Really Existing Fascism

Really Existing Fascism
Roderic Day2021-10-15Twitter

capitalism can be understood as a mode of production with (at least) two concurrent operational moments or aspects: violent expropriation — necessary whenever either big fortunes or desperate propertyless workers are lacking from the equation — and the “non-violent” regime of “voluntary” exploitation more often associated with “advanced” capitalist countries. Primitive accumulation never stops: at the same time that some in America live contented middle-class lives and millions of others get exploited by Amazon as contract workers, the United States uses its police forces to brutalize rebellious Black communities and its military forces to invade nations that haven’t sufficiently integrated into its market system. Capitalism expresses itself as voluntary exploitation in its core, and involuntary expropriation in its periphery (including its internal colonies).

Fascism is as co-constitutive of capitalism as liberalism is. Liberalism corresponds to the operational aspect of surplus value exploitation in the core, whereas fascism corresponds to the operational aspect of primitive accumulation at its temporal and spatial boundaries.

Describing fascism as the “death-rattle” of stage four obscures the fact that it has been present from the outset. Fascism is just the operational aspect that the unlucky part of the globe gets to experience capitalism as. We need to expand the model into a second dimension to integrate this understanding.

  1. Capitalism — Ideological superstructure in defense of individual genius (entrepreneurship, race science, will to power)
    • Expropriative aspect: Primitive accumulation, fascism.
    • Exploitative aspect: Wage labour, liberalism.

This model conceives of the Axis powers as failed fascist experiments in empire-building, and the North Atlantic empires as successful ones. Fascism as an accusation stops relying on a cartoonish depiction of the Nazis as a cautionary tale of a potential future dystopia. Instead, it captures the fact that vicious dehumanizing brutality is co-constitutive of the violent, white supremacist, “freedom-loving” Western worldview.

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