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Title: On Post-Fascism Author: Gáspár Miklós Tamás Date: June 1, 2000 Language: en Topics: Fascism, Hungary Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-06 fro, https://bostonreview.net/world/g-m-tamas-post-fascism
I have an interest to declare. The government of my country, Hungary,
is—along with the Bavarian provincial government (provincial in more
senses than one)—the strongest foreign supporter of Jörg Haider’s
Austria. The right-wing cabinet in Budapest, besides other misdeeds, is
attempting to suppress parliamentary governance, penalizing local
authorities of a different political hue than itself, and busily
creating and imposing a novel state ideology, with the help of a number
of lumpen intellectuals of the extreme right, including some overt
neo-Nazis. It is in cahoots with an openly and viciously anti-Semitic
fascistic party that is, alas, represented in parliament. People working
for the prime minister’s office are engaging in more or less cautious
Holocaust revisionism. The government-controlled state television gives
vent to raw anti-Gypsy racism. The fans of the most popular soccer club
in the country, whose chairman is a cabinet minister and a party leader,
are chanting in unison about the train that is bound to leave any moment
for Auschwitz.
On the ground floor of the Central European University in Budapest you
can visit an exhibition concerning the years of turmoil a decade or so
ago. There you can watch a video recorded illegally in 1988, and you can
see the current Hungarian prime minister defending and protecting me
with his own body from the truncheons of communist riot police. Ten
years later, this same person appointed a communist police general as
his home secretary, the second or third most important person in the
cabinet. Political conflicts between former friends and allies are
usually acrimonious. This is no exception. I am an active participant in
an incipient anti-fascist movement in Hungary, a speaker at rallies and
demonstrations. Our opponents—in personal terms—are too close for
comfort. Thus, I cannot consider myself a neutral observer.
The phenomenon that I shall call post-fascism is not unique to Central
Europe. Far from it. To be sure, Germany, Austria, and Hungary are
important, for historical reasons obvious to all; familiar phrases
repeated here have different echoes. I recently saw that the old brick
factory in Budapest’s third district is being demolished; I am told that
they will build a gated community of suburban villas in its place. The
brick factory is where the Budapest Jews waited their turn to be
transported to the concentration camps. You could as well build holiday
cottages in Treblinka. Our vigilance in this part of the world is
perhaps more needed than anywhere else, since innocence, in historical
terms, cannot be presumed.[1] Still, post-fascism is a cluster of
policies, practices, routines, and ideologies that can be observed
everywhere in the contemporary world; that have little or nothing to do,
except in Central Europe, with the legacy of Nazism; that are not
totalitarian; that are not at all revolutionary; and that are not based
on violent mass movements and irrationalist, voluntaristic philosophies,
nor are they toying, even in jest, with anti-capitalism.
Why call this cluster of phenomena fascism, however post-?
Post-fascism finds its niche easily in the new world of global
capitalism without upsetting the dominant political forms of electoral
democracy and representative government. It does what I consider to be
central to all varieties of fascism, including the post-totalitarian
version. Sans FĂĽhrer, sans one-party rule, sans SA or SS, post-fascism
reverses the Enlightenment tendency to assimilate citizenship to the
human condition.
Before the Enlightenment, citizenship was a privilege, an elevated
status limited by descent, class, race, creed, gender, political
participation, morals, profession, patronage, and administrative fiat,
not to speak of age and education. Active membership in the political
community was a station to yearn for, civis Romanus sum the enunciation
of a certain nobility. Policies extending citizenship may have been
generous or stingy, but the rule was that the rank of citizen was
conferred by the lawfully constituted authority, according to
expediency. Christianity, like some Stoics, sought to transcend this
kind of limited citizenship by considering it second-rate or inessential
when compared to a virtual community of the saved. Freedom from sin was
superior to the freedom of the city. During the long, medieval
obsolescence of the civic, the claim for an active membership in the
political community was superseded by the exigencies of just governance,
and civic excellence was abbreviated to martial virtue.
Once citizenship was equated with human dignity, its extension to all
classes, professions, both sexes, all races, creeds, and locations was
only a matter of time. Universal franchise, the national service, and
state education for all had to follow. Moreover, once all human beings
were supposed to be able to accede to the high rank of a citizen,
national solidarity within the newly egalitarian political community
demanded the relief of the estate of Man, a dignified material existence
for all, and the eradication of the remnants of personal servitude. The
state, putatively representing everybody, was prevailed upon to grant
not only a modicum of wealth for most people, but also a minimum of
leisure, once the exclusive temporal fief of gentlemen only, in order to
enable us all to play and enjoy the benefits of culture.
For the liberal, social-democratic, and other assorted progressive heirs
of the Enlightenment, then, progress meant universal citizenship—that
is, a virtual equality of political condition, a virtually equal say for
all in the common affairs of any given community—together with a social
condition and a model of rationality that could make it possible. For
some, socialism seemed to be the straightforward continuation and
enlargement of the Enlightenment project; for some, like Karl Marx, the
completion of the project required a revolution (doing away with the
appropriation of surplus value and an end to the social division of
labor). But for all of them it appeared fairly obvious that the merger
of the human and the political condition was, simply, moral
necessity.[2]
The savage nineteenth-century condemnations of bourgeois society—the
common basis, for a time, of the culturally avant-garde and politically
radical—stemmed from the conviction that the process, as it was, was
fraudulent, and that individual liberty was not all it was cracked up to
be, but not from the view, represented only by a few solitary figures,
that the endeavor was worthless. It was not only Nietzsche and
Dostoevsky who feared that increasing equality might transform everybody
above and under the middle classes into bourgeois philistines.
Progressive revolutionaries, too, wanted a New Man and a New Woman,
bereft of the inner demons of repression and domination: a civic
community that was at the same time the human community needed a new
morality grounded in respect for the hitherto excluded.
This adventure ended in the debacle of 1914. Fascism offered the most
determined response to the collapse of the Enlightenment, especially of
democratic socialism and progressive social reform. Fascism, on the
whole, was not conservative, even if it was counter-revolutionary: it
did not re-establish hereditary aristocracy or the monarchy, despite
some romantic-reactionary verbiage. But it was able to undo the key
regulative (or liminal) notion of modern society, that of universal
citizenship. By then, governments were thought to represent and protect
everybody. National or state borders defined the difference between
friend and foe; foreigners could be foes, fellow citizens could not.
Pace Carl Schmitt, the legal theorist of fascism and the political
theologian of the Third Reich, the sovereign could not simply decide by
fiat who would be friend and who would be foe. But Schmitt was right on
one fundamental point: the idea of universal citizenship contains an
inherent contradiction in that the dominant institution of modern
society, the nation-state, is both a universalistic and a parochial
(since territorial) institution. Liberal nationalism, unlike ethnicism
and fascism, is limited—if you wish, tempered—universalism. Fascism put
an end to this shilly-shallying: the sovereign was judge of who does and
does not belong to the civic community, and citizenship became a
function of his (or its) trenchant decree.
This hostility to universal citizenship is, I submit, the main
characteristic of fascism. And the rejection of even a tempered
universalism is what we now see repeated under democratic circumstances
(I do not even say under democratic disguise). Post-totalitarian fascism
is thriving under the capacious carapace of global capitalism, and we
should tell it like it is.
There is logic in the Nazi declaration that communists, Jews,
homosexuals, and the mentally ill are non-citizens and, therefore,
non-human. (The famous ideologist of the Iron Guard, the suave essayist
E. M. Cioran, pointed out at the time that if some persons are non-human
but aspire to humanity [i.e., Jews] the contradiction might be sublated
and resolved by their violent death, preferably, according to the
celebrated and still-fashionable aesthete, by their own hand.)
These categories of people, as the Nazis saw them, represented types
crucial to the Enlightenment project of inclusion. Communists meant the
rebellious “lower type,” the masses brought in, leaderless and
rudderless, by rootless universalism, and then rising up against the
natural hierarchy; Jews, a community that survived the Christian middle
ages without political power of its own, led by an essentially
non-coercive authority, the people of the Book, by definition not a
people of war; homosexuals, by their inability or unwillingness to
procreate, bequeath, and continue, a living refutation of the alleged
link between nature and history; the mentally ill, listening to voices
unheard by the rest of us—in other words, people whose recognition needs
a moral effort and is not immediately (“naturally”) given, who can fit
in only by enacting an equality of the unequal.
The perilous differentiation between citizen and non-citizen is not, of
course, a fascist invention. As Michael Mann points out in a
pathbreaking study[3], the classical expression “we the People” did not
include black slaves and “red Indians” (Native Americans), and the
ethnic, regional, class, and denominational definitions of “the people”
have led to genocide both “out there” (in settler colonies) and within
nation states (see the Armenian massacre perpetrated by modernizing
Turkish nationalists) under democratic, semi-democratic, or
authoritarian (but not “totalitarian”) governments. If sovereignty is
vested in the people, the territorial or demographic definition of what
and who the people are becomes decisive. Moreover, the withdrawal of
legitimacy from state socialist (communist) and revolutionary
nationalist (“Third World”) regimes with their mock-Enlightenment
definitions of nationhood left only racial, ethnic, and confessional (or
denominational) bases for a legitimate claim or title for
“state-formation” (as in Yugoslavia, Czecho-Slovakia, the ex-Soviet
Union, Ethiopia-Eritrea, Sudan, etc.)
Everywhere, then, from Lithuania to California, immigrant and even
autochthonous minorities have become the enemy and are expected to put
up with the diminution and suspension of their civic and human rights.
The propensity of the European Union to weaken the nation-state and
strengthen regionalism (which, by extension, might prop up the power of
the center at Brussels and Strasbourg) manages to ethnicize rivalry and
territorial inequality (see Northern vs. Southern Italy, Catalonia vs.
Andalusia, English South East vs. Scotland, Fleming vs. Walloon Belgium,
Brittany vs. Normandy). Class conflict, too, is being ethnicized and
racialized, between the established and secure working class and lower
middle class of the metropolis and the new immigrant of the periphery,
also construed as a problem of security and crime.[4] Hungarian and
Serbian ethnicists pretend that the nation is wherever persons of
Hungarian or Serbian origin happen to live, regardless of their
citizenship, with the corollary that citizens of their nation-state who
are ethnically, racially, denominationally, or culturally “alien” do not
really belong to the nation.
The growing de-politicization of the concept of a nation (the shift to a
cultural definition) leads to the acceptance of discrimination as
“natural.” This is the discourse the right intones quite openly in the
parliaments and street rallies in eastern and Central Europe, in Asia,
and, increasingly, in “the West.” It cannot be denied that attacks
against egalitarian welfare systems and affirmative action techniques
everywhere have a dark racial undertone, accompanied by racist police
brutality and vigilantism in many places. The link, once regarded as
necessary and logical, between citizenship, equality, and territory may
disappear in what the theorist of the Third Way, the formerly Marxissant
sociologist Anthony Giddens, calls a society of responsible risk-takers.
The most profound attempt to analyze the phenomenon of political
exclusion is Georges Bataille’s “The Psychological Structure of
Fascism,”[5] which draws on the author’s distinction between homogeneity
and heterogeneity. To simplify, homogeneous society is the society of
work, exchange, usefulness, sexual repression, fairness, tranquility,
procreation; what is heterogeneous:
includes everything resulting from unproductive expenditure (sacred
things themselves form part of this whole). This consists of everything
rejected by homogeneous society as waste or as superior transcendent
values. Included are the waste products of the human body and certain
analogous matter (trash, vermin, etc.); the parts of the body; persons,
words, or acts having a suggestive erotic value; the various unconscious
processes such as dreams and neuroses; the numerous later elements or
social forms that homogeneous society is powerless to assimilate (mobs,
the warrior, aristocratic and impoverished classes, different types of
violent individuals or a least those who refuse the rule—madmen,
leaders, poets, etc.); … violence, excess, delirium, madness
characterize heterogeneous elements … compared to everyday life,
heterogeneous existence can be represented as something other, as
incommensurate, by charging these words with the positive value they
have in affective experience.[6]
Sovereign power, according to Bataille (and to Carl Schmitt[7]), is
quintessentially heterogeneous in its pre-modern sacral versions (kings
ruling by Divine Right). This heterogeneity is hidden in capitalist
democracy, where the sovereign is supposed to rule through an impersonal
legal order that applies equally to all. Fascist dictatorship is in
business to uncover or unmask it. This explains the link of fascist
dictatorship to the impoverished, disorderly, lumpen mob. And this is
exactly, I should add, what gets lost in post-fascism. The re-creation
of sacral sovereignty by fascism is, however, a fake. It is homogeneity
masquerading as heterogeneity. What is left in the homogeneous sphere in
the middle is the pure bourgeois without the citoyen, Julien Sorel
finally and definitely robbed of his Napoleon, Lucien Leuwen deprived of
his Danton. Fascism, having put an end to the bourgeois realization of
Enlightenment (i.e, to egalitarian capitalist democracy), transforms the
social exclusion of the unproductive (from hermits and vatic poets to
unemployable paupers and indomitable rebels) into their natural
exclusion (i.e., extra-legal arrest, hunger, and death).
Bataille’s work comes out of the French objectivist sociological
tradition, from Durkeim, Mauss, and Halbwachs through Kojève to Paul
Veyne, wherein political repression and exclusion are not interpreted in
moralistic and psychological, but in anthropological terms—as a matter
of establishing identity. Bataille’s revolutionary critique of the
exclusion of the “heterogeneous”—the “useless,” people who are not
“responsible risk-takers”—is based on an understanding of society,
sexuality, and religion, a combination of Durkheim and Marx, if you
wish, that might offer an alternative of our contemporary, on the whole
Kantian, resistance to post-fascism. Our moralistic criticism, however
justified, customarily precludes the comprehension of the lure of the
phenomenon, and leads to a simplistic contempt for barbaric, benighted
racists, rabble-rousers, and demagogues, and a rather undemocratic
ignorance of peoples, fears, and desires.
An alternative line of argument, suggested by this tradition, begins by
observing that the breakdown of egalitarian welfare states frequently
means a shift in the focus of solidarity, fraternity, and pity. If there
is no virtually equal citizenship, the realization of which should have
been the aim of honest, liberal democrats and democratic socialists, the
passion of generosity will remain dissatisfied. A feeling of fellowship
toward kith and kin has always been one of the most potent motives for
altruism. Altruism of this kind, when bereft of a civic, egalitarian
focus, will find intuitive criteria offered by the dominant discourse to
establish what and whom it will desire to serve. If civic politics
cannot do it, racial feeling or feelings of cultural proximity certainly
will. Identity is usually outlined by affection and received threats. He
who will define those successfully wins. Nobody is better at describing
this identity panic than Bataille.[8]
The half-mad pornographer and ultra-leftist extremist, as Bataille is
still regarded in petto, cannot be well received by self-respecting
social theorists, I believe, but curiously his theory is borne out by
the acknowledged standard work on the Nazi regime, written by the
greatest legal hawk of the German trade union movement, happily
rediscovered today as the first-rate mind that he was.[9] In
contradistinction to fanciful theories of totalitarianism, the great
Ernst Fraenkel, summing up his painstaking survey of Nazi legislation
and jurisprudence, writes that:
[i]n present day Germany [he is writing in 1937–39], many people find
the arbitrary rule of the Third Reich unbearable. These same people
acknowledge, however, that the idea of “community,” as there understood,
is something truly great. Those who take up this ambivalent attitude
toward National-Socialism suffer from two principal misconceptions:
1. The present German ideology of Gemeinschaft (community) is nothing
but a mask hiding the still existing capitalistic structure of society.
2. The ideological mask (the community) equally hides the Prerogative
State [Fraenkel distinguishes the “normal,” so-called Normative State
providing chiefly for civil law and the quasi-totalitarian Party state
subordinated to the FĂĽhrerprinzip] operating by arbitrary measures.
The replacement of the Rechtsstaat (Legal State) by the Dual State is
but a symptom. The root of evil lies at the exact point where the
uncritical opponents of National-Socialism discover grounds for
admiration, namely in the community ideology and in the militant
capitalism which this very notion of the Gemeinschaft is supposed to
hide. It is indeed for the maintenance of capitalism in Germany that the
authoritarian Dual State is necessary.[10]
The Autonomy of the Normative State (“homogeneous society”) was
maintained in Nazi Germany in a limited area, mostly where the
protection of private property was concerned (property of so-called
Aryans, of course); the Prerogative State held sway in more narrowly
political matters, the privileges of the Party, the military and the
paramilitary, culture, ideology, and propaganda. The “dual state” was a
consequence of the Schmittian decision of the new sovereign as to what
was law, and what was not. But there was no rule by decree in the sphere
reserved to capitalism proper, the economy. It is not true, therefore,
that the whole system of Nazi or fascist governance was wholly
arbitrary. The macabre meeting of the Normative and the Prerogative is
illustrated by the fact that the German Imperial Railways billed the SS
for the horrible transports to Auschwitz at special holiday discount
rates, customary for package tours. But they billed them!
People within the jurisdiction of the Normative State (Bataille’s
homogeneous society) enjoyed the usual protection of law, however harsh
it tended to be. Special rules, however, applied to those in the purview
of the Prerogative State (heterogeneous society)—both the Nazi Party
leaders, officials, and militant activists, above the law, and the
persecuted minorities, under or outside it. Before fascism, friend and
citizen, foe and alien, were coincidental notions; no government thought
systematically to declare war on the inhabitants of the land, who were
members (even if unequal members) of the nation: civil war was equated
with the absence of legally constituted, effective government. Civil war
from the top, launched in peacetime, or at least under definitely
non-revolutionary circumstances, turns sovereignty against the suzerain
of the subject. The main weapon in this methodical civil war, where the
state as such is one of the warring parties, is the continuous
redefinition of citizenship by the Prerogative state.
And since, thanks to Enlightenment, citizenship (membership in the
political community), nationality, and humanity had been synthetically
merged, being expelled from citizenship meant, quite literally,
exclusion from humanity. Hence civic death was necessarily followed by
natural death, that is, violent death, or death tout court. Fascist or
Nazi genocide was not preceded by legal condemnation (not even in the
stunted and fraudulent shape of the so-called administrative verdicts of
Cheka “tribunals”): it was the “naturalization” of a moral judgment that
deemed some types of human condition inferior. And since there was no
protection outside citizenship, lack of citizenship had become the cause
of the cessation of the necessary precondition of the human
condition—life.
Cutting the civic and human community in two: this is fascism.
This is why the expression, albeit bewildering, must be revived, because
the fundamental conceptual technique of civic, hence human, scission has
been revived, this time not by a deliberate counter-revolutionary
movement, but by certain developments that were, probably, not willed by
anyone and that are crying out for a name. The name is post-fascism.
The phenomenon itself came into being at a confluence of various
political processes. Let me list them.
Decline of Critical Culture
After the 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc, contemporary society
underwent fundamental change. Bourgeois society, liberal democracy,
democratic capitalism—name it what you will—has always been a
controversial affair; unlike previous regimes, it developed an adversary
culture, and was permanently confronted by strong competitors on the
right (the alliance of the throne and the altar) and the left
(revolutionary socialism). Both have become obsolete, and this has
created a serious crisis within the culture of late modernism.[11] The
mere idea of radical change (utopia and critique) has been dropped from
the rhetorical vocabulary, and the political horizon is now filled by
what is there, by what is given, which is capitalism. In the prevalent
social imagination, the whole human cosmos is a “homogeneous society”—a
society of useful, wealth-producing, procreating, stable, irreligious,
but at the same time jouissant, free individuals. Citizenship is
increasingly defined, apolitically, in terms of interests that are not
contrasted with the common good, but united within it through
understanding, interpretation, communication, and voluntary accord based
on shared presumptions.
In this picture, obligation and coercion, the differentia specifica of
politics (and in permanent need of moral justification), are
conspicuously absent. “Civil society”—a nebula of voluntary groupings
where coercion and domination, by necessity, do not play any important
role—is said to have cannibalized politics and the state. A dangerous
result of this conception might be that the continued underpinning of
law by coercion and domination, while criticized in toto, is not watched
carefully enough—since, if it cannot be justified at all, no
justification, thus no moral control, will be sought. The myth,
according to which the core of late-modern capitalism is “civil
society,” blurs the conceptual boundaries of citizenship, which is seen
more and more as a matter of policy, not politics.
Before 1989, you could take it for granted that the political culture of
liberal-democratic-constitutional capitalism was a critical culture,
more often than not in conflict with the system that, sometimes with bad
grace and reluctantly, sustained it. Apologetic culture was for ancient
empires and anti-liberal dictatorships. Highbrow despair is now rampant.
But without a sometimes only implicit utopia as a prop, despair does not
seem to work. What is the point of theoretical anti-capitalism, if
political anti-capitalism cannot be taken seriously?
Also, there is an unexpected consequence of this absence of a critical
culture tied to an oppositional politics. As one of the greatest and
most level-headed masters of twentieth-century political sociology,
Seymour Martin Lipset, has noted, fascism is the extremism of the
center. Fascism had very little to do with passéiste feudal,
aristocratic, monarchist ideas, was on the whole anti-clerical, opposed
communism and socialist revolution, and—like the liberals whose
electorate it had inherited—hated big business, trade unions, and the
social welfare state. Lipset had classically shown that extremisms of
the left and right were by no means exclusive: some petty bourgeois
attitudes suspecting big business and big government could be, and were,
prolonged into an extremism that proved lethal. Right-wing and center
extremisms were combined in Hungarian, Austrian, Croatian, Slovak
para-fascism (I have borrowed this term from Roger Griffin) of a
pseudo-Christian, clericalist, royalist coloring, but extremism of the
center does and did exist, proved by Lipset also through continuities in
electoral geography.
Today there is nothing of any importance on the political horizon but
the bourgeois center, therefore its extremism is the most likely to
reappear. (Jörg Haider and his Freedom Party are the best example of
this. Parts of his discourse are libertarian/neoliberal, his ideal is
the propertied little man, he strongly favors a shareholding and
home-owning petty bourgeois “democracy,” and he is quite free of
romantic-reactionary nationalism as distinct from parochial selfishness
and racism.) What is now considered “right-wing” in the United States
would have been considered insurrectionary and suppressed by armed force
in any traditional regime of the right as individualistic,
decentralizing, and opposed to the monopoly of coercive power by the
government, the foundation of each and every conservative creed.
Conservatives are le parti de l’ordre, and loathe militias and plebian
cults.
Decaying States
The end of colonial empires in the 1960s and the end of Stalinist
(“state socialist,” “state capitalist,” “bureaucratic collectivist”)
systems in the 1990s has triggered a process never encountered since the
Mongolian invasions in the thirteenth century: a comprehensive and
apparently irreversible collapse of established statehood as such. While
the bien-pensant Western press daily bemoans perceived threats of
dictatorship in far-away places, it usually ignores the reality behind
the tough talk of powerless leaders, namely that nobody is prepared to
obey them. The old, creaking, and unpopular nation-state—the only
institution to date that had been able to grant civil rights, a modicum
of social assistance, and some protection from the exactions of
privateer gangs and rapacious, irresponsible business elites—ceased to
exist or never even emerged in the majority of the poorest areas of the
world. In most parts of sub-Saharan Africa and of the former Soviet
Union not only the refugees, but the whole population could be
considered stateless. The way back, after decades of demented
industrialization (see the horrific story of the hydroelectric plants
everywhere in the Third World and the former Eastern bloc), to a
subsistence economy and “natural” barter exchanges in the midst of
environmental devastation, where banditry seems to have become the only
efficient method of social organization, leads exactly nowhere. People
in Africa and ex-Soviet Eurasia are dying not by a surfeit of the state,
but by the absence of it.
Traditionally, liberation struggles of any sort have been directed
against entrenched privilege. Equality came at the expense of ruling
groups: secularism reduced the power of the Princes of the Church,
social legislation dented the profits of the “moneyed interest,”
universal franchise abolished the traditional political class of landed
aristocracy and the noblesse de robe, the triumph of commercial pop
culture smashed the ideological prerogatives of the progressive
intelligentsia, horizontal mobility and suburban sprawl ended the rule
of party politics on the local level, contraception and consumerist
hedonism dissolved patriarchal rule in the family—something lost,
something gained. Every step toward greater freedom curtailed somebody’s
privileges (quite apart from the pain of change). It was conceivable to
imagine the liberation of outlawed and downtrodden lower classes through
economic, political, and moral crusades: there was, crudely speaking,
somebody to take ill-gotten gains from. And those gains could be
redistributed to more meritorious sections of the population, offering
in exchange greater social concord, political tranquility, and safety to
unpopular, privileged elites, thereby reducing class animosity. But let
us not forget though that the social-democratic bargain has been struck
as a result of centuries of conflict and painful renunciations by the
traditional ruling strata. Such a liberation struggle, violent or
peaceful, is not possible for the new wretched of the earth.
Nobody exploits them. There is no extra profit and surplus value to be
appropriated. There is no social power to be monopolized. There is no
culture to be dominated. The poor people of the new stateless
societies—from the “homogeneous” viewpoint—are totally superfluous. They
are not exploited, but neglected. There is no overtaxation, since there
are no revenues. Privileges cannot be redistributed toward a greater
equality since there are no privileges, except the temporary ones to be
had, occasionally, at gunpoint.
Famished populations have no way out from their barely human condition
but to leave. The so-called center, far from exploiting this periphery
of the periphery, is merely trying to keep out the foreign and usually
colored destitutes (the phenomenon is euphemistically called
“demographic pressure”) and set up awesome barriers at the frontiers of
rich countries, while our international financial bureaucracy counsels
further deregulation, liberalization, less state and less government to
nations that do not have any, and are perishing in consequence.
“Humanitarian wars” are fought in order to prevent masses of refugees
from flowing in and cluttering up the Western welfare systems that are
in decomposition anyway.
Citizenship in a functional nation-state is the one safe meal ticket in
the contemporary world. But such citizenship is now a privilege of the
very few. The Enlightenment assimilation of citizenship to the necessary
and “natural” political condition of all human beings has been reversed.
Citizenship was once upon a time a privilege within nations. It is now a
privilege to most persons in some nations. Citizenship is today the very
exceptional privilege of the inhabitants of flourishing capitalist
nation-states, while the majority of the world’s population cannot even
begin to aspire to the civic condition, and has also lost the relative
security of pre-state (tribe, kinship) protection.
The scission of citizenship and sub-political humanity is now complete,
the work of Enlightenment irretrievably lost. Post-fascism does not need
to put non-citizens into freight trains to take them into death;
instead, it need only prevent the new non-citizens from boarding any
trains that might take them into the happy world of overflowing rubbish
bins that could feed them. Post-fascist movements everywhere, but
especially in Europe, are anti-immigration movements, grounded in the
“homogeneous” world-view of productive usefulness. They are not simply
protecting racial and class privileges within the nation-state (although
they are doing that, too) but protecting universal citizenship within
the rich nation-state against the virtual-universal citizenship of all
human beings, regardless of geography, language, race, denomination, and
habits. The current notion of “human rights” might defend people from
the lawlessness of tyrants, but it is no defense against the lawlessness
of no rule.
Varieties of Post-Fascism
It is frequently forgotten that contemporary global capitalism is a
second edition. In the pre-1914 capitalism of no currency controls (the
gold standard, etc.) and free trade, a world without visas and work
permits, when companies were supplying military stuff to the armies of
the enemy in wartime without as much as a squeak from governments or the
press, the free circulation of capital and labor was more or less
assured (it was, perhaps, a less equal, but a freer world). In
comparison, the thing called “globalization” is a rather modest
undertaking, a gradual and timorous destruction of Ă©tatiste and
dirigiste,welfarist nation-states built on the egalitarian bargain of
old-style social democracy whose constituency (construed as the backbone
of modern nations), the rust-belt working class, is disintegrating.
Globalization has liberated capital flows. Speculative capital goes
wherever investments appear as “rational,” usually places where wages
are low and where there are no militant trade unions or ecological
movements. But unlike in the nineteenth century, labor is not granted
the same freedoms. Spiritus flat ubi vult, capital flies wherever it
wants, but the free circulation of labor is impeded by ever more rigid
national regulations. The flow is all one-way; capital can improve its
position, but labor—especially low-quality, low-intensity labor in the
poor countries of the periphery—cannot. Deregulation for capital,
stringent regulation for labor.
If the workforce is stuck at the periphery, it will have to put up with
sweatshops. Attempts to fight for higher salaries and better working
conditions are met not with violence, strikebreakers, or military coups,
but by quiet capital flight and disapproval from international finance
and its international or national bureaucracies, which will have the
ability to decide who is deserving of aid or debt relief. To quote
Albert O. Hirschman, voice(that is, protest) is impossible, nay,
pointless. Only exit, exodus, remains, and it is the job of post-fascism
to prevent that.
Under these conditions, it is only logical that the New New Left has
re-appropriated the language of human rights instead of class struggle.
If you glance at Die Tageszeitung, Il Manifesto, Rouge, or Socialist
Worker, you will see that they are mostly talking about asylum-seekers,
immigrants (legal or illegal, les sans-papiers,) squatters, the
homeless, Gypsies, and the like. It is a tactic forced upon them by the
disintegration of universal citizenship, by unimpeded global capital
flows by the impact of new technologies on workers and consumers, and by
the slow death of the global sub-proletariat. Also, they have to face
the revival of class politics in a new guise by the proponents of “the
third way” à la Tony Blair. The neo-neoliberal state has rescinded its
obligations to “heterogeneous,” non-productive populations and groups.
Neo-Victorian, pedagogic ideas of “workfare,” which declare unemployment
implicitly sinful, the equation of welfare claimants with “enemies of
the people,” the replacement of social assistance with tax credits
whereby people beneath the category of taxpayers are not deemed worthy
of aid, income support made conditional on family and housing practices
believed proper by “competent authorities,” the increasing
racialization, ethnicization, and sexualization of the underclass, the
replacement of social solidarity with ethnic or racial solidarity, the
overt acknowledgment of second-class citizenship, the tacit recognition
of the role of police as a racial defense force, the replacement of the
idea of emancipation with the idea of privileges (like the membership in
the European Union, the OECD, or the WTO) arbitrarily dispensed to the
deserving poor, and the transformation of rational arguments against EU
enlargement into racist/ethnicist rabble-rousing—all this is part of the
post-fascist strategy of the scission of the civic-cum-human community,
of a renewed granting or denial of citizenship along race, class,
denominational, cultural, ethnic lines.
The re-duplication of the underclass—a global underclass abroad and the
“heterogeneous,” wild ne’er-do-wells at home, with the interests of one
set of underclass (“domestic”) presented as inimical to the other
(“foreign”)—gives post-fascism its missing populist dimension. There is
no harsher enemy of the immigrant—“guest worker” or asylum-seeker—than
the obsolescent lumpenproletariat, publicly represented by the
hard-core, right-wing extremist soccer hooligan. “Lager louts” may not
know that lager does not only mean a kind of cheap continental beer, but
also a concentration camp. But the unconscious pun is, if not symbolic,
metaphorical.
We are, then, faced with a new kind of extremism of the center. This new
extremism, which I call post-fascism, does not threaten, unlike its
predecessor, liberal and democratic rule within the core constituency of
“homogeneous society.” Within the community cut in two, freedom,
security, prosperity are on the whole undisturbed, at least within the
productive and procreative majority that in some rich countries
encompasses nearly all white citizens. “Heterogeneous,” usually racially
alien, minorities are not persecuted, only neglected and marginalized,
forced to live a life wholly foreign to the way of life of the majority
(which, of course, can sometimes be qualitatively better than the flat
workaholism, consumerism, and health obsessions of the majority). Drugs,
once supposed to widen and raise consciousness, are now uneasily
pacifying the enforced idleness of those society is unwilling to help
and to recognize as fellow humans. The “Dionysiac” subculture of the
sub-proletariat further exaggerates the bifurcation of society.
Political participation of the have-nots is out of the question, without
any need for the restriction of franchise. Apart from the incipient and
feeble (“new new”) left-wing radicalism, as isolated as
anarcho-syndicalism was in the second half of the nineteenth century,
nobody seeks to represent them. The conceptual tools once offered by
democratic and libertarian socialism are missing; and libertarians are
nowadays militant bourgeois extremists of the center, ultra-capitalist
cyberpunks hostile to any idea of solidarity beyond the fluxus of the
global marketplace.
Post-fascism does not need stormtroopers and dictators. It is perfectly
compatible with an anti-Enlightenment liberal democracy that
rehabilitates citizenship as a grant from the sovereign instead of a
universal human right. I confess I am giving it a rude name here to
attract attention to its glaring injustice. Post-fascism is historically
continuous with its horrific predecessor only in patches. Certainly,
Central and East European anti-Semitism has not changed much, but it is
hardly central. Since post-fascism is only rarely a movement, rather
simply a state of affairs, managed as often as not by so-called
center-left governments, it is hard to identify intuitively.
Post-fascists do not speak usually of total obedience and racial purity,
but of the information superhighway.
Everybody knows the instinctive fury people experience when faced with a
closed door. Now tens of millions of hungry human beings are rattling
the doorknob. The rich countries are thinking up more sophisticated
padlocks, while their anger at the invaders outside is growing, too.
Some of the anger leads to the revival of the Nazi and fascist
Gedankengut (“treasure-trove of ideas”), and this will trigger righteous
revulsion. But post-fascism is not confined to the former Axis powers
and their willing ex-clients, however revolting and horrifying this
specific sub-variant may be. East European Gypsies (Roma and Sintj, to
give their politically correct names) are persecuted both by the
constabulary and by the populace, and are trying to flee to the “free
West.” The Western reaction is to introduce visa restrictions against
the countries in question in order to prevent massive refugee influx,
and solemn summons to East European countries to respect human rights.
Domestic racism is supplanted by global liberalism, both grounded on a
political power that is rapidly becoming racialized.
Multiculturalist responses are desperate avowals of impotence: an
acceptance of the ethnicization of the civic sphere, but with a
humanistic and benevolent twist. These avowals are concessions of
defeat, attempts to humanize the inhuman. The field had been chosen by
post-fascism, and liberals are trying to fight it on its own favorite
terrain, ethnicity. This is an enormously disadvantageous position.
Without new ways of addressing the problem of global capitalism, the
battle will surely be lost.
But the new Dual State is alive and well. A Normative State for the core
populations of the capitalist center, and a Prerogative State of
arbitrary decrees concerning non-citizens for the rest. Unlike in
classical, totalitarian fascism, the Prerogative State is only dimly
visible for the subjects of the Normative State: the essential human and
civic community with those kept out and kept down is morally invisible.
The radical critique pretending that liberty within the Normative State
is an illusion is erroneous, though understandable. The denial of
citizenship based not on exploitation, oppression, and straightforward
discrimination among the denizens of “homogeneous society,” but on mere
exclusion and distance, is difficult to grasp, because the mental habits
of liberation struggle for a more just redistribution of goods and power
are not applicable. The problem is not that the Normative State is
becoming more authoritarian. The problem is that it belongs only to a
few.
[1] A few interesting articles in English concerning recent
developments: Harry Ritter, “From Hapsburg to Hitler to Haider,” German
Studies Review 22 (May 1999): 269–284; Jan Müller, “From National
Identity to National Interest: The Rise and Fall of Germany’s New
Right,” German Politics 8 (December 1999): 1–20; Michael Minkenberg,
“The Renewal of the Radical Right,” Government and Opposition 35 (Spring
2000): 170–188; Jacob Heilbrunn, “A Disdain for the Past: Jörg Haider’s
Austria,” World Policy Journal 28 (Spring 2000): 71–78; Immanuel
Wallerstein, “Albatross of Racism,” London Review of Books, May 18,
2000, pp. 11–14; Rainer Bauböck, “Austria: Jörg Haider’s Grasp for
Power,” Dissent (Spring 2000): 23–26.
[2] See G. M. Tamás, “Ethnarchy and Ethno-Anarchism,” Social Research 63
(Spring 1996): 147–190; Idem., “The Two-Hundred Years War,” Boston
Review, Summer 1999, pp. 31–36.
[3] Michael Mann, “The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern Tradition of
Ethnic and Political Cleansing,” New Left Review 235 (May/June
1999):18–45.
[4] See Mark Neocleous, “Against Security,” Radical Philosophy 100
(March/April 2000): 7–15; Idem., Fascism (Buckingham: Open University
Press, 1997). The evolution from “l’état social” to “l’état pénal” has
been repeatedly highlighted by Pierre Bourdieu.
[5] Georges Bataille, “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,”
[November 1933], trans. Carl R. Lovitt, in Visions of Excess, ed. Allan
Stoekl (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 137–160.
Concerning the problem of masses and violence, see Etienne Balibar,
Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 1998), pp.
105, 115–116. Also: Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy,
trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights, 1988). An interesting
liberal critique of Bataille’s theory of fascism can be found in Susan
Rubin Suleiman’s “Bataille on the Street,” in Bataille: Writing the
Sacred, ed. Carolyn Bailey Gill (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 26–45.
Bataille’s critique has to be understood within the context of the
anti-Stalinist, revolutionary ultra-left. Two volumes of correspondence
whirling around Bataille, Souvarine, Simone Weil, and the mysterious
Laure (Colette Peignot) have recently been published: Laure: Une
rupture, 1934, ed. Anne Roche and JĂ©rome Peignot (Paris: Editions des
Cendres, 1999); and Georges Bataille, L’Apprenti sorcier, ed. Marina
Galletti (Paris: Editions de la Différence, 1999). As to another radical
critique of fascism in the 1930s, see Karl Polányi, “The Essence of
Fascism,” in Christianity and Social Revolution, ed. J. Lewis, K.
Polányi, D. K. Kitchin (London: Gollancz, 1935).
[6] Bataille, “Psychological Structure,” 142. See the two intriguing
drafts to the essay on fascism: “Cet aspect religieux manifeste …” and
“En affet la vie humaine …” in Georges Bataille, Oeuvres complètes, vol.
2 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 161–164. Also: Antonio Negri’s theory of
constituent power and constituted power in his Insurgencies, trans.
Maurizia Boscagli (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1999), pp.
1–128, 212–229.
[7] On the parallel between Bataille and Carl Schmitt, see Martin Jay,
“The Reassertion of Sovereignty in a Time of Crisis: Carl Schmitt and
Georges Bataille,” in Force Fields (New York, Routledge, 1993), pp.
49–60; Bataille’s essay on “Sovereignty,” The Accursed Share vols. 2 and
3, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1933).
[8] See Jean Piel, “Bataille and the World,” in On Bataille: Critical
Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp.
95–106.
[9] Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State [1941], trans. E. A. Shils, E.
Lowenstein, and K. Knorr (New York: Octagon, 1969). See also: David
Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution (Garden City: Anchor Doubleday,
1967), pp. 113–151.
[10] Fraenkel, The Dual State, p. 153.
[11] See G. M. Tamás, “Democracy’s Triumph, Philosophy’s Peril,” Journal
of Democracy 11 (January 2000): 103–110. On alarming alternatives to
politics as we know it, see Jacques Ranciére, La Mésentente (Paris:
Galilée, 1995), pp. 95–131.