I am simply highlighting the fact evidenced across the United States at present that, when the crisis hits, men and women tend to cling to the old paternalistic authority. This authority was anti-woman from the start, and therefore sexism as a primary displacement within the larger logic of nationalism will be more pronounced during the return of crisis. One need only think of the brazenly misogynistic and anti-LGBTQI rhetoric and policy initiatives of Trump, Orbán, and, more recently, Bolsonaro.

16 For a further problematization of both the social and metaphysical understanding of causality, see Adorno (1973, 265–70).

17 The necessity, dictated by the narrow limits of profitability, of deploying and managing the resources of so-called big data, including facial- and voice-recognition technology, is a paradigmatic example of how the pseudo-leftism of liberalism, especially that of Silicon Valley, produces the very fascism it denounces.

18 Adorno (1973, 349) equates this spell with ideology.

19 For a further look at this dialectic between play and combat, which extends to prehuman and precognitive activity, see Massumi (2014).

20 As will be briefly discussed below, the new form of concentration and centralization itself grows so intense that fragmentation or splintering, along with liquidation and protectionism, cannot help but eventually occur. This helps to account, in my view, for the tariff wars between the United States and China, as well as for the seeming neo-mercantilism of the new reactionary international.

21 For a discussion that, drawing on Bel’s text, analyzes privatization as it is currently being practiced in the city of Chicago, see Perlstein (2015).

22 For more on how this racist moralism is far from merely being a twentieth-century phenomenon, see Thompson (1967, 91).

23 Here I am implying a position similar to Alain Badiou’s (2015): namely, that reaching out to China and Russia would have been a sensible maneuver for the Greek leadership. And see Anderson (2015): “Had Syriza put in place, as soon as it was elected, contingency plans for a managed default—preparing the capital controls, alternative currency issue, and other transitional measures that would need to be imposed overnight, if disorder was not to ensue—and threatened the EU with one, it would have had a bargaining weapon in its hand.”

24 For an analysis of how finance capital was never in reality suppressed under Bretton Woods or Keynesian policy and did not therefore simply emerge from nowhere under Reaganism or Thatcherian neoliberal statecraft, see Panitch and Gindin (2012).

25 Cf., Schmitt (1996). For a historical overview of the role of the “command economy” in the case of German fascism, see Neumann (2009, 293–361).

26 For an analysis of the internationalist character of the new right wing, see Renton (2019, 169–87).

27 For an analysis that distinguishes between several iterations of fascism and other forms of populism or populist movements, see Finchelstein (2017).

28 For a summary of many of the theoretical currents that resemble this “transnational” conception of fascism, see Salvador (2014). Adorno (2003b, 8) also emphasizes this point about the West’s supporting of Hitler against Russia, which I here imply parallels U.S. and NATO support of autocratic regimes against virtually every popular uprising in the Middle East.

29 For a more thorough account of how right-wing extremism was never in fact expunged from European institutions but instead began fundamentally reconstituting itself from the end of World War II to the present, see Mammone (2015).