How to Stop Fascism, page 10
Ecofascism, in its modern form, is spread by numerous anonymous groups and figures. But it has been coherently advocated for years by the late Finnish writer Pentti Linkola. Linkola believed that humans are the cause of the earth’s problems; specifically, humans of the global south, whose demand for development has spurred the destruction of the natural environment. Like the Traditionalists discussed in Chapter 2, Linkola wanted to destroy ‘everything we have developed over the last 100 years’.38 He advocated eugenics, not only to ‘cull the weak’ but to reduce the earth’s population to around half a billion, if necessary through a genocidal civil war. And, of course, his proposed political form was dictatorship.
But Linkola, and the small legion of ‘anons’ currently posting ecofascist messages online, are only the latest products of a long ecological tradition built into Nazism and nineteenth-century white supremacism before that. If you are opposed to historical progress, and the self-liberation of human beings, you are left only with ‘nature’ as the framework for your ideas. ‘Nature’, as Brunel University professor Mark Neocleous points out, was one of the core concepts of twentieth-century fascism. Just as fascism tried to replace class with nationalism, and revolution with endless war, it also ‘obliterates history from politics and fills the space with nature’.39
For Hitler, human society was imperfect wherever it did not operate like nature, with the strong eliminating the weak. This, in itself, was an idea borrowed from the original ‘ecologist’, the late-nineteenth-century anti-Semite Ernst Haeckel.40 For the environmental mystics within the ‘green wing’ of the Nazi Party, the sacredness of the earth became the rationale for purging it of problematic humans, which were the ‘lower’ races – specifically Jews and Slavs.
So it is logical that, presented with the new fact of catastrophic climate change, one wing of the far right has co-opted it as an excuse for the project of ethnic civil war. This bifurcation within the far right, between climate denial and ecofascism, is sometimes presented either as an accident, or the result of different national traditions. For me it’s a matter of progression.
As the populist right reaches the limits of what it can mobilize electorally through climate denial, and as populism is back-filled with fascist theory, we should expect this deeper, more authentic ecofascist strand of the far right to grow, and outright climate denial to be left behind. The fact is that both views lead their followers to oppose globally mandated decarbonization targets.
The deniers are happy to go on burning fossil fuels; the ecofascists accept that climate chaos is coming, but not that we need to abandon the carbon lifestyle. Rather, they dream of murdering migrants at the borders of Europe and America as they flee the climate chaos.
In 1945 Goebbels told journalists that, if the Nazis were defeated, ‘the whole German people will go under with us, and so gloriously that, even after a thousand years, the heroic downfall of the Germans is in the first place in world history’.41 This time around, fascism has an even bigger downfall in mind. Destroying the conditions for human life on the planet would be the ultimate achievement for today’s Hitler fanboys – and entirely in keeping with the tradition of anti-humanism they have sprung from.
COVID-19 AS A PRESSURE COOKER
The fifth kind of trouble is the Covid-19 pandemic. At time of writing (March 2021) it has killed 2.8 million people worldwide, plunged the advanced world into its deepest slump since 1921 and boosted the debt-to-GDP ratios of major countries to wartime levels. The long-term economic and geopolitical effects will take a decade to unfold.42
However badly they performed, most governments tried to stop the spread of the disease – and for a good reason. Capitalism is built on the foundation of human labour. If there is no workforce, there is no profit. If there are no consumers, there is no spending and no borrowing. Equally important: without popular consent there is no government. In March 2020, public health officials told politicians in many countries that they were weeks away from the collapse of their hospital systems. Whatever else you can hide in an eviscerated democracy, you cannot hide that.
No matter how many waves the pandemic generates, nor how effective the vaccines are, the economic results of 2020 are certain to accelerate all the other crises listed above.
First, because the debts incurred, and money created to finance all the bailouts and furlough schemes, are not quickly reversible. They will linger on the balance sheets of states, companies and central banks into the middle of the century. This will limit governments’ room for manoeuvre in the face of the future, purely economic shocks thrown up by a decaying capitalism. It will accentuate the tendency towards secular (long-term) stagnation and exacerbate the tendency for states to seek national, rather than multilateral, routes to growth.
Second, because the pandemic hiked the dissonance between neoliberal ideology and reality to a new level. As governments imposed lockdowns, and economic activity slumped, a distinction emerged that was foreign to neoliberal thinking: between businesses that should be saved and those that were allowed to go to the wall. After years of wage stagnation and the erosion of welfare systems, governments everywhere began to provide incomes directly out of taxation. They began to requisition goods on a wartime basis: personal protective equipment (PPE), ventilators, medicines, food and the means to transport them all. Entire sectors were bailed out; in Britain that included the train-operating companies, large airlines, the London transport body and the private healthcare system.
Who in their right mind can now claim that ‘the market self-corrects’? Yes, the sudden demand for a vaccine stimulated parallel and competitive research projects by Big Pharma and university research labs. But in most cases – through the lifting of regulatory barriers and through direct coordination – it was the state that made it possible.
Third, the pandemic shows that the crisis of human security on the planet is not simply about the climate, but about a wider process of environmental destruction. The eradication of smallpox in 1977 had encouraged immunologists to believe that all infectious diseases could be suppressed or eradicated. But the past fifty years have seen the growth of ‘zoonotic’ viruses that cross from bird and mammal populations to humans: HIV-1, SARS, MERS, Bird Flu, Ebola and now Covid-19.
The factors driving the rise of these new infectious diseases, say scientists, are primarily socio-economic: ‘industrialization, intensive farming, urbanisation, rapid transportation and climate change’.43 In summary, they are an effect of neoliberal globalization. Around three quarters of all newly discovered human diseases are zoonotic – and the rate of increase is accelerating.44 Even once Covid-19 is defeated, it is very likely that a development model based on deforestation, chaotic urbanization and the privatization of public services will produce new, deadly crossover viruses.
All of this, yet again, forces our collective imagination to think beyond capitalism. Faced with the increased virus risk, experts at the intergovernmental body on bio-diversity in 2019 called for:
a fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values, promoting social and environmental responsibilities across all sectors.45
As with climate change, it is possible to imagine a kind of capitalism that achieves this goal, but not this capitalism. And in response – again as with climate change – it forces the authoritarians, populists and fascists to converge on a strategy of untruth.
The first year of the Covid-19 pandemic proved a golden opportunity for both right-wing populism and fascism. Far-right activists quickly colonized the pandemic denial movements (‘it’s a hoax’), the anti-mask movements (‘it’s the state limiting our freedom’) and the anti-vaxx ideology. It was no surprise to see people pulled from these starting points into the stronger vortex of QAnon, and from there into the far right itself.
Because, fundamentally, we are dealing with what the psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich once called ‘people in trouble’: people whose existing ideology has been shattered, and who are pushed by every new shock inflicted on them into the search for a coherent alternative worldview. And while the effects may be temporary, there is no shock greater than being forced to leave your workplace, cease your social life and wear a mask over your face. We may be dealing with Covid-19 as a virus for years; we will probably have to deal with the residual political traumas for even longer.
THE CRISES ARE INTERACTING
In 1930 the Italian communist writer Antonio Gramsci wrote his now-celebrated summary of the events that had defeated the Italian left, and that were about to bring Hitler to power:
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.46
As liberalism surveyed the electoral carnage of the late 2010s, Gramsci’s metaphor of the interregnum crossed over to the political mainstream. In 2019 the Munich Security Report, a prestigious annual summary written for the world’s defence ministers, quoted Gramsci’s words as ‘an apt description of the world order today’.47 In 2020 even the right-wing Tory minister Michael Gove quoted Gramsci in order to justify his government’s break with globalism: ‘Our age is not the 1930s. But it is an age of morbid symptoms. The model that the current generation of political leaders inherited has been crumbling.’48
But the interregnum parallel is inexact. Gramsci could not know it, but fascism would be defeated by an alliance of democratic capitalist countries and the Soviet Union. The ‘interregnum’ he hoped might end by producing socialism in fact ended with the triumph of liberal capitalism in 1945.
Gramsci’s interregnum model may have worked in the two-dimensional space of class struggle and national rivalries. But in our era the crises of technological control, bio-security and climate change have added new dimensions.
Climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic look to policymakers like ‘exogenous shocks’: the proverbial asteroid hitting the planet. But they are each a long-term product of capitalism, and their emergence signals that we are dealing with a crisis of a different order from the 1930s.
Analysts in the sphere of geopolitics, climate and economics use relatively crude models of crisis. They can see (and lament) the breakup of an international order; they can read carbon emission scenarios and compare them to geopolitical ones; they can recognize the secular stagnation of Western economies. But because they cannot accept capitalism as a time-limited system, with a beginning, a middle and an end, they have no way of modelling the whole chaotic reality. As a result, the official predictions continually underestimate the destructive potential of a crisis. That was true of the Iraq War and the insurgency that followed; it was true of 2008 and again true as American liberalism tried to cope with Trump.
If we stand back, and try to comprehend the situation as a totality, then the combined crises outlined here look like products of a deeper problem: capitalism is reaching the limits of its ability to adapt and self-replicate.
In periods of general crisis, cause and effect become difficult to follow. There seem to be many causes but only one effect – the crisis itself. Philosophers call this ‘overdetermination’ – and the word was borrowed by Gramsci’s followers to analyse periods like ours. When several crises at once try to push their way through the bottleneck of a single social reality, we should expect them to interact, and in unpredictable ways.
Orienting ourselves will be much easier if we expect the extreme right to exploit these destructive crossovers, and stop telling ourselves lies like ‘populism has run out of steam’ or ‘to ignore the fascists and they’ll go away’, or to ‘concentrate on the economic issues and ignore cultural divisions’. Because, unlike Gramsci’s era, our interregnum contains a ticking clock.
In the twentieth century all wings of progressive politics had a relaxed attitude to historical time. The social democrats were committed to a long-term, peaceful process of change: capitalism would ‘grow over’ into socialism, and in the meantime the working class would learn the skills needed to run a post-capitalist society. Revolutionaries, by contrast, wanted to force the pace of history – but they were confident that, even if they were defeated, defeats were just stepping stones to victory. Liberals, who had no overall goal, were happy to let progress work at its own pace.
But climate change has introduced a deadline. If, amid the chaos of rising temperatures and repeated pandemics, we allow the new fascism to reach a stage where it can challenge for power, or simply block effective action on decarbonization, the price we pay will be higher than the one paid in the 1930s.
Let’s outline a reasonable worst-case scenario. The Western economies, heavily indebted and impaired as a result of Covid-19, remain stagnant and become more unequal; the quality of democracy goes on declining, as does the enthusiasm of law-enforcement agencies to sustain the rule of law. In the democratic world that would leave big tech, not governments, to hold the line against the extreme right and its online armies, which is not going to happen. As the scale of the change required to decarbonize finally dawns on people, and the compressed timescale needed to achieve it, many begin to reject it as a goal. ‘The worst effects will happen after I am dead,’ they reason, or to people living closer to the equator. Better to deploy razor-wire fences and patrol boats at the nation’s borders.
And Covid-19 has already refocused the attention of major powers onto domestic security and supply, not maintaining the global system.
On its own this scenario increases the opportunities for fascism, but only incrementally. The step-change happens if one or more countries experience a moment of fragility, as Germany did in 1929. As we’ll see in Chapter 6, the Wall Street Crash on its own didn’t kill German democracy, but it did make large numbers of people realize, almost literally overnight, that the old solutions would not work any more. All it took then was for the elites to carry on as normal, doubling down on policies everyone knew would fail – which then laid the basis for the Nazi breakthrough. We should expect such moments of fragility to emerge repeatedly during this multilayered crisis.
The most obvious dangers, at time of writing, are a victory for the far right in France in 2022, a breakthrough for the Italian far right before 2023, the return of a Trump-like Republican president in 2024, a military coup in Brazil to stop Lula and the left regaining power, and a further swing by Modi’s BJP towards the exclusion of India’s Muslims. In addition, though the German conservative establishment (and constitution) looks like a strong bulwark against collaboration with the far right, that could change if the CDU/CSU were forced out of power by a Green/left alliance.
But we should remember: if these crises happen, their outcome is never decided in advance.
In 1936, clutching an antique rifle near the Spanish city of Huesca, the anti-fascist poet John Cornford summed up a way to think positively about a situation like ours. ‘History’s not plasticine,’ he wrote, ‘but roaring sands, yet we must swing it to its final course.’49
Cornford went to the Spanish Civil War as a convinced Marxist, certain of final victory. But the experience of war – fighting with an anarchist unit which refused to obey or issue orders, and which had no chance of achieving victory – showed him the complexities of the world.
In the poem ‘Full Moon at Tierz’, Cornford warns us that, to grasp the complexity of times like ours, you have to start from the big picture and expect sudden change. You cannot mould history like clay; it hits you as a complex, thermodynamic flow, like an avalanche of sand in the desert. You can’t stop the flow, but you can put something in its path and divert it. In Cornford’s case that ‘something’ was his own body and, on the day of his death, a jammed machine gun.
There are moments, Cornford wrote, when the long, slow process of change in history reaches a breaking point and solid things shatter, like at the edge of a glacier. In such moments there is no end point preordained by what went before – by the traditions of liberal democracy, or by the constitutions and treaties already written. He calls this moment ‘the dialectic’s point of change’.
In the 2020s it is possible that the rules-based global order will survive, even if a few, isolated right-wing populist regimes persist. But it is more likely that the world order will break, that we will end up with competing power blocs using trade, technology, diplomatic rivalry and even hostile debt write-offs to force their way out of the globalization that prevailed between 1989 and 2008. They won’t need fascism to achieve that, though it will be their willing helper.
It is also possible that the calculations of the authoritarians go wrong, and that revolts of workers, minorities, women, LGBTQ+ people and the global poor inject their own unyielding complexity into the situation, bringing to power transformative governments of the left and centre left. History tells us that this is the moment when the elite becomes open to the appeal of fascism.
If so, for progressive people who want to think in terms of decades rather than tomorrow’s headlines, the task is pretty clear: to save ourselves from climate change we need to stop fascism and defend democracy. But how?
Fascism triumphed in the twentieth century in three phases. First, irrationalism, mysticism and racism became strongly imbued into the culture of the middle class. Next, a few visionary people codified the fascist ideology – replacing class, history and revolution with race, nature and war – and then built a new form of organization around it. Then, capitalism collapsed, and with it the world order. If you are certain this can never happen again, because the interwar period was so different from ours, I hope Part Two of this book will convince you otherwise.
For now, it remains to sum up the dangers outlined in Part One. Fascism is back, in the form of movements perpetrating symbolic violence against the left, minorities and democratic institutions. Instead of forming a firewall against it, right-wing populism is being consumed by it, and parts of mainstream conservatism have become its willing host. The breakthrough, so far, is at the level of ideas, where fascism’s thought-architecture has become influential. Faced with economic crisis, democratic decay, extreme technological power inequalities, climate chaos and the tensions fuelled by Covid-19, there is a non-negligible risk of a fascist breakthrough.
