WEA Topic: Interview on The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism

Excerpt:

3. State intervention has been seen as a counter to the failings of capitalism, but you seem to be suggesting that it is an aspect of fascism. Have I understood, and if so, are there any alternatives?

Yes, State intervention has shown to be historically and presently a pillar of fascist ideas and practices. Historically, Paul Einzig (1933), recognizes in Hegel’s doctrine of the state the ideological grounding of fascism and imperialism. Presently we experience the fact that all State regimes call themselves liberal, whereas they carry out corporatism, a set of laws and controls. The practical implication is that, despite the new media communication in present day capitalism, most individuals and groups still have as their main reference the nation state; the masses are fully integrated in the political life of an organized, centralized, authoritarian democracy and its corporatism.

The alternatives can be constructed only outside capitalism as we know it against its homogenizing, corporative and repressive logic. In the book, a CEO’s speech is given as an example of the way in which the disrespect for human nature is an open, ordinary and fascist practice of corporate neoliberalism. To build alternatives, we must criticize the flawed intellectual reasoning behind the metaphysics of capitalism, and in particular in managerialism, which downgrades everything, including nature and human beings, to a price-market function. Here we express a belief in an alternative to contemporary capitalist metaphysics and mythical language, that is the hope to recover the material inside and outside ourselves. This means freeing ourselves of the metaphysics through a process of individual emancipation, which should consist of recovering the nature of our sentiments from the prevailing domination of the intellectuality of capitalism. The alternatives are constituted by radical arguments and practices, i.e., of theorizing and making revolutions and actions against the violence and prevarication of managerialism. See, for example, how the students and workers struggle in solidarity against the brutalities of corporate managers despite institutional and corporate forms of downgrading, retaliation and blacklisting. While we are talking, individuals are trying to construct relationships of solidarity outside the logic of capitalism, out of the State and the market. Take for example the communication outside the mainstream and “social” media systems. Other examples are the collective attempts for the re- appropriation of the lands, water, natural resources and public spaces, the creative and performing arts openly and freely displayed in the cities, the natural ways of farming, experimentations to switch from market-oriented production to socially oriented consumption.

4. How do you see developments into the future? Are there any positive changes likely?

Our book proposes to regard neoliberalism in its fascist nature to see beyond the academic and intellectual understanding that this view implies. Despite all the formal deprecations of the fascist ideology and practices in European democracies and elsewhere, the recent elections sought the rising and affirmation of fascist and Nazi groups that confirmed that they are not only compatible but synergic to neoliberalism. Populist and fascist groups are likely to continue the extensive use of mythical language and its absurd, nebulous and evocative concepts of community, nation, economic value, and patriotism. In our contemporary capitalism, the legalized forms of oppression operating in a fascist, and capitalistically banal manner will persist, eventually increasing by means of new technologies, especially when we come across the role and function of managerialism.

Link: Interview on The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism | World Economics Association