English Translation of the 'Neofascismo - La bestia neoliberal

I don't where else to put this piece - so I guess Sum Guy's street has been occupied by anti-fascists. In researching Jorge Borges for the D&D project, I started looking at South American publishing houses and wandered across a great introduction to a book on neofascism. We get such poor political analysis in North America - and that is not a bug but a feature of our media system. The Trudeau Jr. 'blackface' moral panic is a great example of a country twiddling it's thumbs with pointless identity politics. A potent dose of South American socialism clears that clogging sludge out.  

This is a Google translation of the introduction. I have made a few edits but I like 'raw' translations. I realize that form of translation and the unfamiliarity of socialist thought might spook people, and sometimes inoculations sting a little. Every paragraph was interesting to me and I'd gladly discuss it.

The core message is simple: Capitalist ethics have so corrupted our governments and societies that aggression and alienation are everyday norms. Law & Order government arise to keep this instability bottled up, fascism arises to shatter the alienation and re-create community by violence toward scapegoats. Those right-wing currents can be used by capitalism to maintain it's corrupting grip. The wide-scale destruction of the left and progressives since the 1980s enables this.

Thanks to Infolibre and to Arnaldo Orfila Reynal who founded the publishing house Siglo XXI in 1965.

The original text is at
https://www.infolibre.es/noticias/cultura/2019/07/20/neofascismo_bestia_neoliberal_97179_1026.html

'Neofascism:The neoliberal beast' (2019)

Adoración Guamán | Aragonese Alfons | Sebastian Martin

Infolibre publishes an extract of Neofascism - The neoliberal beast, a volume coordinated by Adoración Guamán, Alfons Aragoneses and Sebastián Martín. In it, 14 authors , including the editors, analyze from different perspectives the rise of the extreme right , establishing comparisons with the political movements that emerged in the thirties, looking at the fascist Latin American governments and analyzing how neoliberal ideology has allowed or encouraged the new reactionary wave.

The title includes Nuria Alabao, Luciana Cadahia, María José Fariñas Dulce, Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, Albert Noguera Fernández, Joaquín Pérez Rey, Jorge Polo Blanco, Carol Proner, Clara Ramas, Franklin Ramírez Gallegos, Jorge Ramos Tolosa, Francisco Sierra Caballero and Juan José Tamayo

We collect the introduction to the book, signed by the three coordinators.
____________
Introduction

Can the new tendencies of the extreme right be grouped under the currency of fascism, or (neo)fascism?
What differences exist between ultra-right formations and ideologies and the so-called "fascists"?
Are we traveling, even with different accents and modulations, the same trajectory that Europe took in the 1920s and 1930s?
Are there parallels between the dictatorships of the 1970s in Latin America and the practices, present or announced, of some governments in the Americas?
Is market neo-authoritarianism a step, an intrinsic element or a deviation from possible (neo)fascism?
Do circumstances condemn us again to relive the barbarism of exclusion, persecution and even annihilation of the dissident, in the name of the purity and vigor of the nations ... or only of a willingness to recover the rate of capital gain?

These and other similar questions have been raised in European public opinion for years.

The unexpected triumph of Donald Trump, followed by the rise of other national groups of the extreme right, provokes them. The stupor of the progressive sectors before the present ultra-right rise makes them more pressing, if possible.

And, given so much accumulated uncertainty, only one clue seems plausible: the connection of the neo-fascist increase with the crisis and recomposition of global financial capitalism, with the increase in the dynamics of accumulation by dispossession, of violence and moral conservatism, with machismo, xenophobia, racism which release uneasy larvae in societies after their unleashing, to explode in a fragmented but less and less sporadic manner.

As Walter Benjamin pointed out in that dark era, the issue of fascism cannot be addressed without considering capitalism. As Bertolt Brechtt indicated, it would be like investigating the effects without also questioning the causes.

The most obvious in this regard is to appreciate how, yesterday as today, the inequalities and diffuse impotence to which unbridled capitalism leads us are answered by the elites, but getting great popular support, with a revival of the cohesive myth and protector of the nation, much more cohesive if the figure of a collective enemy is identified inside or outside to sacrifice. An enemy that today points to women, refugees, poor or racialized people.

Less evident appears in our eyes, although it was already revealed in the interwar period, is how the routes of capitalist accumulation result in situations of practical monopoly end up claiming, for an effective governvance of the economy, authoritarian formulas that exceed the democratic and constitutional state. The abandonment since the 1980s of the democratizing functions typical of the social state, from the demercantilization of social spaces to the diversification of the economy or the fight for real equality, revived the immanent dynamics of runaway capitalism, putting us back on stage of transnational corporate governance, a market authoritarianism established by the new Lex Mercatoria (“merchant law”), which needs to be compensated or sustained with national authoritarian practices.

There is no doubt that the political solutions offered by ultra-right formations are anchored in deep psychological needs of a collective nature. Among them, the need for community stands out, given a framework of stark individualistic competitiveness. But it also highlights the vital need to feel active participants in the community in which you live. The management of the financial crisis, chaired by the maxim of "There is no alternative", put into practice with all virulence in Greece, has sown in the collective spirit a sense of helplessness that begins to re-claim, to restore to health, authoritarian and executive leaderships able to decide by exploding the meshes of legality.

In this same direction points the diffuse feeling of disaffection caused by the independence of public representatives, often translated into "cartelization" organized for corrupt purposes of private enrichment. Corruption becomes the axis to justify the need for authoritarian leaderships, which, as evidenced by the case of Brazil, end up conveying the idea that the mechanisms of representative democracy are sterile to get rid of the looting piloted by political elites. On both sides of the Atlantic, the need for charismatic leaders who connect en mass with the spirit of immediate intervention, without mediation or legal contention, in the political arena once again extends to the collective soul.

Under savage capitalism, not only the typical mechanisms of representation but the guarantee of the general interest are eroded. The general public incentive enjoyed by the corporate culture (the so-called "entrepreneurship"), adjusting without friction to the needs of capital accumulation, is poorly adapted to the cultural requirements - pluralistic, egalitarian, horizontal - of a democracy. The cult of triumphant individuality and with the ability to command, which only thrives on the disciplined obedience of the whole, fosters authoritarian and hierarchical values when it moves to the polis. The moral principles that govern many business schools, conducive to individual success with contempt of collective cooperation and in need of instrumentalizing, reifying them, the like, provide an ecosystem unbeatable to rampant fascism if they end up becoming, as is the case today, in a social ethic.

We also witness, in parallel, the rise of conservative and violent discourses, reinforcing the traditional axes of colonial, Eurocentric, racist and patriarchal domination over work, migrants and, in particular, women. Using religion, traditionalist conservative values, defamation, the discourse of fear of the other and the exacerbation of the mandate of masculinity, an ideological / legal scaffolding is re-oriented aimed at promoting models of submission and violent exploitation of a majority of the population, with special gender impact, and certainly necessary to maintain the processes of accumulation and social control.

Thus, the culture itself that extends in our models of society fosters the abandonment of democratic values and the embrace of the tactics of fascism. In its full orientation towards the future, it tends to relegate the instructive demands of democratic memory,  in those countries that moved to democracy without breaking the dictatorships that had oppressed them this is an aggravated oblivion. Knowing the dynamics that led to fascism and its practices of extermination and domination does not guarantee, it is true, not repeating barbarism, but it does introduce damping and brake devices, which help prevent it.

In the essential documentary by Chris Marker on the world left in the 1960s and 1970s, 'Le fond de l'air est rouge', the manifestations of American neo-Nazis and those of Wall Street executives, coinciding in their aggressive warmongers, merge into consecutive plans and in his furious anti-communism against the Vietnam War. Economic liberalism and political fascism, in the face of the misrepresentation induced during decades of theoretical 'demo-liberal' correction, end up claiming each other.

With this background scenario, this book aims to investigate the different flanks of this rapport, trying to solve fundamental questions that float today in the public sphere and uncover complicities that remain hidden from the general eyes. To this end, the different works will be organized in two large thematic blocks. The first deals with the general theoretical and historical aspect of the matter, to anchor the real possibilities of the same use of the term «neo-fascism». It is essential to know well the rise of fascism in the interwar world, and its links with capitalism, to draw the relevant parallels, and also to dispense with the most simplistic comparisons. Equally crucial is the conceptual delimitation of fascism, both in its past forms of expression, and in those that begin to emerge today. And we must also pay attention to the different lines of evolution that are leading to the rise of forces that, if they present themselves today as ultra-rightists, already incubated, unequivocally, the snake of future fascism.

The second of the blocks consists of empirical tone essays, already focused on the analysis of domination experiences anchored in the neo-fascist axioms. Its field of tests is sometimes provided by strictly national trajectories, and, on other occasions, transnational scenarios that allow the comparison of local itineraries and practices. Interested in this section is the examination of the axes and devices of domination, that promote fascist social hierarchy or that are directly inspired by neo-fascist formulas, in the fields of coexistence, work, communication, religion or feminism.

To elaborate the projected collective work we have opted for a multidisciplinary and international approach, bringing together fifteen people who have in common the thread of critical thinking. The authors, from Ecuador, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina and Spain, cultivate subjects such as political philosophy, law, sociology, anthropology, theology, communication or history. From the epistemological plurality, the chapters, in permanent dialogue between shared concepts, strive to understand and reason on one of the most complex phenomena, which affects all aspects of society and which is not reducible to a single plane.The result of this collective, multidisciplinary and transatlantic work is a book that contributes instruments to the analysis of what we agreed to call "neofascism", which explain its multiple dimensions and that dismantle common places and prejudices generated many times by extreme movements themselves right, but that are consolidated by being repeated by other parties and by the media.

Precisely because of what we have just explained, the book serves as an instrument to combat the speeches of the extreme right at a time when they are amplified by many media outlets, which place them at the center of the debate, with proposals that pose threats to Human rights and for democracy. This book, written from the intellectual rigor of its authors, has a clear vocation to be, first and foremost, a useful tool in the fight against neofascisms.

Let's make this simple -

In Northern Ontario we used to like our snow-removal people because they were local city-workers.
Then it was privatized to some Australian firm with worse service and so we die on winter roads more.
So we began to hate the government. The government began to lose legitimacy.
The government realized minor hitch in their neoliberalism - it killed democracy - and so they started screaming that only they can protect from Chaos.
[Despite their privatization scheme being the source of Chaos.....]
Soon fear and authority are the governments main source of legitimacy
These same 'demo-liberal' governements also claim to the only source of social progress on the whole planet.
In this cultural atmosphere of capitalist banditry, liberal hypocrisy, 'moral panics' politics and a looming police-state...
....why not be a fascist?

All this could have been avoided if they had let us keep public employees cleaning the roads.

Too bad our 'betters' are greedy half-wits who constantly mistake their buddies' bank-accounts for the public good.

Democracies could not control capitalism, so it liquidated their communities/enviroments/families/friendships to turn a profit, now the monsters of our not-too-distance past are knocking at the door.....

...but let's keep panicking over black-face and transgender pronouns as if they made a dent in any of this.