The future of fascism and the totalisation of capitalism

Let’s start with the banal: the brutal violence of fascist groups threatens and kills people, regardless of how isolated or aspiring these groups are. As long as this is the case, militant anti-fascism is needed to stop them. This makes it all the more tragic that state repression in the FRG (germany) has been able to attack and in some cases smash anti-fascist structures largely unhindered in recent years. Beyond the mere declaration of solidarity, there have been few reactions, and certainly no activist or strategic reference to militant anti-fascism. The months-long Day X mobilisation for the announcement of the judgment in the Antifa East trial turned into a complete fiasco, something that even the smaller clashes on the evenings of that weekend unfortunately could not conceal. Even before a reflection on their own inability to act could begin, the effortless switch from the announced militancy to the victim pose on the occasion of the police kettle was once again achieved.

The contrast between the loneliness of the arrested and submerged antifascists and the „We are more“ mass protests could not have been greater. Even if the latter are primarily due to a viral liberal-bourgeois unease with the rise of the AfD, it was striking how groups that see themselves as radical left and anti-fascist were able to integrate themselves into this mobilisation effortlessly and without any major discussions. Ultimately, the very broad alliance that spontaneously came together here, right up to the government camp, corresponds to the strategic vision of the real existing anti-fascist movement since the self-dissolution of the old Antifa groups a good decade ago. As is well known, this strategy could neither prevent the rise of the AfD nor the racist shift to the right, which was carried out by the bourgeois parties without the involvement of the AfD. Even at the height of the anti-AfD protests at the beginning of 2024, the racist tightening of the law could be pushed through without any blushing of the governmental or movement leftists united in solidarity. Thus, the horse of broad alliance mobilisations continues to be ridden to death unimpressed.

This could also be seen in the civil, semi-obedient blockade of the AfD party conference in Essen (city in the west of germany), where the mobilisation phrases, right down to the wording, corresponded to the ten-year-old efforts against the AfD party conferences in Cologne and Hanover – as if Facebook had reminded someone of the anniversary of their demo selfie post. Consequently, this also applied to the event of the protest itself. The ‘Wiedersetzen’ protest alliance praised itself afterwards with the words: „We said what we would do and did what we said.“ Action consensus defines the course of protests in advance, during which nothing unforeseen should happen. The movement managers‘ need for control follows the same logic as the developing predictive police work. Nothing should disrupt the staging of the spectacle, which is always sold as a success in retrospect, through public relations work on the outside and pathetic invocation on the inside. The spectacle itself, on the other hand, does not want to disturb anything either, except the AfD a little. But certainly not the racist normality, which is also represented at the rallies in Essen by figures such as the CDU mayor and business representatives, who see the AfD primarily as an economic risk for the location.

No CEAS reform with asylum procedures in camps at the EU’s external borders, no „repatriation improvement law“ that disenfranchises people in favour of the goal of smooth mass deportations, no payment card that is intended to make their lives more difficult to the point of self-abandonment, will change the fact that those who decide on and implement these laws will be very welcome again at the next sit-in blockade against the AfD. This means that those who do not want deportations will continue to take to the streets with those who want more deportations in order to protest against those who demand even more. However absurd this situation may be, it will continue to stabilise because it stabilises all those involved in it.

The good, the bad, and the lesser evil

The AfD can continue to present itself as the underdog in a cultural battle against the all-powerful alliance of civil society and a government that is supposedly moving to the left. This is all the easier for it in the constellation of so-called „progressive neoliberalism“ that can also be observed internationally. Addressing demands for cultural recognition, adopting linguistic codes from left-wing and feminist movements and making symbolic concessions are government techniques for presenting themselves as progressive. And the left-wing movement can think of nothing else but to make itself the guardian of these government techniques.

Nevertheless, this constellation has suffered from the tightening of asylum and migration policy in recent years and with it the façade of social progressiveness, morality and democracy, which is a central component of the Greens‘ self-image. A progressive, active civil society plays an important role in this as a pillar of political hegemony and mediator of government policy to the population. The crisis in civil society is linked to the fact that the Greens, who were once allied with it, are now pursuing policies that were previously protested against. At the same time, it is all the more urgently needed for the future project of an ecological modernisation of capitalism. The mobilisations against the AfD are bringing government and civil society back together on the basis of what constitutes progressive neoliberalism: a symbolic anti-racism emptied of all content, which conceals and ultimately legitimises real racist policies.

The feeling of finally being part of a dynamic movement again after years of stagnation is too tempting for the (radical) left part of civil society to resist. It also spares them the bitter reflection that their strategy has failed with regard to the AfD, but fulfils a specific function with regard to the bourgeois shift to the right. One example of this is a quote from the spokesperson of an anti-fascist alliance in the run-up to one of the largest anti-AfD demonstrations: „We should no longer be looking at who made what mistakes and made the AfD so strong“. What matters now is that society stands up for its fundamental convictions and democracy. And regarding the mobilisation against the AfD party conference, an IL (interventionist Left; german wide organization of the so called radical-left) spokesperson explained: „In Essen, we are defending the society of the many and its feminist, anti-racist and climate rights achievements.“ The darker the colours in which the possible future of an AfD government is painted, the brighter the present of existing conditions appears. The fact that the left, with this acting, not only apologises for its own failure, but also for the policies of bourgeois governments, is the price it is willing to pay for its ability to form alliances.

Never again

Both the interest in absolving guilt and the unconditional desire for broad alliances policy are linked to a specific view of history and time on the left. The AfD appears as a historical repetition of the NSDAP. Quotes from Bertolt Brecht and Erich Kästner are being used everywhere as a warning against the coming fascism. „Never again is now“ is the central mobilisation slogan in many places. According to tradition and memory, liberated concentration camp inmates are said to have shouted „Never again“ at the memorial act in Buchenwald in April 1945, where the „Oath of Buchenwald“ was written, which states: „We will only stop the fight when the last guilty person stands before the judges of the peoples/nations. The destruction of Nazism and its roots is our slogan. The construction of a new world of peace and freedom is our goal. We owe this to our murdered comrades and their families“. It is first and foremost those murdered in the past for whose sake action should be taken, not those threatened by the future. Only the destruction of Nazism with its roots (!) can bring justice to those murdered and at the same time break open the continuum of history that produced the causes of fascism and made its repetition possible. The defence of existing democracy as a lesser evil against the looming fascism of the AfD expresses a completely different view of history. The only possibility of a good future lies in the permanent position of the bourgeois present. „Never again is now“ – forever. The perpetuation of a society based on global exploitation and colonialism, which constantly produces new wars and camps, the suffering of those starving, drowning, disenfranchised and racialised in it and through it, appears to be an acceptable price for averting the future.

The thirties lie ahead of us

This headline could belong to a current feature article or antifa leaflet, but it is the title of a lecture given by the French philosopher Gérard Granel in 1989. Granel considered the „provocation“ it contained to be so obvious that he was not afraid of being misunderstood:

„Of course, I am not saying that the historical phenomena of fascism, Nazism and Stalinism have only seemingly disappeared and are in fact lurking behind the front door of the future, waiting to return and drag us along with them. This is not about a ‚return of the real‘ – an idea that, incidentally, is always inappropriate if we want to think history, and even more so if the historical dimension in question is that of the future. The future has no shape. For this reason, dealing with it should never be understood as an attempt to predict ‚what might happen to us‘.“1

Granel is concerned with something else, namely approaching the essence of modernity via an understanding of possibility, according to which possibilitas (possibility) is the same as essentia (essence). Existence possesses various „possible ways of being“. Granel sees the essence of bourgeois modernity in the combination of labour, wealth and infinity in the form of unlimited production. Once established, the principle of profit logic leads to a dissolution of boundaries that subordinates every area of the world to its logic. Money must multiply into more money via the commodity; in order to achieve this, it must constantly open up new fields and commodify them. Granel speaks of the „increasing colonisation of every inner-worldly area by the ‚totalisation of the infinite‘ that drives our history (and all our histories)“.2 Beyond the sphere of commercial production, there can therefore be no reality in politics, art, education or religion that does not have to obey commercial logic.

„But since the abstract and infinite nature of this logic, which now operates in every human activity as its ‚commercial side‘, has nothing to do with the inner properties and essential needs of the various spheres of action just enumerated, what Aristotle had already understood would inevitably happen if only a drop of infinity were added to what is essentially finite: the disappearance of the finite through furious delimitation.“3

In the historical situation of the Weimar Republic, Granel sees a particularly clear need for totality arising from two movements. Firstly, the movement of the totality of production, the intensification of the expenditure of labour power, the catch-up Fordist modernisation, which, in comparison to France, Great Britain and the USA, did not encounter a mediating regulation that would have allowed the working class to „simultaneously combat and process such a rapid acceleration of infinite production.“4 Secondly, the need to keep everything under control in the face of the rapid dissolution of boundaries, and this in the context of a political construction of the Weimar Republic, into which the heterogeneous segments of the population were pressed without being held together by a historically grown political alliance, a functioning imaginary, as Granel describes the political totality of the state. This was the reason „why the lack of unity long before the crisis of 1929 gave rise to the desire for social uniformity and political leadership in order to raise Germany to the highest level of production and modern technology and finally make it a strong nation in history.“5

Granel emphasises that „only a few of the configurations that caused the world’s first explosion in the 1930s along some of its weak points“6 are transferable to the present day. A decisive difference may lie in the fact that the heavy fall in profit rates in the years surrounding the world economic crisis of 1929 included the possibility of its counter-tendencies: the productive destruction caused by crises and war, the integration of the Global South in imperialist and decolonial form into the world market, the proletarianisation of its population, the mobilisation of women into production through bourgeois equality, the productivity boosts through scientific and technological innovations and through an intensification of the squeezing of labour power.

When the economic upswing exhausted itself, the incipient profit crisis of the 1970s was overcome by neoliberalism, as a result of which the significance of industrial production declined. Instead, financialisation and the logistics revolution led to the dominance of the circulation sector as the hegemonic spheres of capital accumulation, as Joshua Clover writes.7 With the dissolution of the political-economic class compromise of Fordism, neoliberalism simultaneously dismantled mass organisations, the idea of social planning in all fields from architecture, urban planning, the handling of media, health policy and social hygiene to family housekeeping. This was also the terrain of historical fascism and it cannot simply be rebuilt.

Racing standstill

Today, it is becoming increasingly clear that the neoliberal innovation cycle has also exhausted itself and that its crises are only being postponed at the cost of ever larger financial bubbles and state rescue programmes. Capital’s need for the rapid dissolution of boundaries is coming up against a deep stagnation of the economy and a downward trend in profit rates. „Deceptive perceptions that leave the impression that life is still moving fast stem from the fact that acceleration has been replaced by shorter production cycles. Investments have to pay off in the short term, and the economy moves more nervously in smaller circles“8 writes Hans-Christian Dany. The hype surrounding terms such as „Second Machine Age“ or „Industry 4.0“ creates a revolutionary image of new devices and technologies which, as Jason E. Smith points out, in fact bring virtually no productivity gains in labour and are primarily used in production as monitoring techniques.9 The continued existence of a surplus population that has no access to secure jobs and the growing proportion of it that is no longer mobilised by capital into productive employment, even in the short boom phases, are a further indication that the total mobilisation of capital is in crisis, as Endnotes writes in an as yet unpublished contribution to the Non-Congress in Berlin.10 „Stagnation is a state of non-movement.“ But capital cannot allow this state to persist, it is nothing if it is not in motion, it must constantly expand, grow beyond its limits, open up new, not yet commoditised areas.

In a world in which the geographical territories left unexplored by capitalism are shrinking, our bodies themselves are becoming a terrain of capitalist land grabbing (Landnahme). What is being colonised today are our souls, our emotions, desires and wishes, the relationships and interactions between us, which are measured, standardised and traded on the market in the form of data. This mobilisation no longer refers primarily to wage labourers and commodities at the sites of their production, but extends total production to the whole of society by commodifying the interaction between people. The science of the relationship between organic living beings and their external world is ‘ecology’. This is why we have elsewhere examined the connection between the biopolitical seizure of land and green extractivism, the ecologisation of society that goes hand in hand with the ongoing destruction of the world, under the concept of an ecological accumulation regime.11 We do not know whether such an accumulation regime will prevail in the sense of a temporary departure from stagnation and an upswing. What is decisive for our time is the attempt to enforce it, in the possibility for us of recognising the essence, to return to Granel. With him, we could describe the growing awareness of the limits of nature and thus of growth since the 1970s as a „push of finiteness“.i and its relationship to the business of green technologies that emerged at the same time. For a capitalism based on total and infinite mobilisation can accept neither limits nor standstill or even regression. This is why the answer to the intrusion of finiteness is not degrowth, but the illusion of infinity. That is why research is being carried out into how CO2 can be shot into the ground, the oceans and the stratosphere. That is why we are not producing less waste, but are constantly finding new places to store it. This is why mines of rare earth metals are being drilled deeper and deeper, the more they are invoked as an instrument of sustainability. This is why the destruction of the world is increasing, just as its ecological protection is becoming the guiding programme of society. It is no coincidence that the need for control is growing in parallel with this dissolution of boundaries and that the logic of predicting the future is spreading into more and more areas, for example in predictive police and judicial work or the surveillance of public spaces.12

Taken together, this means that we are more likely to discover extreme right-wingers with a project for the future among a few transhumanists in Silicon Valley or green Malthusians than in the parliamentary factions of European fascists. But it means even more that the possibility of a monstrous combination of the total need for a modernising dissolution of boundaries and at the same time an authoritarian control of this movement can be found in ecologisation and its biological and technological access.13 We can also approach this specific configuration via another field. Endnotes points us to a certain way in which capital reacts when the dynamics of the economy slow down. It tends to accelerate mobilisation to the point of war and destruction.

„…like the cloud carries the rain“?

Let us remember that Mussolini’s path from socialism to fascism began with his demand that Italy enter the First World War. The processing of the war experience played an important role in the emergence of the fascist mass base, whether in the form of the front-line soldiers in the later German Freikorps and Italian Arditi (although there was also an anti-fascist flavour in the form of the „Arditi del popolo“), or in the form of the younger generation, who had narrowly missed out on active service in the war and developed a fanatical militarism as a result. The glorification of war, a longing for death and a cult of soldierly masculinity played a decisive role in fascism on both an individual and collective level. The Futurist Manifesto, which became the ideological inspiration of the Italian fascists, states: „We want to glorify war – the only hygiene in the world – militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, for which one dies, and contempt for women.“ But the war did not remain at the level of ideology and propaganda. It took on a very real political dimension that combined the geopolitical domination of territory with the demographic-ethnic idea of the conquest of living space or spazio vitale. In Italy, it was about a new Roman-Italian empire in the Mediterranean, which led to the attack on Abyssinia in 1935, historically in the transition between a catch-up colonial war and the prototype of total war. In Germany, the conquest of the ethnic settlement area in the east included the goal of the genocidal enslavement of the Slavic population and the complete annihilation of the Jewish population. At the same time, fascism in Germany and Italy was in a clearly defined historical imperial rivalry with Great Britain and France.

The difference to the present is striking. Certainly, the cult of soldierly masculinity and the idea of the army as the school of the nation still play a role. The mutual attraction between fascism and the military is still evident and the resulting arming of the extreme right and its presence in army circles is worrying. And the common salon fascist in front of the television would at least like to see the army deployed at the external borders to keep the refugees out. But no fascists were needed for the armament and brutal defence of Fortress Europe. And the modern projects of imperial expansion can be found ideologically and politically in the bourgeois camp, especially in the green-liberal camp. The most offensive ideas about sending regular army units to Ukraine, the ever-increasing demands for rearmament and even the flirtation with direct military strikes all come from this camp, which has been practised in imperialism for decades, from France’s Africa policy to Germany’s dominance over south-east Europe. The increasingly likely war over Taiwan will not be fought for the control of territory and population, not in the name of national expansion, but in the name of digitally controlled ecologisation, for the control of the raw materials and semiconductor production needed for this.

European fascism, on the other hand, lacks an imperial project. It is on the historical defensive, far removed from its youthful, brutal utopianism. The recreation of the past as a vision of historical fascism is gone. Futurism can no longer influence today’s fascism ideologically, because the latter has lost the future. „One hundred years later, expansion is over, the urge to conquer has been replaced by fear of the invasion of foreign immigrants“14as the Italian autonomist Marxist Bifo Berardi writes. „What is on the rise is geronto-fascism: the fascism of senile old age, fascism as a furious reaction to the ageing of the ‚white race‘.“

The parties of the extreme right have a contradictory to pragmatic attitude towards the real war projects of the bourgeois governments. Of course, there is criticism of the „foreign domination“ of national foreign policy, the demand that funds should be better used for the „own people“, the barely concealed sympathy for Putin’s macho nationalism, etc., but in case of doubt, these positions can also be radically changed if it facilitates access to power. What Meloni did in Italy with her support for the war in Ukraine, Bardella is doing in France. Of course, the participation of geronto-fascism in the war cannot be ruled out. But it is not the driving force on the way there.

Enjoyment without limits

If the possibility of assuming a similar function for the modernisation of capitalism to that fulfilled by historical fascism in the 20th century is best represented today by digital and ecological mobilisation, then there is a kernel of truth in the polemic of green or liberal fascism.15 The question of whether the analogy to fascism is analytically helpful is a different one. The way in which rule is enforced and hegemony is organised is certainly very different. Although social media are successfully used by fascist milieus, they function completely differently to the centralised radio and newspaper propaganda of the 20th century. All traditional mass organisations in the political and pre-political sphere are massively losing members and significance, and they also play a much smaller role in today’s fascism (India with the RSS is a significant exception).

The rebellion around 1968 set in motion a questioning of traditional values, repressive norms, conservative structures and social authorities. Over time, however, these attempts at liberation were turned around and, in neoliberalism, became the basis for a modernisation of rule that is internalised by the subject, is no longer perceived as an external authority and is based on techniques of constant self-optimisation. Based on Lacanian psychoanalysis, one could speak of the death of the father. With paternal authority disappears a symbolic order that had regulated enjoyment through a ban and against which historical anti-authoritarian protest from the left was formed.

However, it is precisely this order of prohibition and law that has now been almost completely eroded; it no longer exists. It has been replaced by a neoliberal imperative of enjoyment and by the „discourse of the university“, i.e. a hegemonic rule by experts, technocrats and science. The left finds it much more difficult to confront this domination, especially as the latter has modernised itself by integrating and reversing left-wing emancipation. Instead, it reproduces certain restrictions on enjoyment in a reciprocal relationship with the dominant expert discourse, which it continues to influence and modernise at the level of language policy, for example. This becomes particularly clear in the climate discourse or in dealing with the pandemic measures.

The right, on the other hand, which has always found street protests and rebellion difficult since the Second World War due to its identification with (state) authority, is so successful today because it stages protests against the experts and their actual or supposed bans. Nobody should regulate my ‘Schnitzel’, my ‘diesel’ car, my language or my playlist. The contradictory relationship between enabling enjoyment against its restrictions and the need to control it at the same time explains why figures such as Berlusconi or Trump are celebrated by their conservative-religious electorate, even though they quite obviously violate any notion of sexuality being bound to marriage and family.

It is necessary to analyse precisely what form authoritarian rule takes in each case, what the approval of authoritarian leader figures – such as Bolsonaro – is based on, what social needs they address. Adolf Hitler, for example, was the incarnation of the classic authoritarian leader figure of the strict, ascetic, punitive father who led and guided the masses like a good shepherd (an old Christian motif). Today’s forms of power of self-leadership, self-care or even the „discourse of the university“ constitute new forms of authoritarian leadership. They often incarnate the figure of a self-referential individualism that openly propagates desire and enjoyment, in which the leader figures openly display their macho basic characters, sexual potency (with simultaneous homophobia) and economic success and turn them into „proof“ of their election.

Protest and obedience can thus be enjoyed simultaneously in the right-wing camp, where they still fell apart in the traditional opposition of conservative and emancipatory politics. This is why right-wing protest also goes hand in hand with the demand for obedience and submission, e.g. in the form of restrictive legislation on abortion or bans on homosexual marriages. However, these bans are also propagated as liberation: from the state-legitimised „murder of the unborn“, for example, or from the visibility of homosexuality in public. This form of right-wing politics is therefore not simply successful because it provides a better explanation of the situation in the world, but a form of enjoyment that the left hardly has to offer at the moment.

A post-ideological totalitarianism

Today, capitalism no longer functions through a legitimising ideology, such as religion, nationalism or liberalism used to represent in the past. Of course, this does not mean that things have to be less authoritarian. Rather, the factual constraints (Sachzwang) that have taken their place, precisely because they are no longer ideologically justified and therefore politically debatable, establish a form of rule without alternative as rational administration. Anything that contradicts a reality without alternatives must therefore be portrayed all the more vehemently as absolutely irrational and harmful to society as a whole, making it all the more total. The Italian psychoanalyst Massimo Recalcati calls this post-ideological totalitarianism. The friend-enemy constellations can be flexibly altered here, but at the same time they always tend to include those who cannot be utilised from the perspective of capital and therefore represent a danger without benefit, the (racialised) surplus proletariat.

Fascism is not quite the other of this totalising capitalist democracy, today less than ever. Its idea is only to quantitatively expand the projects of neoliberalism. The murderous defence against migration at the borders, the disenfranchisement of citizens and forced deportation, the attack on trade unions and the right to strike, the social-chauvinist humiliation of the poor and the surplus population, the expansion of the police state with more and more deaths through police violence. Who could guess who we mean in each case? Renzi or Meloni? Macron or Bardella? Trump or Obama? The future or the present?

This also applies to the warning that fascism in power could reorganise the constitution, abolish the laws and human rights that inhibit it and perpetuate its rule. Meanwhile, it was Renzi who pushed for an authoritarian constitutional referendum in Italy; Macron, who ruled against all social resistance with more and more presidential decrees.

Ernst Fraenkel, a lawyer and political scientist of Jewish origin, approached the transformation of the state of emergency under Nazi-rule with the concept of the „double state“. He analysed a state of measures in which all legal categories were up for grabs as soon as they stood in the way of Nazi policy, whereby this political aspect was not legally codified but could be arbitrarily redefined again and again. At the same time, a normative state continued to exist in other areas, above all, but not exclusively, the economy, in which laws, legal judgements and administrative acts remained valid. Although the structures of the state of measures repeatedly intervened in other areas, they never completely abolished the normative state, as this would not have been functional for the Nazis. Fraenkel therefore sees the state of exception as being limited neither to a definable area of society nor to a specific historical sequence.

In 2007, historian Michael Wildt found Fraenkel’s concept of the dual state „surprisingly relevant even in the 21st century. For what is Guantánamo other than an attempt to create a lawless sector outside the constitutional order in which ‚measures alone rule‘?“16 However, his view that today’s state is „capable of gradually bringing the sectors of the state of measures back under the rule of law“ may seem overly optimistic in view of the expansion of anti-terror legislation, the suspension of asylum and human rights through the expansion of the camps or the temporary suspension of fundamental rights during the coronavirus pandemic.17 Instead, the dual state theory could provide a different approach to a central sentence in Walter Benjamin’s work: „The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ’state of exception‘ in which we live is the norm.“18

Communis hostis omnium

So what is fascism’s relationship to bourgeois society, if not as its other? Historically, fascism was a putschist counter-revolution against the threat to bourgeois society posed by the revolutionary labour movement. It was therefore supported by elites from capital and partly monarchy because it defended bourgeois rule in a different, reactionary, terrorist, but still capitalist form. Today, there is no sign of a revolutionary left far and wide. If there is a shake-up of power at all, then it comes from the non-movements, the spontaneous, intense and short-lived uprisings, „subjective expressions of the objective disorder of our time.“19 In the covid riots at the beginning of 2021 in the Netherlands20 and during the Nahel Riots21 the fascists emerged under the eyes of the cops to take violent action against the rebels and „restore order“. It is precisely in this capacity that we should hate and fight the fascists, as a party to order, not as a threat to it.

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen describes today’s fascism in relation to the non-movements as a protest against protest. Inspired by George Jackson, he sees fascism as a preemptive elimination of the possibility of a more radical opposition to neoliberal globalisation and the connection between capitalism and the nation state.22 This is true whether it operates outside the non-movements or tries to spread within them. But does it not also apply to today’s hegemonic anti-fascism? Quite a few non-movements have been denounced by the left in the name of anti-fascism as right-wing or cross-front (Querfront), the ‘yellow west’ as well as the mobilisations against lockdowns and health passports.23 Anti-fascism is regularly and internationally used to call for the election of left-wing coalitions in response to the rise of fascist parties. But the broader the popular front that is supposed to prevent fascism becomes, the more the left is identified with power, the less it is seen as a possible alternative. And the actual policies of these coalitions also contribute to increasing the proportion of non-voters as well as the percentage of votes for the right. So that at the next election, the alliance will have to become even broader, even more totalised. The latest farce in this story is the Nouveau Front Populaire in France, and the fact that it is even supported by anti-fascist left-wing radicals only shows how much this milieu has come to an end.

We must abandon this anti-fascism because it has become inextricably linked to capitalist democracy, which keeps fascism alive as a zombie. The only possible way to realise the original promise of anti-fascism is to break this link. This is not a new realisation. As early as the 1920s, the Italian communist Amadeo Bordiga warned that popular front politics could not stop fascism, but would instead undermine the revolutionary class struggle, which could be the only answer to both capitalist democracy and fascism. As inspiring as Bordiga’s critique of the anti-fascism of his time is, it was at the same time tied to absolute subordination to the class struggle organised by the Communist Party. However, with the disappearance of the labour movement as a historically revolutionary subject, the class struggles linked to this subject also lost their revolutionary character.

What remains of the left and is not fully integrated is clinging to the old concepts of the labour movement, mass political organisations, strikes and socialist realpolitik. It appeals to a working class that has been atomised, to milieus that have been smashed, to a state that has given up its role as a socio-political mediator or liberal legal authority. It is a geronto-socialism that produces a geronto-antifascism of popular front politics. The propagation of a revolutionary anti-capitalist anti-fascism, the mobilisation of a hopeful future, appears to us as the other side of this coin as long as the historical conditions of this policy are not analysed. The less it has a concept of transcendence, an idea of a completely different world, the more phrase-like it appears. It appears all the more ridiculous the more isolated it becomes, and all the more detached from reality the less willing it is to make this isolation the starting point for reflection, instead of obsessively covering it up through activism and alliance politics.

This throws us back to the non-movements. Not because we want to declare them the new revolutionary subject, which would be exactly the wrong conclusion. They refer precisely to the rejection of the reproduction of politics, identities and democracy, to the renunciation of all representation. We are aware of their limitations, defeats, the possibility of their relapse into integration or regression. But what we see emerging in them is a profound anger at the circumstances, a break with the consensus, a refusal of integration, a desire for life beyond its administration and reduction to mere survival. Where they could not be appropriated, they were declared enemies on all sides, by the left and the right, the state and civil society. They did not always seek this enmity, but they had to accept it in order to continue fighting. And that is precisely why they were anything but alone. In the way they attacked, the way they evaded the total mobilisation of the state and capital, the way they organised their reproduction, their lives, their coming together, however briefly, we see a flash of the possibility of a break with the status quo, an absolute negation of the existing. This is far from a new revolutionary strategy. But in the midst of a post-ideological totalitarianism, it is not exactly little either.

It is the hatred to the present that keeps the future open.

1Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 233f.

2Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 256.

3Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 249f.

4Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 253.

5Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 253.

6Granel, Gérard: Die Dreißigerjahre liegen vor uns, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 238.

7Clover, Joshua: Riot. Strike. Riot. The New Era of Uprisings, Hamburg 2021.

8Dany, Hans-Christian: Faster than the sun. From a frantic standstill into an unknown future, Hamburg 2015, p. 17.

9Smith, Jason E.: Smart Machines and Service Work. Automation in an Age of Stagnation, London 2020.

10https://nonkongress.noblogs.org/

11From the burning hut: Time of ecology. The new accumulation regime, January 2024. online at: https://inferno.noblogs.org/post/2024/01/11/zeit-der-oekologie/

iGranel, Gérard: The thirties lie ahead of us, in: Granel, Gérard: Die totale Produktion. Technology, capital and the logic of infinity, Vienna 2020, p. 257.

12On these phenomena and their connection to digitalisation and ecology, see: Colletivo Sumud: Ein Organ das alles Kontrolliert – Eine Kontrolle die alles organisiert, German translation online at: https://inferno.noblogs.org/post/2024/05/26/ein-organ-das-alles-kontrolliert-eine-kontrolle-die-alles-organisiert/

13Enlightening analyses of this connection can be found in two articles by Mohand; Mohand: So much for Ecology, so much for Humanity, online at: https://illwill.com/so-much-for-ecology; Mohand: Bifurcation in the Civilisation of Capitol, online at: https://illwill.com/bifurcation

14Berardi, Franco „Bifo“: Geronto-Fascism. The Alzheimer’s of history 1922-2022, online at: https://sunzibingfa.noblogs.org/post/2022/10/17/geronto-faschismus/

15Rafanell i Orra, Josep: Against liberal fascism, online at: https://illwill.com/against-liberal-fascism

16Wildt, Michael: The transformation of the state of emergency. Ernst Fraenkel’s analysis of Nazi rule and its political relevance, Version: 1.0, in: Docupedia-Zeitgeschichte, 1 June 2011, online at: http://docupedia.de/zg/Fraenkel.2C_Der_Doppelstaat. (Re-publication of: Wildt, Michael: The Transformation of the State of Emergency. Ernst Fraenkel’s analysis of Nazi rule and its political topicality, in: Danyel, Jürgen/Kirsch, Jan-Holger /Sabrow, Martin (eds.), 50 Klassiker der Zeitgeschichte, Göttingen 2007, pp. 19-23).

17A more detailed discussion of the politics of the state of exception in the ecological accumulation regime can be found in the second chapter here: From the Burning Hut: Time of Ecology. The new accumulation regime, January 2024. Online at: https://inferno.noblogs.org/post/2024/01/11/zeit-der-oekologie/

18Benjamin, Walter: On the Concept of History, in: Tiedemann, Rolf/Schweppenhäuser, Hermann (eds.): Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. I.2, Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 697.

19Endnotes: Forward Barbarians, December 2020, German translation in Sunzi Bingfa from 11 January 2021, online at: https://sunzibingfa.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/11/vorwaerts-barbaren/

20Riot Turtle: Corona riots in the Netherlands: „The government has stolen millions from families, has destroyed families“, in: Sunzi Bingfa, 28 January 2021, online at: https://sunzibingfa.noblogs.org/post/2021/01/28/corona-riots-in-den-niederlanden-die-regierung-hat-den-familien-millionen-gestohlen-hat-familien-zerstoert/

21Pour Nahel. Anthology of Uprisings, German translation from November 2023, online at: https://nahelanthologie.blackblogs.org/

22Bolt Rasmussen, Mikkel: Fascist Spectacle, October 2021, online at: https://illwill.com/fascist-spectacle#fn2

23Michele Garau has written important strategic reflections on the non-movements and their relationship to the left in the context of the modernisation of capitalism: Garau, Michele: The Strategy of Separation, online at: https://illwill.com/separation. A German translation of his article will soon be published on inferno.noblogs.org