Recently Beth, an online anarchist friend, commented that “people’s models for genocide are wrong.” Genocide “rarely looks like the Holocaust,” involving the killing of “thousands and millions in camps.” It’s more likely to result from “ordinary prisons and deportations run so badly people start dying. It is an extension, not a break with everyday abuses.”
You’ll notice, of course, that these are things that happen under “normal” capitalist regimes as well. This is because fascists — while a unique threat who must be fought in different ways — do not invent shit. They pick up already available tools of repression and go to fucking town [emphasis added].
This is a level of nuance which, unfortunately, a certain kind of Very Online leftist edgelord fails to grasp. For these people, fine distinctions in the names we call things are a form of ideological capitulation. If late stage, financialized, or vulture capitalism involves an intensification of tendencies that always existed under capitalism, then it makes no sense to have a special name for vulture capitalism. If someone uses the term “alt right” instead of “fascist” for Richard Spencer and his ilk, they’re somehow guilty of soft-pedaling the fascist nature of their politics. If present-day American fascism as it has emerged from the MAGA movement is an outgrowth of characteristics that have always existed in American culture to dome degree, then American capitalism and the bourgeois liberal state have always been fascist.
The problem with this bludgeon approach to language is that it renders language less useful as a tool for analysis. Someone on Twitter once asked me what benefit there was to using the term “vulture capitalism,” if capitalism has always involved rent extraction, with large elements of value destruction or impeding value creation in its profit model. I responded that under vulture capitalism or financialized capitalism, asset stripping and enshittification as the primary source of profit had reached such a quantitative level as to amount to a qualitatively new stage of capitalism. But if this is an inevitable late stage of capitalist development, this person asked, what is to be gained by having a special name for it; isn’t the existence of that stage implied in the generic name ‘capitalism’?” By that argument, I said, you shouldn’t have separate words for a baby or an old person, since they’re all implied in the human life cycle; but that would make language a great deal less useful for describing human life.
Similarly, if you simply refer to the alt right as “fascist” with no further distinction, you have no conceptual apparatus for addressing the unique features of the specific form of fascism that emerged on social media in the 00s, under the influence of neo-reaction and gamer culture, and is exemplified by Richard Spencer or GamerGate.
And getting back to our original example of Trumpian fascism as an outgrowth of the many preexisting toxic, authoritarian tendencies in American culture, we’re left with no way of distinguishing the level of authoritarianism that has emerged from the Tea Party on, and culminated in Trump, from the levels of authoritarianism in previous American history. If we lack anything more nuanced than “America was always fascist,” how are we to deal conceptually with an administration that takes a Schmittian view of executive power and legality, and is following the playbooks of Orban, Erdoğan and Putin in attempting to systematically destroy the independence of the courts and all civil society organizations? As Beth argued above, fascists make use of the authoritarian tools of the existing society — but they do so on a greatly intensified level.
In stressing the unique level of the fascist threat today, we do not deny that it is an outgrowth of strong racist, patriarchal, and authoritarian currents which have existed throughout the country’s history. If anything, the fact that this new level of authoritarianism has grown out of the previous American culture makes it clear that we cannot go back to the status quo ante. Once Trumpism is defeated, we can never return to “normal.” We must finish the work of Reconstruction that was never more than half-heartedly begun after the Civil War, and ended before it was fairly started with the Great Betrayal of 1877; we must reckon with the toxic political, social, and economic culture of our society, and all its structural injustices, on a scale greater than the denazification of postwar Germany, in order to make sure this never happens again.
There seems to be a great deal of overlap, probably not by accident, between the edgelords who say “America/capitalism has always been fascist,” and the assorted tankie, campist, and Dirtbag Left types — Greenwald, Dore, Taibbi, etc. — who actually hate liberals and centrists worse than they hate full-blown fascists. They have a lot in common with Third Period Stalin, who, by denouncing Social Democrats as “social fascists” and forbidding Communists to join them in united fronts, facilitated the Nazi rise to power while at the same time alienating many potential sympathizers. Indeed, as they say “America was always fascist” and “liberals are fascist,” these people often wind up denying that the actual fascists themselves are fascist. Hence their unique level of hatred for “shitlibs” and the “professional-managerial class,” to the point of repeating right-wing talking points (“TDS,” “Russiagate was a big nothingburger”) to own them. We see it in their jostling for guest slots on Tucker Carlson, and in people like Matt Taibbi volunteering as “Twitter files” hacks for Elon Musk. Behind the facade of leftism, they are actually friends of fascism.
The practical effect of saying “America was always fascist,” “capitalism was always fascist,” etc., is the same as that of the Eleventh Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary in 1984: it leaves us less capable of making meaningful statements about reality or acting to change it.
