The center will not hold
by Tomasz Konicz
[This article posted on June 23, 2024 is translated from the German on the Internet, https://www.konicz.info/2024/06/23/das-zentrum-wird-nicht-halten/.]
The result of the European elections makes anti-fascism the central battleground in the full-blown systemic crisis. The first major test will take place in Essen at the end of June.
The center will continue to erode, the political center of late capitalist metropolitan societies will continue its fascist transformation. The extremist right will continue to gain momentum. These processes are the political expression of the insoluble systemic crisis in which capitalism finds itself. The economic and ecological agony of capital, in which the current functional elites must fail, is driving the masses of voters to fascism.
The whole secret of the success of the New Right and the rising tide of fascism is that there is no secret here. Everything is in the open. Fascism has no depth. It proliferates on the surface of crisis-ridden late capitalist societies. It thrives in the gutters of the internet, in social networks and in the opinion-forming culture industry, in talk shows, in the comment columns and in the editorials. The embarrassing arguments, the chatty tone and the common language with which bourgeois moderators fail in their postulated “unmasking” of AfD (Alliance for Germany - anti-immigrant party) people in their pathetic talk shows,1 which achieve top viewing figures every time a fascist misanthrope is invited, make it clear that it is in fact the center of society that is talking to itself here.
Germany's new Nazis are not from outer space, they are a crisis product of the center of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Nazi is the middle class, the bourgeois, the German worker, whose ass is on the line in the unfolding systemic crisis of capital. There is no mystery here. The existing late capitalist ideology in the center of society, the tattered national identity, is being driven to barbaric extremes in reaction to the crisis. Neo-liberalism, with its social Darwinism and economic nationalism, provided the springboards that the new right used. It takes the neo-liberal pressure to compete to the extreme, both nationally and racially, by building up corresponding enemy images in response to ever new crises.
There is no ideological break between the capitalist center and fascism, which in its ideology only legitimizes the crisis logic of capital, which reacts to its socio-ecological utilization crisis by removing boundaries and driving its utilization compulsion to extremes. The veneer of civilization is now also peeling off in the centers, the barbaric core of capitalist socialization is emerging in the crisis. Fascism is the subjective bearer of this objective crisis tendency, which produces an extremism of the center that is so successful in its authoritarian revolt precisely because it does not want a break with the circumstances, because everything remains in the well-worn ideological track. In its agony, capitalism is falling back, as it were, to its barbaric original state, to the time of its “blood- and dirt-drenched” (Marx) enforcement in the early modern period – only now billions, not millions of human lives are at stake.
Auschwitz threatens to become a mere prelude to what is accumulating in terms of potential for destruction. Everything is in plain sight. The Mediterranean, the border desert between the USA and Mexico – they have long since become mass graves. Billions of people live in regions that will soon be uninhabitable. The crisis is driving the eroding late capitalist state monsters into a major war, into a nuclear exchange.
The recipe for success of fascism consists of personalizing the crisis in the victims of the crisis (the unemployed, southern Europeans during the euro crisis, refugees, etc.) and externalizing it. The crisis always comes from outside in the form of the victims of the crisis, who are branded as the cause of the crisis, via the German Leistungsgemeinschaft or Volksgemeinschaft, which is imagined as being without contradiction. By isolating and closing its borders, fascism wants to keep the crisis outside, beyond the national community. The world crisis of capital is to be “excluded” in a sense, since it has been personified in foreign groups (marginalized population groups, people with a migration background, Jews, minorities, etc.). In addition, there is a tendency to eliminate these ideological personifications of the crisis at home: with mass deportation and ultimately through extermination.
Fascism follows an evil internal capitalist logic of crisis: sometimes it is no longer necessary to actually believe in these ridiculous fascist enemy images, that crisis victims are also the cause of the crisis. The deal that fascism makes with the ordinary wage-earners is clear and understandable: without the foreign groups, there will still be enough for us even in the crisis. The usual “work for Germans first” sums up this logic of crisis, which can be extended to include everything else (housing, social benefits, health care, etc.). The whole bourgeois-liberal “anti-fascism”, which has always argued with the economic necessity of immigration, is currently breaking down due to the logic of the crisis.
In the current pre-fascism, the New Right has largely achieved hegemony in the discourse, and fascism is already, to a certain extent, in power.2 Germany's democratic parties are rushing to cast the delusion of isolation into law, across the political spectrum. In some places, in the east, in Saxony and Thuringia, fascism – together with its national socialist Wagenknecht faction – can already hope for parliamentary majorities. It is a widespread liberal misunderstanding to believe that capitalist democracy is an effective dam against the rising tide of brown.
The democratic discourse in capitalism revolves around the irrational, fetishistic end in itself of boundless capital utilization, around the optimization of the infamous “economic growth” that must create as many jobs as possible. As soon as this framework of discourse, in which wage-earners discuss their own exploitation in an Orwellian manner, threatens to break down due to the crisis, the entire discourse tips over into extremes, its logic of self-subjugation to the increasingly crisis-driven constraints of the capital relation takes on a fascist character. The right-wing majorities, who in reaction to the crisis only want to work harder and longer, while they look for scapegoats full of hatred, set themselves up democratically all by themselves. That is why it is also easy for pre-fascism to make wage-earners ignore the ecological fallout from the crisis of capital out of fear of the economic consequences.3
In order to effectively combat fascism in the intensifying systemic crisis, mere militancy is not enough. It is crucial to take a proactive approach to the great lie of fascism: the crisis cannot be kept at bay at the borders, it cannot be “excluded” because it is located in the centers of late capitalist societies, in the escalating contradictions of capital. It is also immediately obvious that an endless compulsion to grow in a finite world must eventually lead to disaster. Everyone understands that. Fascism is thus a kind of death cult4 that seeks to maintain capitalism in its self-destructive drive by means of an authoritarian transformation. The objective tendency of capital to destroy the world coagulates into a subjective fascist death drive. This is the actual, unironic program of 21st century fascism, to which ever larger sections of the capitalist functional elites5 are succumbing: clinging to capitalism until death.
An effective anti-fascism must therefore address the capitalist system crisis, which is giving the fascist death cult a boost. Only in this respect could one speak of a radical anti-fascism that reveals the root of the crisis of fascism. Precisely because the center will not hold, the late capitalist world system will break down due to its internal and external contradictions,6 precisely because the system transformation is inevitable. Fascism, in its lust for power, has long since understood this, speculating on the seizure of power in the wake of crises and also developing a corresponding structurally anti-Semitic crisis discourse.7 While fascists publicly fantasize about a return to the “good old days”, they secretly prepare for the deportation and terror campaigns that will follow the great crash.
Anti-fascism must therefore not only address fascism as an outgrowth of the crisis of capital, it must also emphasize the necessity of an emancipatory system transformation that overcomes the capitalist regime of necessity. Precisely because it is inevitable – and because fascism represents the barbaric option of this inevitable and open-ended system transformation. The system crisis must be met with a search for system alternatives. This conscious transformational departure, carried out in a militant anti-fascist movement, would first take the wind out of the sails of fascism with its extremism of the center and its repeated muttering about the “decline of the West”. Either a broad movement consciously dares to embark on a post-capitalist society, especially in the face of fascist crisis ideology – or the fascists will sooner or later take over the increasingly brutal internal capitalist crisis management.
The broad-based protests from June 28 to 30 against the AfD party conference in Essen offer some hope in this regard.8 In contrast to the wave of protests against the fascist mass deportation plans at the beginning of the year, which were carried by the crisis-related eroding liberal consensus, the anti-AfD alliance in Essen is open to different forms of protest, similar to the successful anti-fascist protests of the 1990s, which ranged from trade unions to autonomous groups. The aim here is not only to develop a variety of forms of protest, but also to incorporate a radical critique of fascism as a crisis ideology into the protests, which also actively addresses the obvious need for an emancipatory system transformation. Precisely because capital is breaking up and threatening to drag the process of civilization down with it, precisely because the center will not hold.
