This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge-unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable.’ ![]() The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are "still" possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. One reason fascism has a chance is that, in the name of progress, its opponents treat it as a historical norm. Then we will clearly see that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism. ![]() We must attain to a conception of history that accords with this insight. ‘The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule. In his thesis VIII of “On the Concept of History,” written in 1940, the following can be read: Years later, when fascism had already triumphed in much of Europe, Benjamin returned to the issue, this time to denounce the mechanisms that condemned social democracy to impotency when it came to confronting fascism. ¿What does tradition teach us about fascism? In a classic text from the 1930s, Walter Benjamin warned of this inverted mirror game in terms of the relationship between aesthetics and politics: the Bolshevik politicization of art, that questioned class differences, was responding to the “aestheticization of politics” that pointed to a warlike specularization that kept the relations of property and production intact. Following George Sorel, who theorized fascism as the agent of a mobilizing myth, the Peruvian Jose Carlos Mariategui perceived a certain play of mirrors between fascism and Bolshevism, both possessing the mobilizing myth, to the detriment of parliamentary democracy. According to Alain Badiou, it is because it fights and destroys the effects of the revolutionary event – the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 – that it confronts, through an inverted appropriation of its forms. ![]() Fascism’s revolutionary appearance is false but effective. Racist, nationalist, militaristic ideology, the politicization of the petty bourgeoisie, and the interpellation of the popular are, in the fascist state, inseparable from large capital’s strategic direction and need for expansion. In the polemic between Nicos Poulantzas and Ernesto Laclau, fascism (a phenomenon that also includes Nazism) is characterized as a phenomenon that mobilizes society against the socialist worker threat, as well as that part of the old ruling bloc that, as occurred in Italy and Germany in the 1930s, hamper the development of its hegemony. The question about the possibility of a contemporary fascism supposes then, an exercise in characterizing the political and historical forces and circumstances and about the conditions of possibility for a non-fascist life.įrom the point of view of the Marxist debate about the State and politics, fascism does not include merely any government with authoritarian or conservative features, but corresponds to a certain conjuncture: monopoly capital, centralized large capital, mobilizes the middle class in its support, seeking to displace the circles of the dominant classes that block its expansion, thus affirming its domination over the whole. ![]() Neither Trump nor Le Pen, nor Bolsonaro, are in conditions to establish a fascist state, and, at the same time, we cannot avoid seeing in them the human archetypes of a certain type of postmodern fascism, a specific type of vitalism that is affirmed in its purity – be it ethnic, class, or national purity – through intolerant violence and by treating entire populations as inferior. Can fascism return? The discomfort that arises from this question is rooted in the necessary ambivalence of any reflection that aims to think both about fascism as a situated historical phenomenon and as a persistent configuration that continues to be updated in different conjunctures as an unrepeatable event, to the extent that the conditions that made it possible are already too distant from the coordinates that define our present, and as a repetition of frightening features associated with that experience that do not cease to triumph a bit everywhere.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |