3.3 The Fascist Bond — Historically:
Looking the fascist in the eye, it is understandable that he does not like this we name globalisation. In any case, globalisation is anathema to both far right fascists and far left fascists, as it stands for the project of neoliberal financialised politics. Still, something that the fascist does not truly want or need is a global, unified, world, mankind. True, some fascist regimes were taken by imperialist grandeur; yet many others were occupied within their national frontiers as they were[20]. Yet what fascists seem to share is a Manichaean, coincidentally, Darwinian world view, in which there is resistance and there is opposition; there is pressure, and there is response. Or death. Naturally, the fascist thrust seems to be of the ‘self-preserving’, ‘darwinian’ kind, of the ‘fight and struggle for survival’ one.
Yes, fascism was anti-liberal. And anti-Marxist, by historical coincidence. Yet I would say that the fascist’s anti-liberalism is a bone-deep paranoia where liberal means the frightening chaos of freedom and equality. The fascist seeks and offers a sense of place and purpose when he is too fearful and too confused by the openness of freedom. The terrifying thing about freedom, is the absolute solitude of the autonomous being. Without walls and without floors. And so, what the ideological fascist subject should be, above all, besides tribal, is patriarchal. Without a symbolic father, there is no opposition on which to assert oneself. The fascist subject wants order, law, and keeps its transgressions private since the logic of transgression demands that the law not be exhausted. And so the fascist mounts the theatre of patriarchy, preferably through the martial, or through its 20th century equivalent, the financial.
Classical liberalism proposed free markets as the solution for international conflicts: “the spirit of trade cannot coexist with war”[21]. Notwithstanding, financialised countries are among the most warmongering, i.e. the US and the UK. But wasn’t financialisation stemming from the liberal/neo-liberal ideology? Could it be that financialisation is related to something more akin to the fascist subject? Perhaps, let’s speculate, the fascist spirit, in its evolution, absorbed financialised capitalism — or supercapitalism in historical fascism terms — just as it had absorbed right-wing politics during its syndicalist inception, and became, superfascism? Its support for private enterprise under state control and its protectionist policies may have perfectly and ‘naturally’ evolved into state capitalism and central banking, interventions thought, yesterday as today, to ‘stabilise the economy’. And so globalised financialisation is a consequence of the fascist spirit, in a new historical context. Could that be?: ‘[Neoliberal] Superfascist imperialist globalisation follows a “law of god and nature” as it spreads its superior culture throughout the world, even at the cost of the lives of brave patriots if necessary’…
The internationalist spirit lost its innocence[22] under the abuses of the financialised globalist agenda. The dreams of one humanity vanished under the spell of diversity and the virtue of multiculturalism; ‘the right way to be human’, was gone[23]. But what is a globalist politician worth when despotic atrocities are overlooked as ‘cultural difference’ in exchange for a bond market? Financialised globalisation does not only tolerate but actively enforces the ‘cultural variations’ that will help the continuation of its financial logic, while seeks to ‘democratise’ — or invade — those who do not. Is this the face of ‘the new fascist’? Still, is there anything new in the fascist present and to come?
[20] See note 13.
[21] “… Montesquieu, Kant, J.S. Mill, Bentham, and Cobden decisively advanced the notion that free trade and interdependence lend a positive influence to the development and maintenance of interstate peace. […] Kant had asserted in 1795 that “the spirit of trade cannot coexist with war, and sooner or later this spirit dominates every people”. Quote from Kant, To Perpetual Peace, A Philosophical Sketch. Cited in Félix E. Martin, “International Liberalism: Peace Through Principles?”, Militarist Peace in South America (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 111.
[22] Globalisation is anathema for contemporary Marxists. Yet once communism sought to “pursue the ultimate goal of liberating human society from the material, political and cultural constraints of traditional (‘primitive’, religious, closed) societies by forging links between all human beings within a global technology, a global economy, a global political system, and a global humanistic culture”. Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, 1965, summarised in Griffin, International Fascism, 48.
[23] “One tends to reject western cultural values at the very moment when, critically reinterpreted, many of those values, i.e. egalitarianism, can serve as a weapon against capitalist globalisation. Did we already forget that the entire idea of communist emancipation, as envisaged by Marx, is a radically Eurocentric one?” Slavoj Zizek, Über Mandela hinaus ohne Mugabe zu werden, 2015. https://soundcloud.com/hoerspielhaus/faq-room-2-slavoj-zizek
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