Néstor Kohan
Capital’s responses to the crises of capitalism
Contrary to various trends circulating in the social sciences, we begin with a question that places us in a wide-angle perspective. No “micro” cuts or minimalist decorations that seek to evade or ignore the history and context of the debates. We question the era in which we (sur)vive, openly discussing the much-talked-about, promoted, and completely false “crisis of grand narratives.”
As a premise of this work, we maintain that the contemporary emergence of the “new right” does not belong to the human soul, is not “constitutive of our species,” nor does it respond to an unfathomable evil or cruel character of humanity. We are suspicious of supposed “original sins” and any other type of metaphysical essences. The rise of neo-fascism is inherent to the historical crisis of the global capitalist system.
It is true that planetary “disorder” is not entirely spontaneous. It is fostered, cultivated, and encouraged by large capitalist corporations and their counterinsurgency strategists, renowned as “the engineers of chaos.” But this engineering of social control (big data, lawfare, fake news, hybrid wars, etc.) is not applied out of mere boredom. It is not just another harmless and innocent way to occupy one’s free time. It is implemented out of a social urgency: the need to confront the crisis of global capitalism.
Our era is marked by a coexisting multiplicity of diverse antagonistic contradictions within the capitalist social order, converging on the horizon of a long-term structural crisis. This crisis is much more acute and explosive than those of 1929, 1973-1974, and 2007-2008.
We are witnessing not only the crisis of the global capitalist economy in the productive, commercial, and financial spheres. We are also suffering a crisis of the environment and the ecosystem, a demographic crisis, a food crisis, a health crisis, a crisis of the historical forms of postmodern subjectivity and the commodified culture that gave rise to and enabled it, a geopolitical crisis of the unipolar world, among many other facets of the complex world in which we live.
In order to defend themselves and cope with such a structural and multidimensional crisis, the forces of imperialism and capital are desperately and aggressively lashing out. In pursuit of this goal, they do not hesitate to bring humanity to the brink of disaster, even dragging us into the risk of an (increasingly imminent) third world war.
In the face of each structural crisis, the capitalist system has attempted to deploy various responses, always aimed at ensuring its survival: the reproduction of the system. These responses take economic, political, cultural, and even political-military forms.
The notorious emergence of furious and extreme “new right-wing” movements is part of a larger whole: the counterrevolutionary attempt to moderate the crisis, slow down the decline of Western, Euro-North American imperialism, and reduce as much as possible the tendency for the rate of profit to fall on a global scale.
In other words, the emergence and development of the “new right” is part of a global counterrevolutionary attempt that is not driven by the “evil” or ‘madness’ of three or four individuals with a lot of power or great wealth. On the contrary, the “new right” constitutes an attempt to shape a capitalist response to the crisis. This response takes different forms, always within the spectrum of the “new right”: fascism and neo-fascism, counterinsurgency, and neocolonialism.
Discussing the categories
Before addressing the capitalist counterrevolution in the 20th century and so far in the 21st century, let us pause briefly on the categorical realm.
Among many other sacred cows and prestigious names in the social sciences, we highlight, for example, that of Chantal Mouffe. This writer states, with complete levity, that: “I maintain that categories such as ‘fascism’ and ‘far right’ or comparisons with the 1930s are not appropriate […]”. To replace them, this essayist of such academic renown invites us to use the slippery term “populism,” which she explored together with Ernesto Laclau. Can the far-right experiment of Javier Milei in Argentina―recently adopted as an example to follow by various extremists worldwide―or the regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in the Middle East be characterized as “populist”? The negative answer to this question is more than obvious.
Unfortunately, conceptual ambiguity is not the exclusive property of Chantal Mouffe. Another famous essayist who is currently in vogue, Enzo Traverso, stumbles and slips on several steps as he attempts to climb the theoretical slope to grasp the specificity of contemporary right-wing extremism. If “populism” is too loose, indeterminate, and polysemic a category, Traverso can think of no better idea than to replace it with “post-fascism,” which not only explains nothing (except that the political and cultural phenomena of recent times are taking place several decades after the regimes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Salazar), but also constitutes a completely unnecessary capitulation to “post” fashions (poststructuralism, postmodernism, post-Marxism, post-workerism, postcolonial studies, etc.), to which we can now add… post-fascism. In Traverso’s case, moreover, the vagueness and theoretical eclecticism are exacerbated when he attempts to oppose, in the face of supposed “post-fascism,” nothing less than… “democracy” (sic), thus, in general, without a name or surname, that is, without social determinations.
Further adding to the ideological confusion and feeding the theoretical eclecticism that seems to reign in the field that perceives itself as “emancipatory” or “progressive,” Jean-Yves Camus and Nicolas Lebourg expound at length, appealing to this mixed bag of categories, with the sole exception that these two essayists at least attempt to make a minimal distinction between the constitution of the coordination of the new right, differentiating between those that lean towards “radical populism, of a neoliberal, even libertarian nature” and those that nurture and cultivate “authoritarian national populism.”
Do we then accept the limitations of this type of purely nominal definition, without any anchoring in socio-economic and historical determinations or any theoretical problematization?
To avoid falling into such conceptual misunderstandings, ambiguities, and inaccuracies, trivially cultivated by postmodern essay writing (and its “post” derivatives), it is advisable to first agree on the precise content and specific meaning of the central categories used here: “counterrevolution,” “fascism,” and “counterinsurgency.”
The social phenomenon of counterrevolution constitutes that type of reaction by capital against the labor force and oppressed peoples that occurs when the global capitalist system is undergoing and suffering an acute crisis and the subaltern classes become undisciplined and refuse to passively accept their subordination to the “normal” order of capitalist hegemony or to the formal and real subsumption imposed by large firms and multinational companies against the popular masses. This type of counterrevolutionary reaction consists of the response of capital to a fundamental threat, where its historical mode of production, reproduction, and domination is put at risk. Its forms of manifestation are diverse and broad, within an integrative perspective that, although it encompasses multiple modalities, are united by a common denominator and the same content: the counterrevolutionary offensive of capitalism and imperialism as a whole, guided by a strategic defense of the system.
This is not a “passive revolution,” as Antonio Gramsci calls the partial reforms carried out “from above,” which molecularly modify the balance of power between classes by making some changes and concessions under the control of capital with the aim of preserving and reproducing the previous sociopolitical order, neutralizing its enemies and even snatching away their banners and demands. Unlike such processes, which coexist and often cohabit with counterrevolution, the latter takes on a much more radical, generalized, violent, and strategic character, characterized by a “clash” perspective, a global impulse across the board, confronting the workforce and all rebellious people who do not meekly obey the despotic dictates of capital in various fields (economic, social, cultural, and political, even political-police-military).
Every deep crisis of the system of capital’s domination over the workforce produces a capitalist response (we are not thinking of the cyclical and periodic crises of overproduction of capital and goods or of stagnation and popular underconsumption―which can even be periodized, calculated and measured using the theory of long waves and their intermediate phases―but rather to long-term, global structural crises in which previous social stabilities explode due to their multiple and antagonistic contradictions). The aim is to reorganize society, generating social ruptures, that is, to separate and fracture in order to reunite (reactivating and recreating the processes of extreme violence that characterize the so-called “primitive accumulation” of capital), recomposing and reinforcing capitalist domination.
In outlining these theoretical and conceptual considerations, we start from an assumption that is not always addressed or elucidated with sufficient emphasis. Sharing the teachings of Karl Marx, summarized in his sixth (unpublished) chapter of Capital, we maintain that the world system is based, as such, both on the extraction of surplus value and on alienation; on the exploitation, domination, and subjugation of billions of members of the working class; reproducing commodities, capital, and the social relations of capital itself. Well, this system never commits suicide. Its ruling and dominant classes never resign themselves, passively and calmly, waiting serenely for death to come, wounded in their hearts by the antagonistic contradictions that lead to a fall in the rate of profit and the collapse of the social order usually accepted as “normal.”
In other words, capitalism never “collapses” on its own, due to its own internal contradictions (however dangerous and alarming they may be), without the active political intervention of its antagonists and historical enemies. Nowhere in the world! The ruling classes always react and try to counteract and mitigate the effects of these antagonistic contradictions, overcoming crises “by hook or by crook,” trying out different capitalist responses. When the popular masses, the rebellious social force of labor, and all the social movements subjugated by capital rebel, these reactions take the form of a counterrevolution. Their main strategic objective is to ensure the expanded reproduction of capital and maintain the “normal order” of the system. Social ‘peace’ is nothing more than the stable hegemony of capital over the forces of labor. Hence, the category of “counterrevolution” is the most general, broadest, and most comprehensive way to explain these social processes.
However, the capitalist and counterrevolutionary response to the crisis can take different forms depending on the historical moment, the social territories in conflict, and the balance of power between the social classes and the different subjects (collectives) in struggle. That is why the categories of Marxist critical theory are unfailingly historic. Unlike metaphysics, their content is not always identical for all times and places. Furthermore, if critical theory is assumed from the coordinates of the Global South, analyses and reflections cannot be limited to three or four European-Western experiences. We must leave behind the burden of Eurocentrism in the social sciences.
In some societies, capitalist responses take the form of fascism. In others, they take the form of Nazism. Beyond that, there was also Francoism. These were three initially Western European forms of capitalist response to systemic crisis and reaction against the political and social threats of their historical antagonist.
But these capitalist responses were neither exclusive nor unique. Keynesianism also represented a capitalist response to the crisis of the system (where, in exchange for stable employment, the trade unions of the workforce were strictly disciplined, allowing their domestication and “normal” exploitation to continue); as was Fordism-Americanism (with its prohibition, sexual repression, “scientific management” of popular energies and impulses unilaterally directed toward factory work to increase the extraction of surplus value; its blatant anti-Semitism―which inspired Adolf Hitler―and its subsequent McCarthyism). These experiments―Keynesianism, Fordism, McCarthyism―were also capitalist responses to curb the crisis and subjugate the workforce, ensuring its obedience to exploitation, domination, and submission to the prevailing social order.
Each of these categories, in turn, has taken on different connotations, attributes, and characteristics, some decisive and fundamental and others nonessential, on which not all Marxist thinkers have agreed. Take, for example, the more classical notion―often adopted as “archetypal”―of fascism.
Fascism and its many forms
According to the widely known definition formulated by the Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov in the reports of the Seventh Congress of the Communist International in 1935, fascism consists of “the declared terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most nationalist, most imperialist elements of finance capital.”
Other Marxists, such as the Russian Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky or the Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui, have emphasized that although fascism undoubtedly benefits big capital because of its class character, its main mass force and base of maneuver―for example, in the personnel of the shock troops and the members of its gigantic repressive police-military apparatus―is the petty bourgeoisie, since fascism would benefit big capital not directly through the economy but through political mediation, where the form of state repression of the working class ( ― is the petty bourgeoisie, since fascism would benefit big capital not directly through the economy but through political mediation, where the form of state repression of the working class (its unions, its political parties, replaced by a corporate order completely subordinate to the capitalist state) and its potential allies, becomes partially independent from its main beneficiaries, taking on “Bonapartist” forms (a category that Karl Marx devised to explain the counterrevolutionary coup d’état of December 1851 in France, which was shaken by a workers’ and popular rebellion that stemmed from the insurrection of 1848). For his part, the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci added that fascism, essentially counterrevolutionary, also takes on “Caesarist” political forms, with an apparent unstable balance between the disputing classes (even persecuting Freemasonry in order to replace its personnel in the state administration with its own), although ultimately it directly benefits big capital since, in his view, bourgeois democracy and fascism divide the tasks in their struggle against the working classes.
Reducing the characterization of “fascism” exclusively to a single national reality and a single historical experience (for example, Italy between 1922 and 1945) presupposes an illegitimate restriction of the category. The same would happen if the notion of “Bonapartism” were used exclusively to refer to France between December 1851 and 1870.
The categories of Marxist critical theory are not limited to a linear and photographic empirical description of a single economic-social formation at a given moment. They have a greater explanatory scope, much to the displeasure of Lyotard and his friends. Even Dimitrov himself, who was one of the first to systematize this notion in its use to rethink the counterrevolutionary forms of imperialist capital, clarifies that “The development of fascism and its dictatorship takes different forms [emphasis added by Dimitrov. N.K.] in different countries, depending on historical, social, and economic conditions; according to national particularities and the international position of the given country.”
This variety of conceptual characterizations of fascism becomes even more complex if the category is used to explain Latin American civil-military dictatorships, equally genocidal and promoters of capitalist counterrevolution, no longer in the metropolitan capitalist centers of the imperialist countries but in the dependent capitalist peripheries.
For example, in a debate held in Mexico four decades after Jorge Dimitrov’s thesis was formulated, more precisely on July 20, 1978, at a permanent seminar on Latin America (SEPLA) entitled “The external sources of fascism: Latin American Fascism and the Interests of Imperialism,” Ecuadorian Marxist researcher Agustín Cueva, maintaining strong sympathy for Dimitrov’s definition, argues that the Latin American military dictatorships of the 1970s (Pinochet, Videla, Stroessner, Somoza, etc.) took on directly fascist forms. Brazilian Marxist theorist Theotonio Dos Santos responds to this conceptualization by saying that if the capitalist response with fascist connotations predominated in Latin America in the face of the emergence of various emancipatory processes and insurgent and revolutionary social forces, this fascism took on specific forms, different from those in Europe in the 1930s and 1940s (which Dimitrov had in mind), considering that a dependent fascism predominated in Our America.
In his response to Agustín Cueva, Theotonio Dos Santos, without having read or known him, somehow converged and extended with his own analysis the reflection that in 1938 (four decades earlier!) had been formulated by the Argentine Marxist thinker Ernesto Giudici. The latter, linking Latin American anti-fascism (which identified Nazi Germany as the main enemy) with anti-imperialism (which focused its strategy on the struggle against British and US domination of Our America), strives to problematize and complicate Dimitrov’s reflection in various directions. On the one hand, Giudici argues that fascism is not only “the terrorist dictatorship of big monopoly capital” but also “the totalitarian, terrorist, and permanent dictatorship of the bourgeoisie dependent on finance capital, whatever the degree of its capitalist development” [emphasis added by N.K.]. In this way, Marxist critical theory could explain a phenomenon of universal scope, not only European, but also including the counterrevolutionary forms that periodically reappear in different societies of the Third World or Global South. Furthermore, Giudici, while still a member of the Communist International, reproached Dimitrov for limiting his theoretical definition by overemphasizing the economic dimension (centered on monopoly capitalism), adding that fascism expresses itself in the economic sphere, but also in the political sphere, taking on specific cultural forms, combining these three dimensions in different ways according to each economic-social formation and each concrete situation of class struggle. This Marxist reflection by de Giudici will be extremely useful for rethinking and reflecting on the dissimilar and specific characteristics that the global emergence of the “new” counterinsurgent far right assumes in our day, both in Europe and the United States and in Latin America.
In turn, Bolivian theorist René Zavaleta Mercado added that in Our America, fascism and crypto-fascist regimes are not born or developed as the result of a national project, but under US hegemony and direction, a thesis with which Theotonio Dos Santos would agree.
Returning to the debate in Mexico in 1978, Brazilian Marxist Ruy Mauro Marini (an internationalist activist, like Theotonio Dos Santos, in Chile during the Salvador Allende era) added a supplementary characterization to the theorizations of Cueva and Dos Santos, proposing to understand the capitalist counterrevolution of the 1970s in Latin America as a global process aimed at establishing, on a continental scale and under US imperialist domination, counterinsurgency states.
At this point, if we have previously endeavored to explain the precise content and fundamental attributes of two political categories such as counterrevolution and fascism, we then encounter difficulties in specifying the contents of a third, that of counterinsurgency.
Counterinsurgency in the age of imperialism
Irregular forms of combat between asymmetrical forces (where the insurgency fights against an invading army or forces that are vastly superior in numbers, equipment, and material resources and are waging a counterinsurgency war) are very old and certainly predate the 20th and 21st centuries. Suffice it to recall, for example, the irregular resistance of the Spanish guerrillas against the invasion of Napoleon’s armies in the first decade of the 19th century, in the case of Europe. The same applies to the black slave guerrillas of Haiti against the invading French troops (from the last decade of the 18th century until their victory in 1804); the indigenous insurgency led in Upper Peru (now the Plurinational State of Bolivia) by the guerrillas of Juana Azurduy and Manuel Ascencio Padilla against Spanish colonialism in the early decades of the 19th century; the irregular forces of the Venezuelan llaneros led by Páez, Arismendi, and Piar, under the leadership of Simón Bolívar, as well as the guerrilla forces of Warnes, Arenales, Martín Miguel de Güemes, and Juana Azurduy, fighters of the anti-colonial forces led by San Martín, both during the American wars of anti-colonial independence in the second decade of the 19th century. Faced with all these insurgent forces, the political-military enemy, superior in strength, whether from another invading capitalist power (as in the case of Napoleon in Spain) or European colonialism (as in the case of the South American guerrillas), developed forms of counterinsurgency warfare.
However, modern counterinsurgency has specific attributes, qualities, and modalities that only reached their full deployment from the end of the 19th century onwards, with the rise of capitalism in its fully developed phase of imperialism.
A contemporary definition of insurgency ― by no means scholastic or speculative, but fully operational ― can be found in the Field Manual 3-24 Counterinsurgency (written under the direction of Generals David H. Petraeus and James F. Amos (2006). Washington, Department of the Army): “Insurgency is an organized, protracted, political-military struggle designed to weaken the control and legitimacy of an established government, an occupying force, or another political authority, while increasing insurgent control,“ adding that ”[it is] typically a form of internal warfare, one that occurs primarily within a state, not between states, and one that contains at least certain elements of civil war. Counterinsurgency refers to the military, paramilitary, political, economic, psychological, and civic actions carried out by a government to defeat the insurgency.
As a political-military form of fighting rebel forces, counterinsurgency became widespread on a global scale after World War II.
In this historical phase of capitalism, where imperialism is notoriously predominant, the category of counterinsurgency has the advantage of explaining and accounting for:
(a) the general capitalist response to the crisis of the system of economic and social accumulation and reproduction;
(b) the political form, also general, that the state assumes when it becomes partially independent from the dominant economic social classes it purports to defend, in the face of the insurgent and rebellious threat of the labor force and the popular camp;
(c) the specifically political-military, counterinsurgency modality and character that the class struggle assumes when the capitalist counterrevolution sets out not only to resolve the crisis of the threatened system,
“restore social order” and repress the popular camp, but also to confront and crush the insurgent revolutionary movement (usually resorting to annihilation and genocide, exceeding in both cases mere police repression).
Counterinsurgency becomes genocidal and adopts the decision to annihilate when it faces an enemy social force that is organized, morally and materially prepared for confrontation, equipped with a defined strategy aimed at revolution and the seizure of power, and capable of flexibly managing different fronts and forms of struggle (legal, semi-legal, clandestine; demanding, economic, cultural, political, and political-military, all at the same time, within a global insurgency project).
In contrast, counterinsurgency remains in a preventive mode when its historical enemy exercises rebellion and indiscipline in a series of spontaneous protests, whether of an economic-corporate nature (for stable employment, wages, bonuses, health and education, housing, etc.), or for their special rights as differentiated social groups (sexual freedoms, legal rights, freedom of the press and information, etc.). In the latter case, that of preventive counterinsurgency, the enemy has not yet managed to structure itself as a long-term belligerent force, due to political and ideological weakness, social fragmentation, delays in its operational capacity, or simply a lack of a coherent strategy for the struggle for power.
In this sense, Ruy Mauro Marini’s conceptualization could be made more complex by differentiating between counterinsurgency states in which the military objective focused mainly on annihilation predominates and those in which counterinsurgency remains at the preventive, “low-intensity” level, exercised even under republican forms, with periodic elections and a functioning parliament, but framed within a clearly counterinsurgency strategy.
Why would there be counterinsurgency if there is no active political-military insurgency? Because the forms of capital do not wait until the last minute and the last second when “civil war breaks out” to begin identifying, registering, classifying, monitoring, controlling, and subjugating their enemy. No, not at all. Annihilation is prepared several years in advance, during which prevention still predominates.
If we accept this complexity of categorizations and a greater delimitation of the previous conceptual precisions, then we can not only differentiate between the two types of counterinsurgency (active-operational and preventive). We could also understand that fascist and neo-fascist forms do not always assume mass mobilization as a defining and absolutely essential characteristic of their morphology. There may be forms of fascism that relied from the outset on mass mobilization (as was the case in Italy and Germany until their defeat in World War II at the hands of the Red Army and the communist partisans), but there may also be others where the application of counterrevolutionary terror (with methods copied from Nazism, such as torture and extermination camps, anti-Semitism, etc.) was exercised by the police and military without mass mobilization or even against mass mobilization.
Furthermore, fascist and neo-fascist movements and regimes are not exclusively “political” in nature. They are economic, political, cultural, and political-military. The archetypal case of German fascism, known as Nazism, is extremely illustrative. Usually, in books, articles, films, documentaries, and lectures, it is often reduced to a purely political and military phenomenon. Little attention is usually paid to its economic and social structure and morphology, which remained largely intact after the crushing defeat of 1945 by the Red Army. In Nuremberg, priority was given to the trial of the genocidal perpetrators in brown uniforms. The capitalist companies that made fortunes from Nazism and enabled its rise remained largely unpunished (Muchnik, 1999). As a result, most of them continued to operate, recycled after 1945 and changing only their names, to this day.
The dead end and capitulations of the “anti-totalitarian” school
Why is it so difficult, complex, and elusive to conceptualize, theorize, and reflect on the new extreme right and neo-fascism of the 21st century? Because there is a vast jungle of ideological justifications that present themselves as “anti-totalitarian” and, therefore, anti-fascist, when in reality they are covert apologists disguised as the extreme right.
To the shameful list of clearly denialist mandarins of imperialist power, who write freely in an attempt to sweep under the rug, cover up, diminish, and even justify the genocidal practices of Nazi imperialism, we must add a neighboring and adjacent school, scandalously close to the shameful apologists for the German Führer and his uniformed butchers of Italian fascism and Spanish Francoism.
This is the “anti-totalitarian” current, so obsessed with combating any possible resurgence of social revolution and red communism that its members, refined swindlers who have abandoned any semblance of historiographical seriousness, always end up equating, through circus juggling and fairground illusions, the triumph of the Bolshevik revolution and the mere existence of the Soviet Union with Hitler’s Germany and its “final solution” (a euphemism to justify one of the greatest genocides in human history, comparable only―as Aimé Césaire warned in 1955 in his work Discourse on Colonialism―to what European colonialism had previously done to the African peoples and the indigenous peoples of Our America).
In this neighboring school, equally infected by the anti-communist rage of pro-Nazi deniers, the fauna is varied and colorful. It includes a few academics who wear robes and feign supposed Western defenses of “ultra-neoliberal” conservatism (from whose coordinates they go out of their way to minimize the Nazi massacres, trying to cover them up with the frayed umbrella of the “European civil war” and the most fanatical anti-communism) to media buffoons, less attached to the demands of academic norms and more attentive to the staging of McCarthyist show business.
Among the former is François Furet, a French historian (once prestigious), a former Marxist convert who became a pitiful crusader against communism, a movement he had been part of between 1949 and 1956. Disappointed with communism, as was the epistemologist Karl Popper, initially a communist activist in Austria and later a guru of the most fundamentalist neoliberalism, Furet ended up fighting against the red flag without any shame, sowing the seeds of what he now claims as the leitmotif of the international coordination of the most extreme new European right.
His pathetic German co-pilot is the historian Ernst Nolte (ultra-Catholic by training, a direct disciple and friend of Martin Heidegger, as could not be otherwise), who competes with his French colleague to see who wins the European cup of the most deranged anti-communism.
Furet made a comment on Nolte’s libel, to which Nolte responded with a letter. The correspondence between the two, originally published in the magazine Commentaire, comprised eight letters in total between 1997 and 1998 and was published as a single book, under a title that leads us unequivocally to an identification that is, in itself, absurd and delusional: Fascism and Communism. Both historians ended their intellectual careers as radical right-wing extremists. But Nolte in particular, although he assumes the exaggerated appearance of a supposed “liberal” character in a manner that is both feigned and obviously opportunistic for academic convenience, in his correspondence with the French McCarthyist he comes remarkably close to neo-Nazi revisionists and deniers, casting doubt on the number of people annihilated in the Nazi extermination camps or giving the benefit of the doubt to the columns of smoke from the crematoria at Auschwitz, characterized by revisionists as… “an optical illusion” [sic]. All serious historiographical research is completely lacking in intellectual respect, even when evaluated from the most recalcitrant right-wing point of view. Following the same criteria: could the mushroom clouds from the nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been the scattered smoke from a group of disoriented Japanese tourists at a summer camp? Only an intellectual lumpen like Ernst Nolte can allow himself to take and distort fundamental and emblematic elements of the Nazi genocide for the sake of German impunity. If a Paraguayan, Guatemalan, Mexican, or Argentine historian did this, I would immediately go to court or call for a distasteful and low-brow comedy show. Nolte added to this extremist and counterrevolutionary constellation one of the propaganda ideas that has become a mantra: Islamophobia, even going so far as to equate the political tradition of Islam with fascism. This is nonsense without any evidence, logic, or consistency, which, unfortunately, is adopted by the international coordination of the extreme right, even in countries governed by pro-capitalist but tolerant social democracies.
Neither Nolte nor Furet are alone in their respective countries in this counterinsurgency crusade of the Knights Templar, half grotesque, half pathetic, who obsessively seek to eradicate and bury once and for all any trace of anti-capitalist insurgency, Marxism, and communism, diluting, diminishing, justifying, and, when possible, directly denying the Nazi genocide.
Nolte is accompanied, as he takes care to emphasize whenever he can, by a pitiful team that panics every time it imagines seeing, from afar, through binoculars and through the window, a tiny red flag: the insufferable Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber, and Michael Stürmer. All of them have happily thrown overboard any of the many justified “guilt” feelings that, several decades ago, in the second postwar period, the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers felt on behalf of the German people for having enthusiastically and collectively supported Hitler.
And poor Furet was lucky enough to be accompanied by a chorus of companions even more frivolous, banal, and superficial than Nolte’s boring, fascist, and unbearable German associates. These are the bombastic and histrionic “New Philosophers,” who are neither new nor philosophers. Among them are Maurice Clavel, Jean-Marie Benoist, André Glucksmann, Jean-Paul Dollé, and Gilles Susong, among other sellers of black-and-white televisions and promoters of raffles for a trip to Disney in some shopping mall. But the most media-savvy of them all is undoubtedly Bernard-Henri Lévy, a fanatical Zionist, promoter of France’s neocolonial adventures in North Africa (for example, the military adventure of Western imperialism, NATO, and the United States in Libya and the assassination of its president) and a gladiator when it comes to legitimizing the “right to interfere” of US imperialism in any corner of the planet. Many of them came from the Parisian university elite and briefly showed up at student assemblies in 1968, purely by chance, the year in which the famous protests proliferated. But they became “disenchanted” with Marxism faster than it took them to change their underwear. In one of the few honest writings he penned, Bernard-Henri Lévy confessed that he betrayed himself many times… before he turned thirty! A complete renegade at such a young age, before he became an intellectual. A confession on his part… relief from evidence.
None of these children, pampered by the most rancid elements of the French right―racist, colonialist, pro-Zionist, and xenophobic―and hyper-promoted by their large (in)communication monopolies, there were never decades of militancy and, towards old age, as a result of a certain “maturity” or perhaps exhaustion, a kind of negative balance would have been reached and then the decision would have been made to retire from Marxism and cross over to a more peaceful and tranquil path. Which would be, from our point of view, highly debatable but, why not, understandable.
This is absolutely not the case with the self-styled “New Philosophers”! Bernard-Henri Lévy did some ideological tourism for a very brief summer season in the Maoism of the Gauche Proletarienne [Proletarian Left] and then went on to profit and live for several decades from his unbridled anti-Marxism and blatant Zionism, well paid for, of course. A lucrative and risk-free business. With a lifetime of vacations guaranteed―through Zionism―in Israel, the colonialist and genocidal spearhead of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Had he been born in Latin America, his vacations would surely have been guaranteed in Miami or in the counterinsurgency narco-state of Colombia, historically known as “the Israel of Latin America.”
His rapid transition from what Samir Amin ironically called “the religious spirit of extreme intellectual theorists who move from one extreme to the other without any problem” (Amin, 2008: 221), was much more like a passing fashion in shoes or a fleeting haircut than an exhaustive elaboration of a theoretical corpus and a political tradition that he had examined, known, and evaluated in depth. Perhaps it is no coincidence that his Spanish counterpart, less “chic” and more gray, the best-selling publicist and current admirer of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, Pío Moa, also went through that singular and exotic “European-style Maoism” during his acne-ridden youth.
Bernard-Henri Lévy’s tireless defense of the colonialist, racist, exclusionary, Islamophobic, and pro-American policies of the State of Israel, whether in the French press or in the Spanish Prisa group, for which he is a regular columnist, reached such a point that at the dawn of 2006, in a lecture given in January at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York (an institution founded by magnate David Rockefeller), he declared that “anti-Americanism is the new anti-Semitism,” equating and identifying criticism of US imperialist policy with anti-Semitic ideology. What nonsense! According to this shameless, capricious, and forced criterion, the American Jewish thinker Noam Chomsky, who has published dozens of books questioning US imperialism, would be… an anti-Semite!
If this kind of hilarious argument―and his brazen defense of Western racism, neocolonialism, and imperialism―were shouted out in a bar by a drunken patron who had had one too many, it would immediately generate condescending laughter or whispered mockery. But the person promoting them, applauded by the French far right and disseminated throughout official European society, is none other than the anti-communist Bernard-Henri Lévy, who grants himself prestige by presenting himself as a student of… Jacques Derrida, the father of “deconstruction.” Oh, what a coincidence!
That is why old François Furet had such bad luck in his anti-communist career, even though he tried hard to ally himself with his German squire. With such co-drivers and such an unserious team of mechanics, no one is going to win a rally, no matter how many prestigious papyri they have from the conservative academies of the old capital of the 19th century, as Walter Benjamin called it.
In terms of intellectual history, both Nolte’s German anti-communist school and his gang of accomplices lacking in political, ethical, and scientific scruples, as well as Furet’s anti-Marxist cast, Bernard-Henri Lévy, and their French cohorts, have fed on what is commonly known as the ideological current of “anti-totalitarianism,” which lightly equates communism with Nazism.
Hannah Arendt, exiled in the United States, published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, at the height of McCarthy’s witch hunt. When Charles Chaplin, Bertolt Brecht, and Howard Fast were being persecuted in the United States, shady trials were held against all intellectuals suspected of simple “progressivism,” and the labor and union movement, as well as the film industry, were harshly repressed. It was a time when more than 30,000 books were censored and banned in the United States (removed from libraries and bookstores), while private conversations, family gatherings, and meetings between friends were monitored… and many people who had never read two pages of Marx and had never even seen the covers of Das Kapital in a bookstore ended up in prison “just in case.” All of this was legitimized through rigged trials, false accusations, forced and anonymous denunciations, unfounded testimony, “irregular” and secret interrogations, crowned by the famous blacklists (bans for the purposes of ideological persecution and thought control). It was a veritable witch hunt that inspired Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible [1952].
Of course, in the field of racism and apartheid against the African-American population in the southern United States, McCarthy was not innovating anything new in the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan and its heirs had long been lynching, segregating, and persecuting the black population without anyone being horrified or alarmed. In that regard, everything continued and went on as it was (and still is) customary and “normal” in the United States. And that is not some “anti-American” invention, as Bernard-Henri Lévy would hastily warn. Someone as unsuspected of anti-imperialism as former US President W.J. “Billy” Clinton was forced to publicly apologize in April 1997 because in his country “in the 1960s, more than 400 black men from Alabama were used as human guinea pigs.” This was the case in which these 400 citizens of African descent, who were suffering from syphilis, were deliberately not cured so that experiments could be carried out on them. If that happened a decade after McCarthyism… let’s imagine for a minute what happened during Senator McCarthy’s dark reign…
But neither Hannah Arendt nor the school of “anti-totalitarianism” inspired by her (in the United States and Western Europe) ever dared to focus and deepen their analysis by adopting as their main object of study the persecutions of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy and his anti-communist, xenophobic, and racist abuses, aimed at achieving total and absolute control of the population. When Arendt mentions it, in a very heavy 620-page tome, it is only in a very brief and microscopic footnote of just… three lines! Quite simply: shameful. It is no coincidence that the historian of ideas and political culture Domenico Losurdo characterized the “anti-totalitarian” crusade as a direct product of the Cold War and anti-communism, just as he dismissed the attempt to equate communism and Nazism as “artificial,” ” imposture,“ ”ideological,“ and, as we pointed out, ”an adaptation to the Cold War.“
Something similar to this intellectual imposture and its consequent ideological capitulation by Hannah Arendt happened to other European intellectuals exiled in the United States. They suddenly became ”anti-totalitarian” and denounced “Eastern despotism,” focusing primarily on the crusade against communism (a lesser-known but highly symptomatic case is that of former German communist Karl August Wittfogel, a former member of the Frankfurt School, ex-Marxist, ex-militant, co-opted and recruited in the United States for the most fanatical crusade of anti-communism).
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, that immense 620-page book, where Arendt’s reflection on anti-Semitism is central, there is not a single mention of… Henry Ford, one of the archetypal paradigms of Hitler, Rosenberg, Goebbels, Himmler, von Schirach, Baldur von Schirach, and the rest of the Nazi hierarchy.
Not a single line, not a single footnote in 620 pages! Absolute silence. And yet, at that point, Hannah Arendt was writing from the United States, with every library she could think of to visit and every bookstore at her fingertips. Was it perhaps too difficult to find and therefore analyze Henry Ford’s legacy in American political culture? We suspect not. Antonio Gramsci, who never set foot on American soil, did not hesitate for a second to focus his attention on Henry Ford and “Fordism” when identifying and reflecting on the paradigm of “Americanism.” And that’s despite the fact that his famous Prison Notebooks were written almost two decades before Hannah Arendt’s famous text saw the light of day… (his notebook 22, on “Americanism and Fordism,” was written in 1934, 17 years before Arendt’s work was published).
When it comes to judging the supremacist racism prevalent in the United States, the slavery and subjugation of the African-American working class, and the anti-Semitism of which Henry Ford was an ardent precursor, Arendt’s supposedly “anti-totalitarian” work is marked by… a scandalous silence.
Those surprisingly absent chapters, those shamefully blank pages, those deafening silences make the overloaded pages of The Origins of Totalitarianism creak. Such epistemological and political obstacles do not respond to a supposed “lack of information” or unfamiliarity of the author (and her school) with the subject matter. Let us avoid euphemisms: what we are dealing with is, plain and simple, complicity.
Or did Wittfogel suddenly forget in the United States everything he had researched in Frankfurt when he denounced one of his former comrades as a communist in the midst of the McCarthy witch hunt? Or was Arendt not surprised that Henry Ford, an international symbol of modern American industrial culture, was explicitly adopted as an archetypal example and even honored by Führer Adolf Hitler himself?
The truth is that in order to understand Hannah Arendt’s ideological stumbles and compromises, one could argue that she had no choice but to “negotiate” with the prevailing ideology in the United States in the early 1950s. Half a century later, however, it is truly untenable to continue maintaining the same hermeneutic line, when the ideological climate had already changed significantly. We refer, for example, to the book Totalitarianism: A History of a Debate by Enzo Traverso, who once again insists on the homology between communism and Nazism, making a notable and significant abstraction of the English, French, and American genocides throughout the colonial world.
From Arendt, through Wittfogel, to Traverso, the “anti-totalitarian” school―perhaps even against its original intentions―is accompanied by certain unwanted friendships.
We must not forget that Ludwig von Mises, in his anti-communist hatred and opposition to “totalitarianism,” does not hesitate or waver in defending the supposed merits of an extremely violent, anti-communist regime such as Benito Mussolini’s fascism.
In one of his books considered a “classic” by his supporters of the “Austrian school,” entitled Liberalism (published in 1927 and reprinted countless times, until 2015, without ever changing a comma or a period), Ludwig von Mises declares, without blushing, the following: “It cannot be denied that fascism and all similar dictatorial tendencies are animated by the best of intentions, and that their intervention has saved European civilization for the moment. The merits acquired by fascism will remain forever in history [emphasis added by N.K.].” Let us bear in mind that, in the name of “anti-totalitarianism,” the Austrian publicist makes this statement praising fascism five years after Mussolini took power in Italy and one year after Antonio Gramsci was imprisoned.
Through the paradoxes of cultural history, both the French convert (Furet) and his anti-communist German associates (led by Nolte), both inspired by the “anti-totalitarianism” of the Cold War, ended up wallowing in the same mud as the neo-Nazi revisionists, without distancing themselves from the neoclassical economists, the fathers of neoliberalism, even in its most extreme “Austrian” version. All of them were unbridled right-wingers, invariably open defenders of big business and the single party of imperialist capital, but with slight nuances between them. In their unbridled fury against any memory, real or imagined, of communism and the red flag, Furet and Nolte are undoubtedly much closer to the neo-Nazi denialist camp than they themselves imagine, as in quite a few works (individual or shared) they have tried to minimize Hitler’s genocide, extravagantly attributing it to supposed and delusional “Asian influences.”
Neo-Nazism and denialism
Among the “think tanks” and the ruling and dominant classes of Western Europe and the United States of America, openly and violently pro-imperialist geopolitical strategies and practices have played a fundamental role in recent decades. It is no coincidence that these strategies and practices have abandoned previous “pacifist,” “republican,” and “liberal” gestures and postures to openly flirt with neo-fascist and apologetic positions that attempt to minimize Nazism when they do not openly sympathize with this current.
It is by no means random that in recent years traditional Nazi groups, updated neo-Nazis, Falangists, Francoists, fascists, and the entire supremacist chorus that surrounds them have achieved social visibility, electoral legality, absolute “tolerance” on the part of the bourgeoisie previously identified with bourgeois republicanism, and brazen media promotion. This is true both in Western Europe, in European countries and republics of the former Soviet orbit that have fanatically converted to anti-communism (with euphoric entry into NATO), as well as within the United States, the main gendarme of Western imperialism and the cradle of McCarthyism.
This alarming resurgence of supremacism and neo-Nazism, which justifies or even openly defends imperialist, colonialist, racist, xenophobic, and genocidal policies, has been historically preceded in the American case by the old fundamentalist theories of “Manifest Destiny” and the “Monroe Doctrine,” the supremacist apologetics of the Western and North American white race in Henry Ford’s The International Jew, as well as the more contemporary trend of denialism and “revisionism.” The latter have been attempting to deny, question and, if there is no other option, justify the fierce and brutal Nazi-fascist-Franco genocide perpetrated first during the Spanish Civil War and then during World War II.
Among the strict deniers, cover-ups, and justifiers of German Nazism, the following stand out: Harry Elmer Barnes, David Hoggan, Austin App, and Willis Carto in the United States; Louis Darquier de Pellepoix, Robert Faurisson, and Jean-Marie and Marine Le Pen in France; David Irving in England, among many other intellectual frauds, all of whom are fanatical anti-Marxists and uncontrolled anti-communists. To all of them can be added the Spaniard Pío Moa, an exotic and pathetic former leftist turned vulgar writer of shopping mall literature who has achieved fame by spreading commercial hagiographies of Generalissimo Francisco Franco. A staunch denier of the massacres in Spain, Moa is a degraded and peripheral, second-rate version of Nazi deniers.
These literary representatives of the Lower Paleolithic are accompanied by more media-recognized “stars” of the political Parnassus, such as Matteo Salvini in Italy, the neo-fascist Vox group in Spain, the far-right Frauke Petry in Germany, the extremist Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, the son of a Nazi and himself a neo-Nazi, Jörg Haider (now deceased) of Austria, among many other devoted admirers of the swastika, black leather, and brown shirts.
If the former attempt to perfume and soften the Nazi filth with their writing, which is impossible to hide and pestilential even if we close our eyes and cover our noses, the latter strive to aggiornare and update the old fascist forms of social reordering in the field of state politics and the large media monopolies. In both cases―writers and political representatives―the goal is the same: to defend and promote counterinsurgency in a vain attempt to “save” the imperialist system of twilight capitalism in the face of the undeniable crisis of the unipolar world.
The “new” neo-fascist right
In the publications of German Nazi denialism, Italian neo-fascist revisionism, and Spanish neo-Francoism, as well as in the militant anti-communism of the various “anti-totalitarian” schools (whether French, German, American, etc.), all historically preceded by the pro-imperialist doctrines of Monroe, of the “Manifest Destiny” of the United States, as well as in Ford’s anti-Semitic newspapers and volumes, although delusional and psychedelic, the crusaders’ arguments attempt to string together a minimal “theoretical” discourse (several quotation marks). With no small amount of eclecticism and a great abundance of pragmatic opportunism, Zionism joins this ghost train, accompanied by the pro-Nazi sympathy of Zelensky in Ukraine (who publicly honors Stepan Bandera, a collaborator of Hitler) and the neo-Nazi exaltation of the Croats (who praise Ante Pavelic, another pawn of the Führer). In a disjointed and fragmented manner, spouting sloppy platitudes and falsified historical data, sinking knee-deep into the most primitive and reactionary atavistic prejudices, but in all these cases, the main sustenance is based on a far-right ideology that seeks to legitimize the neocolonial domination of the great Western powers and the overexploitation of the working class of the Global South.
Following this nauseating thread, in the so-called “new Europe” of the 21st century, an extremist mass conservatism is emerging, brutally xenophobic, Islamophobic, and unashamedly nostalgic for the fascist, Nazi, and Francoist counterrevolution of the first half of the 20th century.
The “bait” used to justify xenophobia and supremacist aspirations refers to the fact that millions of Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Hindus, and Asians (accompanied by no few “Sudacas” from Latin America) flocked en masse to the capitalist metropolises of the West, fleeing hunger, super-exploitation, wars of conquest and plunder, and various genocides in their peripheral societies of origin.
Let us not forget that the “civilized” and ‘democratic’ former German Chancellor Angela Merkel declared from Potsdam, a few days after meeting with the Prime Minister of Turkey in October 2010, that: “In the early 1960s, our country [the Federal Republic of Germany. N.K.] called on foreign workers to come and work in Germany, and now they live in our country […] We have deceived ourselves. We said, ‘They won’t stay, they’ll leave at some point.’ But this is not the case […] And, of course, this vision of a multicultural [society], of living together and enjoying each other’s company […] has failed completely.”
“Aryan” and “white” Europe felt offended, displaced, even socially and culturally invaded by this massive dark-skinned workforce that is good for cleaning bathrooms and scrubbing floors, as well as for doing rough factory work, but not for sharing citizenship in the European community. At best, they manage to achieve second-class citizenship. This is true of the Muslims and Africans arriving in France, and the Turks and Syrians going to Germany. Official Europe, Western-oriented and Eurocentric to the core, for decades convinced that it had finally left behind Nazi eugenics and ethnic cleansing as an embarrassing “sin of youth,” never abandoned its claims of “racial purity.” Today, it assumes this publicly and without much embarrassment. The masks and pretense have fallen away. It is bothered by the smell of Muslim-style roast meat and by seeing the subway full of dark faces when the immigrant workforce dares to leave the suburbs of large cities (where it is clearly marginalized) and, with no small amount of fear, dares to move to an urban space traditionally reserved for “whites.” The rebelliousness of immigrant youth makes itself felt socially in a cyclical manner, and the forces of repression (police and military) do not hesitate to adopt clearly counterinsurgency strategies of containment and confrontation. The role of the so-called “French school” of counterinsurgency warfare in the colonies and the fierce repression suffered by extra-parliamentary insurgencies within Western Europe itself (in Germany, Italy, France, Great Britain, and Spain) from the late 1960s throughout the 1970s and, in some cases―particularly in Spain and southern France―until a few years ago.
And so, hand in hand with linguistic, religious, and ethnic discomfort in the face of dark-skinned immigration, or in the face of rebellions by nations without their own state, the omnipresent specter of neo-fascist political reactions reappears, once again, the omnipresent specter of neo-fascist political reactions, sometimes presented in their fierce and rudimentary original guise and sometimes with an updated air of commercial “efficiency” and cold parliamentary “modernity.” It is no coincidence that these extreme right-wing forces, which never completely disappeared, although they have now gained mass support, combine everything from the most excessive street violence and shock groups to institutional participation in conventional parliamentary regimes (such as the European Parliament or the US Congress), with the barely concealed approval of the old parliamentary formations and classic political representations of the post-war period.
The “New Right”: a hybrid of neo-fascism and extremist neoliberalism
Without abandoning conceptual and categorical precision, but moving closer in time to the “new” extreme right-wing movements of the last two decades (that is, placing ourselves in the heart of the 21st century), there may be counterinsurgency fascisms that are once again attempting a capitalist response to the systemic crisis by promoting discourses and practices centered on xenophobia, racial supremacism, and national exclusivism (for example, in Spain and France, where Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are mixed in an eclectic and even contradictory manner, without much concern for logical consistency or political coherence); others where localist and secessionist rhetoric predominates (for example, in northern Italy, where anti-immigrant xenophobia is reappearing in the foreground, today [2025] having become state policy in Italy); and still others where neo-Nazi propaganda appeals, for example, an idealized and melancholic “New European Order” (mainly in countries that previously belonged to the Soviet sphere of influence and currently espouse a nostalgic anti-communism of the Third Reich and its collaborationist regimes, with the geopolitical intention of being accepted by the European Westernism of NATO). In the latter case, the aim is a capitalist response to the crisis, which is continental in nature, not just local. Always, of course, beyond all these nuances, attributes, and differentiated models, relying on a shared foundation: counterinsurgency, a capitalist reaction “of shock” against communism and the legacy inspired by Karl Marx, that is, directing this response of capitalist imperialism against the organized workforce and the anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist liberation movements of the Global South.
And while neo-fascists, neo-Nazis, and the extreme “new right” vary significantly in tone, rhetoric, marketing, staging, and the priorities of their political propaganda, their economic projects are not very different. All have in common, we reiterate, the same axis of capitalist response to the crisis, the promotion of counterinsurgency measures (active or preventive) against social movements and rebellious political forces, as well as a “shock” policy against the historical rights of the workforce (promoting employer-led “labor reforms,” planned destruction of pensions, dogmatic elimination of all state subsidies not directed at large companies and banks, etc.). This wide-ranging zoological fauna weaves pragmatic alliances around this “program,” both in Europe and the United States and in dependent and peripheral capitalist countries. However, these ultra-right extremists maintain an extremely opportunistic flexibility when it comes to discussing what specific type of capitalist response to promote on a strictly economic level.
Some forces on the extreme right appeal to ideological confusion by calling themselves “libertarians.” Anyone minimally informed knows that the term “libertarian” is synonymous with anarchist, a cousin of communism with which it shared the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA or First International). . However, just as the German Nazis happily used the term “socialist” to identify themselves while mercilessly massacring all the Reds… without making any major distinction, the “new” extreme right of the 21st century has no problem using a term of anarchist origin to defend the employer policies of large companies against the workforce, promoting an exclusively repressive state, but one that strictly guarantees the super-exploitation and savage and unbridled extraction of surplus value without any kind of law or legal codes. Pure “economic freedom” (for capital) combined with little or no political freedom (for the popular majorities and the workforce). Now, alongside the supposed “libertarians” (in reality: ultra-neoliberals, fundamentalist defenders of market asymmetries, fetishes, and irrationalities), there coexist extreme right-wingers, alleged “protectionists” (for example, in the case of the neo-fascist wing of the US Republicans, led by the supremacist magnate Donald Trump; or, in the French case, in the National Front, already institutionalized by Marine Le Pen). In most of these cases, this seemingly “protectionist” stance, critical of globalization, mainly conceals a geopolitics of great power in dispute with the global rise of China, along with xenophobia towards a super-exploited workforce of Latin American origin in the United States or African, Arab, and Muslim origin in France.
To these theoretical specifications and descriptions of multiple nuances and attributes within the neo-fascist counterinsurgency arena, all of a “macro” nature, which the Marxist tradition and its critical theory contribute to understanding the responses of Western capitalist imperialism to the crisis of the system, it is also worth adding other types of complementary reflections and theorizations, formulated on another scale, such as those attempted in Austria and Germany, first, and then in the United States, by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich on family structure and politics directed at the unconscious, managing to construct submissive and obedient personalities that allow fascist forms to triumph over the working classes, their political organizations, and their emancipatory projects. Historical and social processes in which victims―not rationally reading a logically articulated program of specific measures, but through imaginary or unconscious processes―identify with their perpetrators (not only by voting for and supporting repressive and genocidal forces, but even by militating in organizations that attack their own class with virulence and hatred). The same applies to the reflections of the Argentine philosopher and psychoanalyst León Rozitchner, who draws on the more “social” works of Sigmund Freud, as well as the theoretical works of Karl Marx and Karl von Clausewitz, to delve into the most intimate subjective folds (often despised or ignored by the political culture of the traditional left) that allow, not in the visible realm of political programs and explicit slogans, but at much deeper levels that are not observable at first glance, that is, unconscious, identifying with atavistic, reactionary, fascist, and counterrevolutionary forms in the social scenarios of class struggle. To the works of Reich and Rozitchner, we should surely add the research of Erich Fromm, who investigates the unconscious motivations that lead segments of the working classes to support Nazism and fascism, even against their own class, finding the answer in the tendency to seek secondary bonds as a substitute for the primary ones that have been lost.
Capitalist responses to the crisis and counterrevolutionary offensives of the 20th and 21st centuries never operate in the abstract, in the stylized and skeletal orbit of “pure” social classes (in the style of the ideal types imagined by Max Weber), without historical anchoring in various social formations specific to the world system.
Here we explain another of our starting points, often neglected by publicists who only use “Marxist” jargon and slang without thoroughly understanding Karl Marx’s dialectical methodology. The capitalist regime, since its very inception as a world system, has never been flat, horizontal, or homogeneous. It has historically unfolded through uneven development, structuring a system of asymmetries, dominations, and dependencies, where some social formations (and their nation-states) have played a catalytic role in metropolitan capitalism in its imperialist phase, while other social formations have been relegated, since the very birth of the world system and its international division of labor, the role of colonial, semi-colonial, or dependent peripheries, subordinated to the colonial domination of capitalist imperialism. Therefore, counterrevolutionary offensives have not only attempted to keep the world system of exploitation and oppression afloat by attacking the workforce on a global scale, but have also lashed out against the insurgent social forces of the colonies and former colonies, as well as the dependent societies and subjugated nations and communities of the Global South.
The capitalist counterrevolution in the imperialist phase has had as its adversaries and enemies not only the rebellious workforce but also the insurgent movements of national-anti-colonial liberation. Hence, counterinsurgency has invariably been accompanied by rabid racism and supremacist ideologies, pseudo-scientific justifications about alleged “inferior peoples” and “nations destined to disappear,” atavistic misogyny and patriarchy, primitive and parochial contempt for other cultures (Orientalism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, underestimation and humiliation of native, indigenous, and Afro-descendant peoples) and theocratic fundamentalisms (Protestant or Catholic, but also Zionist), cloaked in the deceptive garb of an exclusionary, Western-centric, and genocidal modernity. All of these are justifications for imperialist and colonialist projects, legitimizing their class wars and rampant ethnocentrism (against the dark skin, for example, of the immigrant masses who in recent years have been flowing into the United States or European countries, not to mention the massacred Palestinian people), their genocidal practices, and the various offensives of capital.
Are these latter, “extra” connotations, which have accompanied each of the counterrevolutionary attempts, part of the DNA of imperialist, neo-Nazi, and neo-fascist counterinsurgency, or are they simply fortuitous and casuistic accidents, that is, an accidental and dispensable epiphenomenon? Historical experience suggests that their repeated and systematic reappearance and reproduction, in each of the capitalist responses to the crisis and in the various global offensives of the counterrevolution of imperialist capital, is an integral part of the social form we know as the capitalist regime. Neither genocide, nor racism, nor misogyny, nor the Western apologia for the deranged and delusional “white supremacy” constitute “fortuitous accidents” or “singular and unrepeatable anomalies.”
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