Neoliberalism Paved the Way for Authoritarian Right-Wing Populism

Neoliberalism’s ruling elite eschews real democracy, seeing it as the enemy of markets.

By Henry A. Giroux , TRUTHOUT

Published September 26, 2019

Talk of a looming recession is heating up as the global economy slows and President Trump’s tiff with China unsettles financial markets. As world trade contracts, stock markets drop, the manufacturing sector in the United States is in decline for the first time in a decade, and farmers and steel workers continue losing their income and jobs.

Rumors of a coming recession accentuate fears about the further deterioration of conditions faced by workers and the poor, who are already suffering from precarious employment, poverty, lack of meaningful work and dwindling pensions. A global economic slump would make living standards for the poor even worse. As Ashley Smith points out, levels of impoverishment in the United States are already shocking, with “four out of every ten families [struggling] to meet the costs of food, housing, health care, and utilities every month.”

Just as the 2008 global economic crisis revealed the failures of liberal democracy and the scourge of neoliberalism, a new economic recession in 2019 could also reveal how institutions meant to serve the public interest and offer support for a progressive politics now serve authoritarian ideologies and a ruling elite that views democracy as the enemy of market-based freedoms and white nationalism.

What has not been learned from the 2008 crisis is that an economic crisis neither unites those most affected in favor of a progressive politics nor does it offer any political guarantees regarding the direction of social change. Instead, the emotions that fueled massive public anger toward elites and globalization gave rise to the celebration of populist demagogues and a right-wing tsunami of misdirected anger, hate and violence toward undocumented immigrants, refugees, Muslims and people of color.

The 2008 financial crisis wreaked havoc in multiple ways. Yet there was another crisis that received little attention: a crisis of agency. This crisis centered around matters of identity, self-determination and collective resistance, which were undermined in profound ways, giving rise to and legitimating the emergence of authoritarian populist movements in many parts of the world, such as United States, Hungary, Poland and Brazil.

At the heart of this shift was the declining belief in the legitimacy of both liberal democracy and its pledges about trickle-down wealth, economic security and broadening equal opportunities preached by the apostles of neoliberalism. In many ways, public faith in the welfare state, quality employment opportunities, institutional possibilities and a secure future for each generation collapsed. In part, this was a consequence of the post-war economic boom giving way to massive degrees of inequality, the off-shoring of wealth and power, the enactment of cruel austerity measures, an expanding regime of precarity, and a cut-throat economic and social environment in which individual interests and needs prevailed over any consideration of the common good. As liberalism aligned itself with corporate and political power, both the Democratic and Republican Parties embraced financial reforms that increased the wealth of the bankers and corporate elite while doing nothing to prevent people from losing their homes, being strapped with chronic debt, seeing their pensions disappear, and facing a future of uncertainty and no long-term prospects or guarantees.

Neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality.

In an age of economic anxiety, existential insecurity and a growing culture of fear, liberalism’s overheated emphasis on individual liberties “made human beings subordinate to the market, replacing social bonds with market relations and sanctifying greed,” as noted by Pankaj Mishra. In this instance, neoliberalism became an incubator for a growing authoritarian populism fed largely by economic inequality. The latter was the outcome of a growing cultural and political polarization that made “it possible for haters to come out from the margins, form larger groups and make political trouble.” This toxic polarization and surge of right-wing populism produced by casino capitalism was accentuated with the growth of fascist groups that shared a skepticism of international organizations, supported a militant right-wing nationalism, and championed a surge of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-democratic values.

This apocalyptic populism was rooted in a profound discontent for the empty promises of a neoliberal ideology that made capitalism and democracy synonymous, and markets the model for all social relations. In addition, the Democratic proponents of neoliberalism, such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, participated in the dismantling of the social contract, widening economic inequality, and burgeoning landscapes of joblessness, misery, anger and despair.

At the same time, they enacted policies that dismantled civic culture and undermined a wide range of democratic institutions that extended from the media to public goods such as public and higher education. Under such circumstances, democratic narratives, values and modes of solidarity, which traded in shared responsibilities and shared hopes, were replaced by a market-based focus on a regressive notion of hyper-individualism, ego-centered values and a view of individual responsibility that eviscerated any broader notion of social, systemic, and corporate problems and accountability.

Ways of imagining society through a collective ethos became fractured, and a comprehensive understanding of politics as inclusive and participatory morphed into an anti-politics marked by an investment in the language of individual rights, individual choice and the power of rights-bearing individuals.

Under the reign of neoliberalism, language became thinner and more individualistic, detached from history and more self-oriented, all the while undermining viable democratic social spheres as spaces where politics bring people together as collective agents and critically engaged citizens. Neoliberal language is written in the discourse of economics and market values, not ethics. Under such circumstances, shallowness becomes an asset rather than a liability. Increasingly, the watered-down language of liberal democracy, with its over-emphasis on individual rights and its neoliberal coddling of the financial elite, gave way to a regressive notion of the social marked by rising authoritarian tendencies, unchecked nativism, unapologetic expressions of bigotry, misdirected anger and the language of resentment-filled revolt. Liberal democracies across the globe appeared out of touch with not only the misery and suffering caused by neoliberal policies, they also produced an insular and arrogant group of politicians who regarded themselves as an enlightened political formation that worked “on behalf of an ignorant public.” The ultimate consequence was to produce later what Wolfgang Merkel describes as “a rebellion of the disenfranchised.” A series of political uprisings made it clear that neoliberalism was suffering from a crisis of legitimacy further accentuated by the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the election of Donald Trump, support for the National Rally (formerly known as the National Front) in France, and the emergence of powerful right-wing populist movements across the globe. 

What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists.

As a regime of affective management, neoliberalism created a culture in which everyone was trapped in his or her own feelings, emotions and orbits of privatization. One consequence was that legitimate political claims could only be pursued by individuals and families rather than social groups. In this instance, power was removed from the social sphere and placed almost entirely in the hands of corporate and political demagogues who used it to enrich themselves for their own personal gain. Power was now used to produce muscular authority in order “to secure order, boundaries, and to divert the growing anger of a declining middle and working-class,” Wendy Brown observes. Both classes increasingly came to blame their economic and political conditions that produced their misery and ravaged ways of life on “‘others’: immigrants, minority races, ‘external’ predators and attackers ranging from terrorists to refugees.” Liberal-individualistic views lost their legitimacy as they refused to indict the underlying structures of capitalism and its winner-take-all ethos.

Functioning largely as a ruthless form of social Darwinism, economic activity was removed from a concern with social costs, and replaced by a culture of cruelty and resentment that disdained any notion of compassion or ethical concern for those deemed as “other” because of their class, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion. This is a culture marked by gigantic hypocrisies, “the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events,” widespread viciousness, “great concentrations of wealth,” “surveillance overkill,” and the “unceasing despoliation of biospheres for profit.”

George Monbiot sums up well some of the more toxic elements of neoliberalism, which remained largely hidden since it was in the mainstream press less as an ideology than as an economic policy. He writes:

Neoliberalism sees competition as the defining characteristic of human relations. It redefines citizens as consumers, whose democratic choices are best exercised by buying and selling, a process that rewards merit and punishes inefficiency. It maintains that “the market” delivers benefits that could never be achieved by planning. Attempts to limit competition are treated as inimical to liberty. Tax and regulation should be minimized, public services should be privatized. The organization of labor and collective bargaining by trade unions are portrayed as market distortions that impede the formation of a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Inequality is recast as virtuous: a reward for utility and a generator of wealth, which trickles down to enrich everyone. Efforts to create a more equal society are both counterproductive and morally corrosive. The market ensures that everyone gets what they deserve.

In the neoliberal worldview, those who are unemployed, poor consumers or outside of the reach of a market in search of insatiable profits are considered disposable. Increasingly more people were viewed as anti-human, unknowable, faceless and symbols of fear and pathology. This included undocumented immigrants in the United States and refugees in Europe, as well as those who were considered of no value to a market society, and thus eligible to be deprived of the most basic rights and subject to the terror of state violence.

Marking selected groups as disposable in both symbolic and material forms, the neoliberal politics of disposability became a machinery of political and social death — producing spaces where undesirable members are abused, put in cages, separated from their children and subject to a massive violation of their human rights. Under a neoliberal politics of disposability, people live in spaces of ever-present danger and risk where nothing is certain; human beings considered excess are denied a social function and relegated to what Étienne Balibar calls the “death zones of humanity.” These are the 21st century workstations designed for the creation and process of elimination; a death-haunted mode of production rooted in the “absolute triumph of irrationality.” 

Economic and cultural nationalism has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism into a war machine.

Within this new political formation, older forms of exploitation are now matched, if not exceeded, by a politics of racial and social cleansing, as entire populations are removed from ethical assessments, producing zones of social abandonment. In this new world, there is a merging of finance capital and a war culture that speaks to a moral and political collapse in which the welfare state is replaced by forms of economic nationalism and a burgeoning carceral state.

Furthermore, elements of this crisis can be seen in the ongoing militarization of everyday life as more and more institutions take on the model of the prison. Additionally, there is also the increased arming of the police, the criminalization of a wide range of behaviors related to social problems, the rise of the surveillance state, and the ongoing war on youth, undocumented immigrants, Muslims and others deemed enemies of the state.

Under the aegis of a neoliberal war culture, we have witnessed increasing immiseration for the working and middle classes, massive tax cuts for the rich, the outsourcing of public services, a full-fledged attack on unions, the defunding of public goods, and the privatization of public services extending from health and education to roads and prisons. This ongoing transfer of public resources and services to the rich, hedge fund managers, and corporate elite was matched by the corporate takeover of the commanding institutions of culture, including the digital, print and broadcast media. What has been vastly underestimated in the rise of right-wing populism is the capture of the media by authoritarian populists and its flip side, which amounts to a full-fledged political attack on independent digital, online and oppositional journalists.

While it is generally acknowledged that neoliberalism was responsible for the worldwide economic crisis of 2008, what is less acknowledged is that structural crisis produced by a capitalism on steroids was not matched by subjective crisis and consequently gave rise to new reactionary political populist movements. As economic collapse became visceral, people’s lives were upended and sometimes destroyed. Moreover, as the social contract was shredded along with the need for socially constructed roles, norms and public goods, the “social” no longer occupied a thick and important pedagogical space of solidarity, dialogue, political expression, dissent and politics.

As public spheres disappeared, communal bonds were weakened and social provisions withered. Under neoliberalism, the social sphere regresses into a privatized society of consumers in which individuals are atomized, alienated, and increasingly removed from the variety of social connections and communal bonds that give meaning to the degree to which societies are good and just.

Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.

People became isolated, segregated and unable “to negotiate democratic dilemmas in a democratic way” as power became more abstract and removed from public participation and accountability. As the neoliberal net of privilege was cast wider without apology for the rich and exclusion of others, it became more obvious to growing elements of the public that appeals to liberal democracy had failed to keep its promise of a better life for all. It could no longer demand, without qualification, that working people should work harder for less, and that democratic participation is exclusively about elections. What could not be hidden from many disenfranchised groups was that ruling elites produced what Adam Tooze describes as “a disastrous slide from the hypocrisies and compromises of the previous status quo into something even [more dangerous].”

As the global crisis has intensified since 2008, elements of a political and moral collapse at the heart of an authoritarian society are more obvious and find their most transparent expression of ruthlessness, greed and unchecked power in the rule of Donald Trump. As Chris Hedges points out:

The ruling corporate elites no longer seek to build. They seek to destroy. They are agents of death. They crave the unimpeded power to cannibalize the country and pollute and degrade the ecosystem to feed an insatiable lust for wealth, power and hedonism. Wars and military “virtues” are celebrated. Intelligence, empathy and the common good are banished. Culture is degraded to patriotic kitsch…. Those branded as unproductive or redundant are discarded and left to struggle in poverty or locked away in cages.

The slide into authoritarianism was made all the easier by the absence of a broad-based left mass movement in the United States, which failed to provide both a comprehensive vision of change and an alignment of single-issue groups and smaller movements into one mass movement. Nancy Fraser rightly observes that following Occupy, “potential links between labour and new social movements were left to languish. Split off from one another, those indispensable poles of a viable left were miles apart, waiting to be counterposed as antithetical.”

Since the 1970s, there has been a profound backlash by economic, financial, political and religious fundamentalists and their allied media establishments against labor, an oppositional press, people of color and others who have attempted to extend the workings of democracy and equality.

As the narrative of class and class struggle disappeared along with the absence of a vibrant socialist movement, the call for democracy no longer provided a unifying narrative to bring different oppressed groups together. Instead, economic and cultural nationalism has become a rallying cry to create the conditions for merging a regressive neoliberalism and populism into a war machine. Under such circumstances, politics is imagined as a form of war, repelling immigrants and refugees who are described by President Trump as “invaders,” “vermin” and “rapists.” The emergence of neoliberalism as a war machine is evident in the current status of the Republican Party and the Trump administration, which wage assaults on anything that does not mimic the values of the market. Such assaults take the form of fixing whole categories of people as disposable, as enemies, and force them into conditions of extreme precarity — and in increasingly more instances, conditions of danger. Neoliberal capitalism radiates violence, evident in its endless instances of mass shooting, such as those that took place most recently in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio. This should not be surprising for a society that measures power by the speed that it removes itself from any sense of ethical and social responsibility. As Beatrix Campbell puts it,

The richest society on the planet is armed. And it invests in one of the largest prison systems in the world. Violence circulates between state and citizen. Drilled to kill, doomed to die: mastery and martyrdom is the heartbreaking dialectic of the manufacture of militarized, violent masculinity…. The making and maintaining of militarised masculinities is vital to these new modes of armed conflict that are proliferating across the flexible frontiers of globalized capitalism, between and within states.

What has become clear is that the neoliberal agenda has been a spectacular failure. Moreover, it has mobilized on a global level the violent political, social, racial and economic energies of a resurgent fascist politics. Across the globe, right-wing modes of governance are appearing in which the line collapses between “outside foreign enemies” such as refugees and undocumented immigrants, on the one hand, and on the other, inside “dangerous” or “treasonous” classes such as critical journalists, educators and dissidents.

As neoliberal economies increasingly resort to violence and repression, fear replaces any sense of shared responsibilities, as violence is not only elevated to an organizing principle of society, but also expands a network of extreme cruelty. Imagining politics as a war machine, more and more groups are treated as excess and inscribed in an order of power as disposable, enemies, and [forced] into conditions of extreme precarity. This is a particularly vicious form of state violence that undermines and constrains agency, and subjects individuals to zones of abandonment, as evident in the growth of immigrant jails and an expanding carceral complex in the United States and other countries, such as Hungary.

As neoliberalism’s promise of social mobility and expanding economic progress collapsed, it gave way to an authoritarian right-wing populism looking for narratives on which to pin the hatred of governing elites who, as Paul Mason notes, “capped health and welfare spending, [imposed] punitive benefit withdraws [that] forced … many families to rely on food banks [and] withdraw sickness and disability benefits from one million former workers below retirement age.”

Across the globe, a series of uprisings have appeared that signal new political formations that rejected the notion that there was no alternative to neoliberal hegemony. This was evident not only with the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, but also with the election of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and support for popular movements such as the National Rally in France. Establishment politics lost its legitimacy, as voters rejected the conditions produced by financialized capitalism.

In the United States, both major political parties were more than willing to turn the economy over to the bankers and hedge fund managers while producing policies that shaped radical forms of industrial and social restructuring, all of which caused massive pain, suffering and rage among large segments of the working class and other disenfranchised groups. Right-wing populist leaders across the globe recognized that national economies were in the hands of foreign investors, a mobile financial elite and transnational capital. In a masterful act of political diversion, populist leaders attacked all vestiges of liberal capitalism while refusing to name neoliberal inequities in wealth and power as a basic threat to their societies. Instead of calling for an acceleration of the democratic ideals of popular sovereignty and equality, right-wing populist leaders, such as Trump, Bolsonaro and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán defined democracy as the enemy of those who wish for unaccountable power. They also diverted genuine popular anger into the abyss of cultural chauvinism, anti-immigrant hatred, a contempt of Muslims and a targeted attack on the environment, health care, education, public institutions, social provisions and other basic life resources. As Arjun Appadurai observes, such authoritarian leaders hate democracy, capture the political emotions of those treated as disposable, and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.

In this scenario, we have the resurgence of a fascist politics that capitalizes on the immiseration, fears and anxieties produced by neoliberalism without naming the underlying conditions that create and legitimate its policies and social costs. While such populists comment on certain elements of neoliberalism such as globalization, they largely embrace those ideological and economic elements that concentrate power and wealth in the hands of a political, corporate and financial elite, thus reinforcing in the end an extreme form of capitalism. Moreover, right-wing populists may condemn globalization, but they do so by blaming those considered outside the inclusive boundaries of a white homeland even though the same forces victimize them. At the same time, such leaders mobilize passions that deny critical understanding while simultaneously creating desires and affects that produce toxic and hypermasculine forms of identification.

Authoritarian leaders hate democracy and do everything they can to hide the deep contradictions of neoliberal capitalism.

In this instance, an oppressive form of education becomes central to politics and is used as a tool of power in the struggle over power, agency and politics. What is at stake here is not simply a struggle between authoritarian ideas and democratic ideals, but also a fierce battle on the part of demagogues to destroy the institutions and conditions that make critical thought and oppositional accounts of power possible. This is evident, for example, in Trump’s constant attack on the critical media, often referring to them as “‘the enemy of the people’ … pushing ‘Radical Left Democrat views,’” even as journalists are subject to expulsion, mass jailing and assassination across the world by some of Trump’s allies.

Waging war on democracy and the institutions that produce it, neoliberalism has tapped into a combination of fear and cathartic cruelty that has once again unleashed the mobilizing passions of fascism, especially the historically distinct registers of extreme nationalism, nativism, white supremacy, racial and ethnic cleansing, voter suppression, and an attack on a civic culture of critique and resistance. The result is a new political formation that I have called neoliberal fascism, in which the principles and practices of a fascist past and neoliberal present have merged, connecting the worst dimensions and excesses of gangster capitalism with the fascist ideals of white nationalism and racial supremacy associated with the horrors of a fascist past.

Neoliberal fascism hollows out democracy from within, breaks down the separation of power while increasing the power of the presidency, and saturates cultural and social life with its ideology of self-interest, a survival-of-the-fittest ethos, and regressive notions of freedom and individual responsibility.

What needs to be acknowledged is that neoliberalism as an extreme form of capitalism has produced the conditions for a fascist politics that is updated to serve the interest of a concentrated class of financial elite and a rising tide of political demagogues across the globe.

The mass anger fueling neoliberal fascism is a diversion of genuine resistance into what amounts to a pathology, which empties politics of any substance. This is evident also in its support of a right-wing populism and its focus on the immigrants and refugees as “dangerous outsiders,” which serves to eliminate class politics and camouflage its own authoritarian ruling class interests and relentless attacks on social welfare.

A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy.

In the face of a looming global recession, it is crucial to understand the connection between the rise of right-wing populism and neoliberalism, which emerged in the late 1970s as a commanding ideology fueling a punitive form of globalization. This historical moment is marked by unique ideological, economic and political formations produced by ever-increasing brutal forms of capitalism, however diverse.

Governing economic and political thinking everywhere, neoliberalism’s unprecedented concentration of economic and political power has produced a toxic state modeled after the models of finance and unchecked market forces. It has also produced a profound shift in human consciousness, agency and modes of identification. The consequences have become familiar and include cruel austerity measures, adulation of self-regulating markets, the liberating of capital from any constraints, deregulation, privatization of public goods, the commodification of everyday life and the gutting of environmental, health and safety laws. It has also paved the way for a merging of extreme market principles and the sordid and mushrooming elements of white supremacy, racial cleansing and ultranationalism that have become specific to updated forms of fascist politics.

Such policies have produced massive inequities in wealth, power and income, while further accelerating mass misery, human suffering, the rise of state-sanctioned violence and ever-expanding sites of terminal exclusion in the forms of walls, detention centers and an expanding carceral state. An impending recession accentuates the antagonisms, instabilities and crisis produced by the long history and reach of neoliberal ideologies and policies.

A new economic slump would further fuel forces of repression and strengthen the forces of white supremacy, Islamophobia, nativism and misogyny. In the face of such reactionary forces, it is crucial to unite various progressive forces of opposition into a powerful anti-capitalist movement that speaks not only to the range of oppressions exacerbated by neoliberalism, but also to the need for new narratives that speak to overturning a system steeped in the machineries of war, militarization, repression and death.

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Neoliberal Fascism

Book Review

by Thomas Klikauer
04/05/2019

Co-Written by Thomas Klikauer & Kathleen Webb Tunney

Undoubtedly we live in the age of neoliberalism. There might also be a link between Neoliberalism and fascism. If one agrees with the rather enticing idea that Hayek’s ideology pamphlet The Road to Serfdom is the ur-texts of neoliberalism, then neoliberalism was indeed invented during the dying days of German Nazism and Italian fascism. The idea of a Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism argues that capitalism and neoliberalism aren’t what liberal and communist thinkers alike thought it is. Instead, it has some telling characteristics that make it similar, in fact, to what fascist and reactionary Catholic political movements have dreamt. Worse, neoliberalism has transmogrified into a new fascist militiaeven though there are no longer any Italian style black-shirts (FasciItaliani di Combattimento) or German style brown-shirts (SA and later SS, dressed in black) roaming the streets rounding up Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, trade unionists, communists, socialists, anarchists, progressive academics, democrats and the like.

Despite the rather obvious lack of present-day fascist brutalities, there is a spirit of capitalism that is fascistic. Indeed, capitalism never contradicted German Nazism or Italian fascism. Capitalism has never challenged any other form of right-wing authoritarianism,ranging from Spain’s Franco and Chile’s Pinochet to Liberia’s Charles Taylor. Instead, on neoliberalism, seven key points can be made:

1. fascism and capitalism imply an organic society;
2. trade unions that are fought and repressed until they are tamed into a neoliberal structure;
3. a role for a social ethics and business ethics is to camouflage corporate crimes;
4. war as a means to resolve thorny international relations issues;
5. horror towards forms of sociality that are not based on the standard capitalist state;
6. the perception of the other as either a threat or an ally; and
7. tensions between politics and the economy are framed as efficiency problems.

Germany’s Nazis called the first point Volksgemeinschaft – a racially purified community. Capitalism and contemporary neoliberalism seek quite a different society compared to Germany’s racial nightmare and the fascist dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Neoliberalism’s society is based on rampant consumerism with engineered and homogeneous masstaste. In mass consumerism with supporting mass media, everyone is made to know Coca Cola, IKEA and Toyota. Neoliberalism’s global ideology not only supports homogenous mass taste, it also presents some organisations that fall within their prescribed ideology as acceptable. At the same time, neoliberalism undermines socialist and social-democratic parties as well as trade unions until unions are eliminated. The deliberately engineered decline of trade unions is not seen to be unethical by a non-democratic but deeply ideological actor, namely, neoliberalism. Meanwhile,business ethics has become a pure ideology,not only justifying neoliberalism and business attacks on trade unions, but also camouflaging corporate criminality and environmental vandalism on a global scale.

Given the prevalence of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, neoliberalism still drives wars and global aggression. To mask many of neoliberalism’s evils, itwelcomespopulism (e.g. Donald Trump, USA; Nigel Farage, UK; Viktor Orbán, Hungary, etc.). Under populism, the other is presented as an outcast. Seeking to eliminate class politics, contemporary European right-wing populism feeds on presenting the other –refugees and migrants– as dangerous. Lastly, there are inherent tensions between politics (a populace’s quest for social welfare, public schools, hospitals, etc.) and economics including an unbridled free market and The Privatization of Everything.Neoliberalism conceals its own contradictions as efficiency problems.Such problems are increasingly solved through authoritarian means.

Much of this process is designed to create an intellectual homogenisation of the individual.In short, rafts of people –including entire economics departments in universities–have been made to subscribe to neoliberalism’s global free market ideology. The power of neoliberal hegemony also supplies a general logicforpigeon-holing anything that might come forth. Beyond that, neoliberalism’s organic societies, to take a typical fascist dream also means that no revolution is possible. Neoliberalism presents this as TINA – there is no alternative. Expectedly, in the metaphysics of capitalism, perfect freedom and perfect deception overlap. This should be called fascism.Under fascism and Nazism, there were next to no freedoms and definitely no elections. By contrast, today’s highly engineered and corporate mass media-driven election spectacles have been reduced to system-stabilising choices – Coke-vs.-Pepsi, Republicans-vs.-Democrats, Labour-vs.-Tories, and so on. Voting under neoliberalism often means not much more than one hierarchy replaces another hierarchy. Just as George Orwell once said,from the point of view of the low,no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

Perhaps what goes for fascism also goes for neoliberalism: fascism not simply had an ideology, it had ideas fascism endowed itself with a set of practical ideas for practical politics. Indeed, neoliberalism has an ideology and it has ideas. In the case of fascism, the age-old propaganda still works: fascism made trains run on time –the trains to Auschwitz in the case of Nazi-Germany, for example. Neoliberalism’s practical ideas for practical politics are,for example, lowering unemployment. Neoliberalism does this largely by creating the working poor and the precariat.These lower the statistics of unemployment – not unemployment and under-employment. It creates a favourable media image of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism also claims to have practical solutions for global warming, changing light bulbs, for example. What we are facing under neoliberal capitalism has been descried by Wallace-Wells so magnificently: the coming of the Uninhabitable Earth. What we are engaged in is a bit like the overpaid CEO in his corporate jet dropping a teabag into a recycling bin while saying I do my bit!

In capitalism and neoliberalism, as in fascism, production must nonetheless remain in private hands, while wages must be elastic. The government intervenes in production only when private initiative fails. The neoliberal term elastic is the euphemism for wage stagnation and their actual wage reduction – a problem recognised even by the otherwise staunchly neoliberal IMF some time ago.Like capitalism and neoliberalism, fascism was, and is, a mass phenomenon. Neoliberalism is somewhat similar albeit without having created a mass movement.Like fascism, capitalism and neoliberalism need the masses– just not as a fascist mass political movement, but as depoliticised mass consumers.

Without Fordist mass-production and mass-consumerism there is no neoliberalism. Neoliberalism depends on ten nebulous points: fiscal discipline, public expenditure, fiscal reform, financial liberalisation, competitive exchange rates, liberalisation of trade, foreign direct investment, privatisation, deregulation, and property rights. Neoliberalism works in authoritarian and democratic regimeswhether there is the presence of a dictator or of a democratic regime, neoliberal actions can be adopted as shown by the dictatorship of Pinochet in Chile and the Bush administrations. Neoliberalism can or perhaps has to live with democracy – fascism can not.

Like fascism, neoliberalism is not a set of economic policies but a new and more effective technology of power. While neoliberalism may enjoy power, fascism is all about power.Indeed, Neoliberalism uses its power – not directly like fascism – but indirectly, shaping political power through its ideology. As a result, it seeks to get its political parties into power while remaining in the background, working as an hegemonic ideology. Once in power, domestic and international brutalities are a characterising factor of neoliberalism. This, of course extends into workplaces.

Hence, there is a link between neoliberalism and Managerialism. Under the formula of management + ideology + expansion = Managerialism, Managerialism infiltrates many previously non-managerial areas (schools, hospitals, universities, etc.). It relentlessly enforces managerial concepts such as performance management and KPIs into every eventuality of workplaces. Beyond that, Managerialism turns human beings into human resources or Menschenmaterial– human material.

Both inside workplaces driven by Managerialism and outside, where society is driven by neoliberalism, the guiding motto has become credere, obbedire, combattere – believe, obey, combat. Neoliberalism makes you believe in the so-called free market; obey its unseen and increasingly brutal forces; and combat rising job insecurity, stagnating and falling wages and your colleagues who are set against you in an eternal workplace battle for promotions, bonuses, and so-called personal advancement. Credere, obbedire, combattere was the motto of Benito Mussolini.People in power and their lackeys can only stick to the neoliberal policies that increase inequalities while increasing the grip of the state over the economy and politics.

Perhaps fascism-equals-neoliberalism. Still, there are three problems with this: a linguistic problem, a conceptual problem and an historical problem. The least serious problem is the linguistic problem. Neither fascism nor neoliberalism has a nature as the title of the book says. Fascism and neoliberalism are not natural. Instead, they are man-made inventions – created mostly by men.The second problem is conceptual in character.In many ways, the concept of neoliberalism and the concept of fascism do not match even though parts of both may overlap.Contemporary neoliberal societies are not fascist societies. Unlike Italian fascism and German Nazism, democracy allows you to change government, to leave neoliberalism behind and to move towards another politics. Changes can also be made in the sphere of political economy. According to the Economist’s Democracy Index, Norway, Iceland, Sweden and New Zealand, for example, are democracies, These countries are not the same as Italy in 1929 or Germany in 1939. In short, neoliberalism can live with democracy – fascism can not.

Digging deeper into the conceptual problem, one discovers even more problems. The next conceptual problem engages with an Italian, a compatriot of the authors of the book, namely, the Italian writer and philosopher Umberto Eco. Eco outlined fourteen conceptual elements that together create fascism. Recently, Eco’s fourteen elements have been applied to Germany’s new right-wing party AfD and to Donald Trump concluding –correctly– that Donald Trump is not a fascist. Trump may very well be racist, a conman and a cheat but he is not a fascist. Trump is not the new Adolf Hitler of the USA. And he is no way a new Benito Mussolini even though Trump may be as pompous as Mussolini.Finally, fascism and Nazism do not have mid-term elections to the US Congress (6th November 2018). Instead, they have Auschwitz.

The next drawback is the problem of history. Neoliberalism’s economic policies cannot be equated with fascism’s economic policies. Neoliberalism is not about self-sufficiency and war nor is it about autarky. Neoliberalism may welcome war and even encourage warfare, but its entire economic system is not geared toward war-making. War-making was the focus in Italy and was even more so in the case of Nazi Germany.In addition, fascism represents crisis capitalism with a cudgel in the form of marauding, beating and torturing brown-shirt thugs (Italy) and the SA (Germany). Neoliberalism simply does not have that. The Italian and German police forces are not even close to fascist thugs and Hitler’s SA.

Fascism also prefers the well organised and ideologically confined homo corporativuswhile neoliberalism fancies the homo economicus. The latter clings to the hallucination of a rational choice driven by cost-benefit analysis and hyper-individualism. Perhaps one of the key differences between neoliberalism and fascism is what is called a state-directed private ownership economy. While neoliberalism would definitely agree with the private ownership economy,neoliberalism will very strongly reject such a state-directed economy. In short, capital, remains, as ever, private. If neoliberalism could, it would almost abolish the state or reduce it to a nightwatchman state.By comparison, fascism likes the strong and all-controlling über-state run by the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento (Italy) and in Germanyby theKapo, the Blockwart, and the Übermensch – the racially superior Aryan.Despite these shortcomings, The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalismremains an insightful and exquisite discussion of neoliberal fascism.

The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism is published by Andrea Micocci and Flavia Di Mario.

US born Kathleen Webb Tunney (German Lit. in Philadelphia, Munich and Tübingen)

German born Thomas Klikauer (Pol. Sc. Bremen and Boston) teaches Indian MBAs in Sydney (Australia) and like Biryani: https://klikauer.wordpress.com/

[SEE ALSO: https://researchers.westernsydney.edu.au/en/publications/transforming-organisations-for-triple-bottom-line-a-review-of-sus-2/]

https://countercurrents.org/2019/05/neoliberal-fascism/

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