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As the far right surges across Europe – most alarmingly in Germany – how should we understand the economic forces behind fascism’s latest surge, and is there a way to pull Europe back from fascism’s lair? What would an effective anti-fascist economics look like?
Fascism happens whenever capitalism has an existential crisis and the left fails to offer a credible alternative. At that point, the fascist playbook stands ready. If the left does not counter it with a clearheaded, persuasive, uncompromising socialist programme, the fascists’ policies shall triumph even before fascists win office.
The fascists’ first move is, always, to plagiarise the left.
They take aim at crony capitalism, corrupt bankers and the central banks’ role in supporting them. They, quite accurately, describe mainstream politics as the “uniparty”. They call for radical change. But, when it comes to defining that change, they suffer instant amnesia. Not a word comes from their mouths against Big Business, the bankers, the developers privatising social housing, the monstrous cuts the Radical Centre made to public education and health. Studiously, they steer clear of saying anything about the cult of austerity that successive governments have adopted to wreck the lives of the majority whom the fascists are trying to woo.
Instead, they revert to their radically misanthropic Purity Cult.
Portraying our cities as crawling with impure, foreign, dangerous miasmata, stirring up a moral panic about the dark-skinned aliens about to invade our borders and traverse our seafronts, they promise to purge them, to make our nation pure “again”, to eradicate these impurities: Muslims, Jews, trans people, poor brown people, whoever can be stigmatised at little cost. Once they have thus poisoned enough souls, they promise to make us great “again”.
As they rise in the polls and can sniff the aroma of governmental office, they exploit the fact that the ruling class and its conservative and centrist political representatives are more afraid of the left than they are of the fascists. To make themselves electable and fit for polite society, they embrace Zionism to rinse out their Nazi past. Soon, they begin to forge alliances with Big Business and Big Finance, exploiting the delusion that the monied can control them – the fascists. Meanwhile centrist parties, hoping to remain in government, even if only in the fascists’ shadow, adopt fascism-lite (see the Labour government’s performative cruelty to disabled people and to refugees).
Once in government, the first thing the fascists do is betray the people whose discontent they harvested to get there. They instantly get into bed with the Big Finance / Big Business / Big Tech folks who they had admonished while in opposition. They ask a techlord to gut the public service, to emulate Gleichschaltung: the Nazi policy of firing public sector employees, replacing them with its flunkies while siphoning off citizens’ data and feeding it to its servers for future surveillance and control purposes. They build concentration camps for aliens. They pardon their allies, attack the universities, take over cultural centres and use the courts to legalise their brutality – a task made so much easier after the centrists had used the same courts to imprison decent people demonstrating against genocide.
But what about the most distinctive features of fascist socio-economic policy?
First, they move away from what the Radical Centre considers “fiscal responsibility” to demonstrate their concern for the suffering masses – with social benefits that, nevertheless, flow in ways designed to deny their recipients a voice (e.g. forced induction into fascist local organisations, with trades unions banned).
Second, consistent with their agenda to mobilise the nation to purify itself and to stand up against potential foreign foes, they opt for a turbocharged, and constantly escalating, version of military Keynesianism. Local militias (e.g., Donald Trump’s ICE) and a massive expansion in the defence budget go hand in hand with the projection of naked power at home and abroad. They withdraw from international organisations and treaties. They trash what is left of international law. They luxuriate in displays of maddened power. And they keep escalating.
Big Business loves it. Big Finance too. Big Tech throws a massive party to celebrate. Investment grows. Demand burgeons. Occasionally, interesting economic institutions emerge (e.g. the Nazi innovation of Labour Treasury Certificates, or MEFO Bills, to ground the new German currency in labour values, instead of gold). The stock exchange leaps into the stratosphere.
Alas, a time comes when the warehouses are full, the war machine’s profit rate declines, employment ebbs, discontent begins to grow. At that point, a massive financial crisis beckons – one that is more often than not followed by a cruel war. In the age of nuclear weapons and techno-feudal war machines, will humanity survive such an occurrence? There are solid grounds for doubting it.
What is the alternative? Wherever we turn our gaze, from Trump’s America to Burnham’s Britain to Merz’s Germany to Macron’s France, one thing shines through. The Radical Centre has lost control of the capitalist crisis it helped create. The recalcitrant ultra-right is on the march. Fascism is in the air. Social democrats in Europe and Clintonite liberals in the United States are blowing massive winds in the fascists’ sails – even when in opposition. Only the unbowed left can counter the expanding domain of radical misanthropy with a radical humanism. But, for that to be possible – let alone likely – the left must be unashamedly radical. And to be that, it needs to wage war against all those things that European social democrats and American liberals made their peace with a long time ago.
First, investment cannot be left to the financial markets. Second, private banks can no longer be allowed to harness society’s collective capacity to create money. Third, the oligarchic principle of a free market in shares needs to be replaced by the principle of one employee, one share, one vote in the shareholders’ general meeting.
These three policies, if they become the foundation of a socialist left, can accomplish two things. They can lure the masses back from fascism’s lair, and they can create the shared prosperity that removes the driving forces behind crisis and war.
The question is not whether the left can afford to be radical. The question is whether the left can afford not to be. The fascists are waiting. The only thing that is preventing them from wrecking the world is their incompetence. It would be irresponsible to continue to bank on it.
Yanis Varoufakis is an economist, politician and author. His latest book is ‘Raise Your Soul: A Personal History of Resistance’.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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Thank you for the article. Democratic leader is rumored to not be elected speaker of the house. He takes a lot of AIPAC nearly 100 hundred million so far. I don’t want him elected speaker. He is so corrupt. Let’s hope we can find someone to take his place. Getting rid of corruption is an ominous task ahead.
These ideas of how to combat rising fascism in Europe and the US were understood by Franklin Roosevelt and his Vice-President, Henry Wallace. Denounced as socialists, they championed the New Deal and progressive policies as an antidote to the appeal of populist fascists.