Autonomies

… to make use of the weapons created by fascism, which has been
allowed to use the fundamental aspirations of people for affective exultation
and fanaticism. But we affirm that the exaltation… must be
placed in the service… of a grandeur quite different from that of the
nationalists.

Georges Bataille, Counter-Attack: Union of the Struggle of Revolutionary Intellectuals

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve. Not the least reason that the latter has a chance is that its opponents, in the name of progress, greet it as a historical norm. – The astonishment that the things we are experiencing in the 20th century are “still” possible is by no means philosophical. It is not the beginning of knowledge, unless it would be the knowledge that the conception of history on which it rests is untenable.

Walter Benjamin, On the concept of history

Fascism was a desperate attempt to defend the bourgeois economy from the dual threat
of crisis and proletarian subversion, a state of siege in which capitalist society saved itself by giving itself an emergency dose of rationalization in the form of massive state intervention. But this rationalization is hampered by the extreme irrationality of its methods. Although fascism rallies to the defense of the main icons of a bourgeois ideology that has become conservative (family, private property, moral order, patriotism), while mobilizing the petty bourgeoisie and the unemployed workers who are panic-stricken by economic crisis or disillusioned by the socialist movement’s failure to bring about a revolution, it is not itself fundamentally ideological. It presents itself as what it is — a violent resurrection of myth calling for participation in a community defined by archaic pseudovalues: race, blood, leader. Fascism is a technologically equipped primitivism. Its factitious mythological rehashes are presented in the spectacular context of the most modern means of conditioning and illusion. It is thus a significant factor in the formation
of the modern spectacle, and its role in the destruction of the old working-class movement also makes it one of the founding forces of present-day society. But since it is also the most costly method of preserving the capitalist order, it has generally ended up being replaced by the major capitalist states, which represent stronger and more rational forms of that order.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

When I see that young people are in the process of losing their old common values and absorbing the new models imposed by capitalism, running the risk of dehumanising themselves and being prey to an abominable aphasia, to a brutal absence of critical capacity, to a factious passivity, I remember that they were the characteristics of the S.S. – and I see spread over our cities the horrible shadow of the swastika.

Pier-Paolo Pasolini, Scritti corsari

How do we rid our speech and our acts, our hearts and our pleasures, of
fascism? How do we ferret out the fascism that is ingrained in our
behavior?

Michel Foucault, “Preface” to Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

The first of a series of reflections on fascism and anti-fascism, for our somber times …

Continue reading →