Confronting Neo-liberal Regimes: The Post-Marxist Embrace of Populism and Realpolitik (original) (raw)
Related papers
Reclaiming the differences: Three neglected theories of fascism in Lukács, Marcuse, and Bloch
This paper [authors' copy, preprint, to appear in Socialism and Democracy], coauthored with Matthew King (Deakin University), excavates three lesser-known 20th century critical analyses of fascist ideology by leading thinkers that contradict Adorno and Horkheimer's influential conception of fascism in Dialectic of Enlightenment, which anticipated and contributed to shaping subsequent post-structuralist theorizing. These analyses situate fascism as not too rationalist, but ideologically irrationalist; not as the culmination in extremis of a monologic modernity, but the attempt to fabricate alternative anti-liberal modernities; and not inevitable or normative in any way, but as one possible product of specific socioeconomic and political conditions. The first of these accounts (Part 1) is Herbert Marcuse's 1933 critique of what he terms the "heroic-folkish realism" of Nazi thought in figures such as Krieck, Köllreutter, van den Bruck, Schmitt, and others in "The Struggle Against Liberalism in the Totalitarian Theory of the State". With Gyorgy Lukács's 1952 The Destruction of Reason (Part 2), in contrast, we find both an analysis which traces fascist irrationalism back to a lineage of irrationalist thought hailing from the early 19th century, and a Marxist materialist account of the conditions of its emergence and popularisation. Finally, Bloch’s analysis in The Heritage of our Times of the defining features of fascist ideology’s attack on the “Ratio” (Part 3) is coupled to an analysis which goes beyond that of Lukács of the socioeconomic conditions, of the greatest potential present relevance, which explains why particular “non-synchronous” strata of populations (those who fear being left behind, having previously been relatively privileged) are susceptible to Far Right mobilization which passes.
Questions about the "meaning," or the "nature," or the "significance" of fascism have been debated since the early 1920s. Is it a revolutionary or a counterrevolutionary movement? Is it an agent of modernization or an opponent of it? Is it more socialist than capitalist or vice versa? What is the "meaning" of its celebration of cultural revolution? What is the relation between its ideology and its practice, or between fascism as a social movement and fascism as a regime? Some of these questions are easier to answer than others: for example, fascists opposed "modernization" if that term means liberalism, democracy, Marxism, individualism, and feminism, while they favored it if the term means technological and economic advancement, military superiority, efficiency, and the glorification of speed and machines. (It is well-known that one of fascism's ideological sources was Futurism, which shared all these traits.) The traditional Marxist interpretation of fascism has been that, despite its revolutionary rhetoric, in practice it was essentially conservative: it maintained the existing class structure and favored big business while brutally suppressing trade unions and workers' rights. It decisively foreclosed the possibility of revolutionary socialism, thus serving the interests of capitalism. Another interpretation, exemplified by Zeev Sternhell, maintains that fascism was more left than right, more revolutionary than counterrevolutionary: it was basically a revision of Marxism, violently opposed to capitalist society. Far from being a bulwark of the bourgeoisie, it loathed bourgeois decadence and advocated a form of socialism, "national socialism." These are arguably the two most widespread views, or at least the polar opposites around which debate orients itself. In this paper we shall weigh the respective merits of each and decide in favor of the Marxist one, with some qualifications.
On Fascism: A Note on Johannes Agnoli's Contribution
no. 24,, pp. 38-57, 1999
Publications on Fascism are many. Agnoli's recent book Fascism without Revision does not add just another publication. His theoretical focus and political perspective are specific. Although quite unknown in the English-speaking world, Agnoli has been and remains one of the most intriguing and respected Marxist scholars on the continent. (1) His book on Fascism confirms his status as an heretic Marxist thinker. For him, the purpose of social and political theory is not to advance abstract generalizations that subordinate the real existing world of class antagonism to doctrinaire catch-phrases such as totalitarianism. Rather theory's purpose is to supply enlightenment as to the real movement of a perverted world.
Elite Theory versus Marxism: The Twentieth Century's Verdict [2000]
Historical Social Research / Historische Sozialforschung
Noting that Marxist and elite paradigms birthed competing theories on social and political change and that the differential development of these theories depends less on evidence than on ideological leanings, the epilogue to a collection of essays on postsocialist elites compares these paradigms in terms of their polarity in the 20th century. Although fading by the end of the 19th century, Marxism saw renewed vitality as it was embraced as a theoretical and ideological tool of radical and reformist leaders of the European Left. Elite theory's decline is attributed less to a lack of its plausibility than to a lack of ties to organized political forces. However, Marxism's emergence as a major global intellectual and political movement had a concomitant destructive impact on its explanatory power. By the end of the 20th century, Marxist theory comprised many dissipating streams. The decline of elite theory is delineated, noting that its tenets remained intact despite its unpopu...
(2009) The Fascist elites, government and the Grand Council
Portuguese Journal of Social Science, 2009
The aim of this article is to analyse the composition of the Italian political elite during the 21-year Fascist regime . Even today the writings on this subject, which have always been circumscribed by the axioms 'state/party' and 'authoritarianism/totalitarianism , have not managed to find a synthesis to define the regime's true nature. It is our belief that an empirical study of the political elite can help to define these questions.
Critical theory and pre-fascist social thought
History of European Ideas, 1994
A certain well-known phenomenon in postmodern theoretical discourse strikingly expresses the failure of postmodernists to respond to the political history of modernity.' Postmodernists often rearrange conceptual references within a sensitive meta-theoretical divide between romanticism and rational modernism. Assuming the latter as its enemy, romanticism finds its presence in modernity increasingly suppressed.2 The life histories of Paul de Man, Carl Schmitt, Arnold Gehlen and, more importantly, of Martin Heidegger, stand out as warnings against an affirmative appropriation of their texts. It is their alleged fascist ancestry, in the final instance, that makes modern cultural criticism and romanticism so suspect. In the Discourse of Modernity,3Habermas related the counter-enlightenment to early romantic philosophy, Nietzsche and the life philosophers. This is to establish an anti-rational and anti-intellectual stance in cultural criticism, undermining the enlightening role of the 'deconstruction' movement4 One might read the attempts to reconstruct Marxism within a framework of postmodern theory, prosecuted by studious admirers of Giddens, as perhaps too simple and reductionist an undertaking to obtain relief from the bitter implications of the ambiguously enlightening assertions of romantic and cultural critical authors. However, the affinity between romanticism and the theory of modernity is difficult to deny.5 The microsurgical emphasis of this paper, therefore, is a suspicion of modern rationalism's claims to pure and 'enlightened' logic. Although modernist rationalism in the leading centres of Western social thought in the period succeeding the Second World War has brought about a fresh interpretation of its roots, there is, possibly, no avoiding the romantic foundations of theory. The barbarisms of two world wars and of the holocaust have been closely related to the effective history of the radical critique of industrialism and Western civilisation (the so-called Kulturkritik), which once found expression in the pathos of the life philosophers of turn-of-the-century Germany. The early 1920s debates on the event of mass extermination in the war fields of Verdun and at the Somme, indeed, form a prelude to the inquisitive turn taken by this critique since the 1950s. It was none other than Lukacs who held Nietzsche and life philosophy responsible for the advent of irrationality and the 'modern' barbarisms. Post-fascist rationalism levelled similar accusations against phenomenology
Analytical Fascism: What Stares Back When One Stares into the De-Enlightenment
George Washington University Illiberalism Studies eBook Series, 2024
While it is clear what those attracted to fascism today are against, it is less clear what they are for. Not in the sense of how they want to remake society—this is usually clear enough. What is less clear is the fundamental values that are driving their desire to create a different kind of order. Compounding this difficulty, too many liberals are stubbornly sticking to some conventional beliefs: that human nature is as liberals think it is, not something that is fundamentally disputed; that facts are what liberals think they are, even if some people choose to ignore them; and that everybody is pursuing basically the same conception of the good, even if some of them are deluded as to where we are now and how to get where we want to go. But this move to the right is not being driven simply by mistakes; it is a principled move, backed by a coherent, consistent, and historically well-sourced value system, even if this value system is perverse. Fascism has its own conception of the moral subject; of the need for a rigid social hierarchy of men; of the nature of individual rights; and of the importance of purity in blood, soil, and ideology. It believes in the unity of the people, the leader, and the state; it embraces very different and (to liberals) often disturbing moral ends; and it employs starkly different rules of social interaction. And it believes, in the end, that this all leads to the greatest expression of democracy ever invented.
2002
European fascism continues to be one of the most studied and debated aspects of modern history, and I do not pretend to reinvent the wheel with this article. Rather, I seek only to make a contribution towards a comparative history of the different means of functioning within four of the fascist-era dictatorships, and this only within one particular domain- that of the relationship between the single party, the dictator and the government -with the unique and precise objective of illustrating the eventual operational specificness of `fascist regimes' with respect to the available classical tools, and in particular the authoritarian±totalitarian binomial. Ceci etant dit, I will review some of the arguments I employed in connection with this aim regarding the departures from the typical functioning of twentieth-century right-wing dictatorships associated with interwar fascism.