The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism

Andrea Micocci, Flavia Di Mario

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351251181
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Capitalism is based on a false logic in which all facts and ideas are reduced to a consideration of their 'feasibility' within the capitalist system. Thus, all mainstream economic and political theories, including those such as Marxism which are supposed to offer an alternative vision, have been stunted and utopian ideas are completely side-lined. In order to constantly work out the feasible, you have to hang on to pseudo-factual concepts: nationalism; a constant drive for efficiency; the idea of nation/state; corporatism; managed markets; business ethics; governance etc. Capitalism is reduced to the management of the economy by states that fight each other and marvel at the independence of finance. All this, the book argues, is akin, intellectually, economically, politically, and unfortunately individually, to fascism.

The Fascist Nature of Neoliberalism offers a brief, provocative analysis of this issue with special reference to the most visible executioners of its will: the much-misunderstood managerial class. This group simply happens to hold power, and hence visibility, but they do what everybody else does, and would do, all the time. This is because capitalism is an intellectual outlook that thoroughly directs individual actions through fascist and non-fascist repression. This book argues that the only way to escape capitalism is to recover individual intellectual and sentimental emancipation from capitalism itself in order to produce radical solutions.

This volume is of great importance to those who study and are interested in political economy, economic theory and philosophy, as well as fascism and neoliberalism.

1 Introduction

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The financial problem is the crucial problem: we must balance the state budget as soon as possible.

Benito Mussolini, first speech as Prime Minister¹

Few economists and lay persons are bound to disagree when someone says that capitalism cannot be a functioning market economy unless it is supported by a state, a juridical system and a conflict-solving social and political organisation – and ‘market’, here, can be meant in the common, approximate and vague way we all use in our daily business, as well as in the sense stated in microeconomic theory. Nor would anybody disagree if the necessity of a degree of homogeneity and efficiency – a sense of common purpose – is judged necessary. To this, one can also safely add that an unspecified quantity of conflicts and disagreements are bound to remain, which must be, and usually are, tamed into the feasible. Most lay people would say that the above is simply the essence of reality. Very significantly, they are unlikely to say ‘this is what reality looks like’, for that would imply doubt of the truthfulness, and response to human needs, of everything that has been said.

Competent and politically aware economists, as a consequence, would find attempts to go beyond this apparently innocuous generalisation in the direction of exploring the general features of actual capitalist states, juridical systems and social and political organisations hard to digest. They are scared by the intuition that capitalism is not quite the same thing implicit in economic and political theories, which is what we are going to argue in the pages that follow. Capitalism, neoliberalism and fascism are, to the chagrin of these self-secure economists, fuzzy and even self-contradictory. We are going to show this protean aspect, for it is there that explanations must be found – difficult explanations.

We propose in what follows that ‘capitalism as we know it’ today is akin to, and indeed partakes in the same nature as, fascist ideas and actual practices about politics and the economy.² Both fascism and capitalism as we know it, in fact, imply an organic society (a community, as present-day capitalist men and women of all political persuasions are fond to say³); trade unions that are fought and repressed until they are tamed into a corporatist structure and strategy; a role for a social/socialised ethics and even a business ethics that is sought and even (in some historical periods) surprisingly found; war as a means to resolve thorny international relations issues; horror towards forms of sociality that are not based on the standard capitalist state; the perception of the ‘other’ as either a threat or an ally; and a tension between politics and the economy, easy to brand as an efficiency problem. This guilty confusion takes place, as we will argue repeatedly, because otherness is disregarded in that it is replaced with diversity, as in Hegel (2008). (See Micocci 2016.) All the above cannot be understood without this fundamental trait being always in our minds. In capitalism, all problems can be mediated because there is no ‘other’ reality, but only ‘capitalist’ diversity. We will see this, with further important particulars, in Chapter 2 and onwards.

In order for the majority to leave well enough alone and go on with pointless but feasible debates, language and logic are distorted and, above all, limited: they are transformed into what Cassirer (1962) called ‘mythical language’. In more general terms (Micocci, 2016), metaphysics⁴ and myth replace sound ideas: vague capitalistic concepts replace concrete facts, as well as abstract reasoning in the (paradoxical) name of efficiency coupled with flexibility. Evocation rather than definition is, in other words, practised.⁵ This, to us – and to many other authors – is fascism, as we shall see in Chapter 3.

In other words, a flawed, limited and limiting (fascist) metaphysics informs present-day capitalism of itself. Economic theory, due to its logically flawed structure that mirrors such dominant intellectuality, is condemned to be part of such metaphysics, never to transcend it in any way.⁶ Marxist theories could have gained intellectual independence from all that, had the banally metaphysical – and wrong – Hegelian mentality of those who presided over the Marxist debate not gained overwhelming dominance (Micocci, 2002, 2009/10, 2012, 2016). Their activity has thus helped enhance the fascist character of the metaphysics of capitalism and helped capitalism survive.

As a consequence of all the above, to operate successfully in capitalism you are better off if you hold, and use, a simplified framework for analysis. This latter implies, however, a tremendous complication in the definition of the technicalities because these, as a consequence of the simplifications, are always under-determined (see Micocci, 2016). Mainstream economics and mainstream Marxism(s) have for long supplied such framework, but they have now been superseded, we argue here, by the much more coherent neoliberal lack of ideas. Neoliberalism is not even a consistent corpus of ideas; in fact, it exists only as a tireless producer of eclectic economic policies. As an outcome, we will see, in due course, it is the best interpreter of the fascist component of the capitalist metaphysics. The alleged liberal features of neoliberal capitalism (for instance, inequality, individual competition, the rolling back of the welfare state and of the planning activity of the state in the economy, firm management), as we will show, perfectly fit the fascist nature of capitalism theoretically as well as historically, and depend on the presence of its mythical language. (Take ‘the regulating power of the market’ locution for a typical instance.)

The recent preponderance of finance (Micocci, 2011a, 2011b, 2012, 2016) has powerfully helped this trend by enhancing the grip of the dominant metaphysics of profits on actual capitalist life and on its mythical language (Di Mario and Micocci, 2015). Firm management and, as a consequence of neoliberal stupidity, even state management are imbibed with such mentality.⁷ The two things have grown hand in hand. The enhancement of the metaphysics produced by the financialisation induced by neoliberalism has spread itself even on the wretched classes, which do not partake of the financial bonanza. Authoritarian forms of democracy and populist solutions can thus be imposed on whole populations, as Europe has shown so well as to need no further explanation. Proportional electoral representation has virtually disappeared from the world.⁸

This text, against much of the present fashion, is not going to argue that the present crisis that started in 2007 has brought anything relevantly new to the scenario we are going to depict. This is because crises are normal to the development of capitalism and come down to capitalist conflicts, which are unable to produce any novelty, despite the rhetoric of all the prophets of doom who proliferate in such circumstances. The features of capitalism that matter to us remain the same despite all the human sufferings such crises entail. Also, as we will show in Chapter 3, fascist economic and political programmes are so shallow, vague and eclectic as to emasculate any economic and political challenge, however violent or damaging. Fascism is violent because its politics is impotent.

In Chapter 2, we outline the theory behind this book, thus describing the relevant features of capitalism as we know it.

In Chapter 3, we discuss fascism, basing our argument mainly but not solely on Italian fascism. We shall seek to emphasise the relevant economic and political features of fascism in general in order to see its relation with capitalism.

Chapter 4 discusses neoliberalism in the light of what has been said in the preceding pages. It shows how capitalism, fascism and neoliberalism are perfectly parallel and share in the same nature.

Chapter 5 presents a peculiar feature of neoliberalism, which helps it survive by enhancing some of its fascistic features: managerialism.

The conclusions will be as brief as possible because the fascist features of capitalism as we know it and of its present-day version called neoliberalism have been, hopefully, demonstrated in the course of the argument.

An edifying little story is told in the Appendix to help the reader in trouble understand the guilty subtlety and vulgarity of the whole through the example of academia, which should nurture, besides intellectual erudition, originality, but instead contributes, we hold, to the present state of things. With such belief we offer it.

Notes

1In Mussolini (1934).

2Many will seek to criticise us by claiming that our use of the word fascism is too personal and idiosyncratic. By it, however, we mean what we say here, and we know no other term for it. Polemics about it are therefore specious, or political. For a fruitful discussion of populism, an inadequate but fashionable item that helps further distortions, see D’Eramo (2013).

3For a critique of the indiscriminate use of the concept of community, see Micocci (2012).

4‘[A]n intellectual construction that aims to provide an ultimate system of meaning to reality’ (Micocci, 2016, p. 1). Things are reduced to capitalist things, whence their limited and limiting role, and nature itself, is perfectly out of touch.

5For the theoretical background to this general reasoning, see Micocci (2016).

6Its theoretical features are a logically analogous metaphysics to the capitalist metaphysics (see Micocci, 2002, 2009/10, 2012, 2016).

7By the way, to the chagrin of Sweezy (1962), Burnham (1942) was well aware of this feature.

8A pure proportional system probably existed only in Italy, and was abolished at the dawn of the neoliberal era with the criminal impulse and action of the Communist Party (PCI). See Abse (1993).

2 Capitalism

Capitalism has been conceptualised in two main ways by those who have studied its economy: as a concentration of commodities based upon a labour-exploiting M-C-M’ (money-commodity-money’) (with M’>M) dynamic by Marxists, or as a set of continuous, fair commercial exchanges intrinsic to human nature (hence the need to devise and produce endless quantities of commodities of all qualities) by the neoclassicals, and more recntly by their successors, the so-called ‘mainstream economists’. We utilise here, as already said, an alternative to both, developed in Micocci (2002, 2009/10, 2012, 2016): capitalism as metaphysics, which we briefly reiterate in what follows. By doing this, we will outline the most relevant features of capitalism as we know it.

Capitalism as we know it, as everybody knows, has come to acquire its present characteristics because its evolution over time, as the mainstream and mainstream Marxist(s) accounts as well propose, produced a historical rift in the Middle Ages with an entailed, correspondent change in the mode of production. The coherence and resilience of such change, however (and here we part from all mainstream accounts), as it is human beings who perform economic and political activities, can only be explained by observing the homogenisation of the intellectual modus operandi of each individual agent as well as private and public institutions that has taken place over the said historical period. States and markets have further helped the spread of such intellectual homogenisation of the individual by acquiring ‘capitalistic’ features. Indeed, if there existed, however limited in size and importance, any pockets of alternative intellectual structures endowed with the entailed alternative ways to articulate th...