Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen

Late Capitalist Fascism


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situation: the sovereign, George W. Bush, introduced a series of ‘anti-terror’ decrees that curtailed public and private freedoms, procedure took precedence over law and exception became the rule. The Patriot Act and the Military Order made it possible for the US army to detain people who were suspected of terrorist activity for an unspecified period of time, completely revoking these persons’ legal status.

      This book has two parts. Chapter 1 outlines the various crises that have laid the groundwork for the growth of fascism. It attempts to historicize and contextualize the re-emergence of fascism as an outcome of a longer political economic development characterized by a shrinking economy and a hollowing out of the political system. The financial crisis dealt a heavy blow to an already credit-inflated economy, and the subsequent political mishandling accelerated what was by then a quite advanced delegitimation of politics as we know it. The political hegemony of neoliberal global capitalism is in tatters and the bourgeoisie has a hard time agreeing on a new course. Because racism and ultra-nationalism have proved themselves to be the only means with which it is possible to uphold electoral politics, fascist parties are gaining ground everywhere. Together this constitutes what the historian of fascism Geoff Eley calls a ‘fascism-producing crisis’.20

      An effective anti-fascism has to take the form of radical social change. Only insofar as anti-fascism is embedded in a radical anti-capitalist stance will it be possible to engage in the necessary critique of national democracy’s immanent politics of exclusion. The only anti-fascism capable of confronting contemporary networked fascism is an offensive one that highlights the contradictory function of fascism in a crisis-ridden capitalist society.

      1 1. Ernst Nolte: Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche. Munich: Piper, 1963; Eng. trans. as The Three Faces of Fascism. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,