Between myth and modernity: Fascism as anti-praxis

I

Defending his theory of fascism as ‘alternative modernity’, Roger Griffin is at pains not to offend socialist sensibilities by eliding the distinction between Marxism and fascism: ‘As a “liberal humanist”, I sympathise with the need to maintain such distinctions, since to place the socialist revolution on a par with the Nazi revolution is not only grotesquely counter-intuitive, but smacks of postmodern relativism, a “bourgeois luxury” lethal to any political commitment or radical activism.’

Yet, he adds,

… such distinctions are difficult to sustain at a theoretical level, since they imply the existence of objective criteria to distinguish between ‘pseudo-revolution’ or Ersatz revolutions and ‘true’ revolutions, criteria that surely are not reducible to value-judgements (or plain utopianism) about which alternative to the status quo corresponds most to the personal values of the historian or political scientist. ¹

Griffin does not justify this assertion adequately, leaving readers to wonder why objective criteria are so difficult to establish. Does he believe there is no way to determine the distinction between fascism and socialism on the basis of lived experience or historical evidence? Or, does he believe that – even where objective criteria such as property ownership or class structure exist – it is difficult to distinguish fascism and socialism because the political consequences of both are the same (i.e. totalitarianism)? Or does Griffin consider the structural distinctions between fascism and socialism inadmissible because such differences are ultimately irrelevant, if – as intellectual historians appear to argue – it matters more what fascists say about their political views than what they do in power?

Griffin’s daring presentation of fascism as an ideological blueprint for a new modernity applies Gramscian categories (cultural hegemony, autonomy of the political, etc.) to defend a non-Marxist conception of fascist revolution, but reveals a somewhat problematic understanding of Gramsci’s political sociology. While conceding that fascism was manipulated by ‘reactionary elements of big business and the traditional ruling classes’, ² Griffin nonetheless insists that despite the fetid embrace of conservative elites within the hegemonic apparatuses of church, industry and state, fascism was a revolutionary driving force in itself, demonstrating the power of ‘superstructural’ forces in the clash of political ideals in interwar Europe. This emphasis on political ideals is valid, to the extent that left-wing and right-wing parties sought to develop a mass base by amplifying their ideological distinctions; yet, as Roberts notes, Griffin’s ‘syncretic Marxism’ lacks a ‘differentiated sense of the contending forces within fascism itself’. ³ The alternative modernity Griffin connects with fascism derives not from the hegemonic project of a revolutionary class or progressive alliance of classes but from the structural hegemony of a historic bloc which advances a dynamic process of social organization and modernization through a professional-managerial intelligentsia and cultural avant-garde, whose collaboration in the totalitarian restructuring of capitalist relations is based on rational self-interest and fear rather than ‘civilizational despair’. ⁴

Griffin notes that Gramsci saw fascism as a ‘passive revolution’ of the right, a ‘war of position’ following a period of open conflict which facilitated the retrenchment of capitalism. There are certainly grounds for linking fascism and revolution if our definition of ‘revolution’ is restricted to a ‘revolution within capitalist society’. Yet the activity of remembrance that Griffin identifies as the source of the ‘mythopoeic power of collective associative memory’ ⁵ appears on closer reflection to be a type of narrative discourse which Gramsci himself linked to the production of ‘collective fantasy’, which ‘works on a dispersed and shattered people to arouse and organize its collective will’. ⁶ Irrespective of its truth-value, Gramsci viewed myth as a last resort during periods of crisis; for, despite the apparent demythologization of capitalist modernity, regression into myth is always possible. ⁷ Yet Gramsci’s conception of revolution was integrally linked to his philosophy of praxis which he intended as a defence of Marx’s philosophy of revolution against both mechanical materialism and Crocean idealism. For Gramsci, mechanical materialism translated into ‘primitive infantilism’, with its insistence on the economic determination of all phenomena: politics, he argued, is ‘always a reflection of the structure tending to develop, but there is no guarantee that these tendencies will necessarily reach their fulfilment’. ⁸ Gramsci believed that ‘popular conviction often has as much energy as a material force’, yet qualified this assertion by adding that it

… lends support to the concept of ‘historic bloc’ in which … the material forces are the content and ideologies are the form. This distinction between form and content is just heuristic because material forces would be historically inconceivable without form and ideologies would be individual fantasies without material forces. ⁹

In Marxism, the force of ideology is derived not from manifestos or myths, but from a contradictory relation of ideological change to the changing material basis of society. Ideology is incorporated in the sedimented structures and practices of everyday life, and ideological conflict erupts where new forms of qualification arise but where existing forms of subjectification do not: ideological formation ‘does not take place in ideology alone. It is always a subjection to, and a qualification for, a particular social order with non-discursive dimensions.’ ¹⁰ Griffin, by contrast, holds to a programmatic concept of ideology abstracted from material conditions, rendering opaque the function of fascism as counter-revolutionary organization. Yet idealist conceptions of ideology are based on two ‘dubious’ assumptions:

First, they rely on what we might call the ‘Munchhausen effect’: the capacity of individuals to pull themselves up by their ideological bootstraps. This assumes that simply through the power of ideological imagination, each new generation of humans can emancipate itself from ideological formation by its parents, even though facing exactly the same situations as the latter. Second, they presuppose that existential ideologies, among which primordial significance is usually given to the inclusive ideologies of religion and moral philosophy, themselves stand outside history but can – and do – none the less act as movers of history. ¹¹

Not only do idealist approaches ignore the critical-realist point that structures pre-exist social actors – as Joseph observes, their ‘functioning and effects are beyond the full comprehension or control of agents in their day-to-day activity [though] this does not mean that agents passively occupy structural locations’. ¹² They also overlook the point that social actors acquire the resources to participate in transformative praxis because of their given structural location. ¹³ Ideological production must be explained in relation to the objective mechanisms which determine consciousness: material interests generated by social structures and patterned identities which arise through the practice and lived experience of individuals:

Agents are involved in relations, both with each other and with social structures and practices. A hegemony or hegemonic project should therefore be seen as an articulated attempt to preserve or transform such structures and relations. It would be mistaken, therefore, to try and reduce Gramsci’s analysis to simple political, ethical or strategic concepts. ¹⁴

The material logic of fascist ideology can be understood more clearly as anti-praxis: a mythicized, counter-revolutionary response to the crisis of modernity which is dialectically opposed to the philosophy of praxis Gramsci identified as the authentic core of historical materialism. Gramsci’s philosophy of praxis was not simply a code for ‘Marxism’ designed to evade the censor, but a critique of the double revision of Marx’s philosophy of revolutionary action. At key points in the Prison Notebooks, Gramsci attacks what he sees as the vulgarization of historical materialism in orthodox Marxism-Leninism and the distorted appropriation of Marx’s praxeological critique by Croce and Labriola which led to the ‘migration and mutation to the right, indeed to Fascism, of elements and motifs Marxist thinking on praxis’. ¹⁵ As a ‘philosophy from below’, Gramsci’s theory of revolutionary praxis was aimed at challenging the speculative idealism of contemporary thought and reorienting Marx’s critique of political economy for a new period of capitalist development. Marx believed that it was through practical social activity that the structure and complexity of social forms become accessible; ¹⁶ he challenged the dehistoricization of reality in Feuerbach’s epistemology by introducing the Hegelian notion of reason and reality, attacking the dichotomy between philosophy and the real world by unifying his critique in an ‘all-inclusive totality of theory and practice’. ¹⁷ Feuerbach, he reasoned,

… does not see how the sensuous world around him is, not a thing given direct from all eternity, remaining ever the same, but the product of industry and of the state of society; … it is an historical product, the result of the activity of a whole succession of generations, each … modifying its social system according to the changed needs. ¹⁸

The purpose of Gramsci’s intervention in the structure/superstructure debate was to develop the philosophical orientation of Marxism as a ‘philosophy from below’, conceptualized outside existing philosophical institutions and directed against myth and metaphysics. As Haug argues, Gramsci believed that

… the vital source of Marxian thinking was forgotten or pushed aside by [orthodox] Marxism itself, while liberal and fascist branches of bourgeois philosophizing rejuvenated and redynamized themselves with it. With the term ‘philosophy of praxis’ Gramsci not only expressed exactly what he actually did as a theorist, but also brought back into Marxism what Labriola had grasped as the ‘nucleus of Historical Materialism’. ¹⁹

Furthermore, he adds, by ‘using this term he began to reclaim the field that Croce had occupied with his Filosofia della pratica and Gentile with his Filosofia del atto as original Marxist territory’. ²⁰ Gramsci feared that Marx’s philosophy of revolutionary praxis would be submerged beneath a narrative of spontaneous revolutionary will based on intuitionism, hero-worship and myth; he saw myth as an incoherent basis for revolutionary transformation in stratified societies because ‘myths lacking the internal consistency that can only derive from the real constellation of forces, even if conceived dynamically’, leave the ‘collective will in the primitive and elementary phase’ and ‘may at once cease to exist, scattering into an infinity of individual wills which in the positive phase then follow separate and conflicting paths’. ²¹

Revolution can be defined as the overthrow of a system of political organization, leading to transformation of the social relations of production. Is this definition applicable to fascism? To answer this, we must consider the revisionist emphasis on fascism as cultural rebellion. In Reflections on Violence, Sorel rejected Marx the positivist in favour of Marx the revolutionary: socialism could not be forged through a politics of gradualism or negotiation with progressive elements in the bourgeoisie. ²² Sorel’s syndicalism can be understood as a means of using participation to convey meaning: rejecting historical materialism, he believed ‘revolution’ should be recast in proletarian terms using the language of the general strike. Sorel’s anti-constitutionalism may be contrasted with Lenin’s vanguard theory, and his inconsistent intellectual legacy is not without value: like Luxemburg, he saw revolutionary activity as a formative process through which workers gain experience of struggle. He also believed that parliamentary socialism would only prolong capitalism by imposing regulation. While recognizing that the ‘distortions’ of myth rule out the possibility of rational critique (and that a gulf exists between political myth and actual historical events), revolutionary socialism was seen as an ethical project which would sweep all before it through violent confrontation, providing workers with a visceral experience of revolutionary upheaval as a dramatic act of redemption. ²³

Sorel’s narrative of insurrection attacked political rationalism by privileging mythos over logos, rejecting a long tradition in European political theory inaugurated by Machiavelli. He appealed to fascists not simply for discursive reasons, but because (like Schmitt) he held democracy in contempt, linking parliamentarism with ungovernability. But while Sorel admired Mussolini, to describe Sorelianism as ‘fascist’ is misconceived: Sorel was influenced primarily by the ‘revolt against reason’ in late 19th-century conservatism, and his work demonstrates affinities with libertarian anarchism and even American pragmatism. ²⁴ As Sand notes,

… there is, if not an original synthesis, at least a surprising degree of closeness between conservative and revolutionary components. This special closeness, which at times defies the conventional categories of Right and Left, is what piqued the curiosity of intellectuals from the French romantic right, and later of intellectuals who went over to fascism and even Nazism. ²⁵

Sorel did not ‘visualize traditional elites sharing power with semi-intellectual political elites spouting revolutionary rhetoric, behind whom there would march a disciplined army of producers and aroused masses’. On the contrary, he was a revolutionary conservative

… because the latent model in the diagnosis of production relations in his work was that of the small nineteenth century workshop whose skilled values were dying out. His criticism of the modern state had conservative foundations because it involved nostalgia for decentralized forms of political relations; hence also his preference in periods of despair for the traditional authorities whose relative strength over the rule of the state constitutes a guarantee of pluralism. ²⁶

Sorel was a pessimistic chiliast who dismissed the idea of progress without considering the unique ontology of capital as a self-valorizing value which tends towards indefinite expansion. ²⁷ As Redding argues, in his rejection of modernity,

… radical change is utopian rather than actual. If the evils from which society suffers are understood as structural, their exposure must rely on unrelenting violence rather than a rhetorical promise that violence is indeed at work … Change is abortive precisely because it is the impossible reservoir of millenarian hopes: a dream. ²⁸

Griffin identifies Benjamin’s Theses as an exemplary text on the mythopoeic power of collective memory, placing Benjamin among the most original Marxist writers of the last century – despite Benjamin’s refusal to connect ‘ideological energy’ with fascism. ²⁹ Yet Griffin does not examine the text in which Benjamin outlines his own concept of violence. ³⁰ Unlike Sorel, Benjamin saw mythic violence not as emancipatory but as law-making, leading to a reconstitution of authority legitimized through a parodic aestheticization of change. He acknowledged Sorel’s distinction between the political general strike and the proletarian general strike; but there are important distinctions in the use of the terms ‘violence’ and ‘myth’ by both writers. As Salzani argues: ‘[d]ivine violence is set by Benjamin against the mythic violence of law; on the other hand, Sorel describes the proletarian general strike as the most powerful myth in the class struggle’. ³¹ While it is misleading to read Benjamin’s text as an attempt to ‘subsume Sorel’s notion of general strike minus myth’, for Benjamin ‘the “mythic” is the prison of a life reduced to “natural life”, guilt and misfortune which drag the human [race] down and bring disaster upon them: the eternal recurrence of violence’. ³²

For Sorel, the term ‘myth’ is used in a nominal sense to denote the opposite of ‘scientific knowledge’. Sorel viewed historical materialism as the bastard child of positivism, and in his theory of revolution it is not economic change but insurrectionary violence which ends capitalism. For Benjamin, on the other hand, the term ‘mythic’ implies the subjugation of humanity in a legally constituted prison of ‘natural necessity’. Benjamin’s attempt to uncover the redemptive potential of modernity by interrogating the notion ‘fate’ suggests a link with Marx’s argument that nature itself is a social category but society remains a natural environment in which humans are ‘still not in control of their own productive forces vis-à-vis nature’. ³³ Human history can only begin once the social process no longer stands under the rule of blind natural laws; that is to say, only if labour is no longer mediated by the violence of natural necessity will it be possible to overcome the ‘as-if natural’ (naturwüchsig) results of labour which assume a taken-for-granted form in the hegemonic apparatus of the capitalist state. Revolution may thus be interpreted as a process of transition from a realm of natural necessity (labour) to an undertheorized realm of freedom (self-activity), though as Zilbersheid notes the revolutionary nature of the self-abolition of labour has received insufficient attention: understood properly revolutionary socialism is not

… based on labour, but rather on a new mode of productive activity, which would break the continuity of human history – would abolish the most basic form of production, labour, which has prevailed from the outset of human history and become the basis, in different forms, of all exploitative societies. ³⁴

Like Marx, Benjamin believed that the ‘question regarding violence is … the question of a violence eliminating its own reproducibility, a violence that, qualitatively different from instrumental or mythic violence, would interrupt the natural, cyclic and mimetic circle of violence as response to violence’. ³⁵

Unlike Schmitt, therefore, who understood myth as a resource for overcoming obstacles to the maintenance of order, Benjamin was concerned to retrieve a conception of emancipation in which the development of human powers becomes the true realm of freedom; and, unlike Sorel, who understood myth as a dramatic narrative (an ‘impetus to overcome inertia’ ³⁶ ), and who believed that irrational myth could contribute to a new grounding of authority, Benjamin’s theory of revolution borrows from an older tradition of transformational thinking in which emancipation is based on liberation from the prehistoric condition of ‘fate’, embodied juridically in the constituted authority of law. Rather than

… valorizing myths à la Sorel as propelling the workers towards the moment of ‘pure violence’, Benjamin … saw myth as the corrupting influence of nature on man. Any secular morality ultimately sustained by myth necessarily had to be corrupted. And any law that embodied or enforced such a morality also had to be contaminated. ³⁷

For Benjamin, to posit law is to configure power through a new nomology of sovereign power – a field of knowledge about rules: rather than securing justice, law embodies the rule-producing function of force in zones of intensive socialization, in which sanctions form a juridical economy of violence leading to the ‘routinization of the types of social behaviour which are compatible with existing order’. ³⁸

From a philosophical-anthropological perspective, aetiological myths may allow communities to address an experience of trauma produced by civilizational decline – creating an illusion of ‘mastery’ which is inevitably contingent on the organization and exploitation of human labour on a monumental scale. But is political myth sufficient to constitute revolution? From a critical-theoretical perspective, it seems clear that the misidentification of fascism and revolution in revisionist historiography is explained by an inadequate theorization of the true function of fascist myth as a collective act of disavowal, that is to say, as ‘simulacra’ of mastery to overcome the emasculation and impotence of late bourgeois culture. It is this misidentification which undermines efforts to develop a non-Marxist theory of fascism: mythic thought should not be criticized because it is ‘untrue’ but because myths exhibit a speculative and intrinsically particularistic nature which cannot provide an objective basis for revolutionary transformation. ³⁹ Etymologically the word ‘mythos’ derives from the Greek root ‘µυ’ meaning to close or keep secret:

Myth remembers discretely and selectively. Myth closes its eyes to certain events and closes its mouth. The agencies for the muting and transmuting of the past are the Muses, and the term ‘muse’ is derived from the same root. … The Muses make it possible to remember the past fondly or heroically, but they do so with fog filters. ⁴⁰

It is here that the symbolic violence of fascist myth becomes clear: as a violent rupture of dramatic or ‘incendiary’ modernism, the myth of ‘fascist revolution’ dramatized the experience of modernity in a new and scandalous form, confronting – but ultimately regrounding – the collective disavowal and betrayal manifest in bourgeois culture. In this sense, argues Haug, fascism was not a

. . . revolution in the framework of society but a revolution in the experience of this framework; not a revolutionization of domination, but a stabilization of domination. It dismantled the existing system of conflict resolution, creating instead a whole collection of new authorities and state apparatuses, the most important of which was an apparatus of coercion which penetrated the entire system. ⁴¹

Fascist myth obscures the dialectic of reason and revolution in modernity and the function of practical-critical activity which ‘achieves its highest expression in revolutionary praxis, the most advanced stage in the transformation of society^’.42 In contrast with fascism, which was ‘supported by an economy determined by the laws of the market’, ⁴³ transformative praxis ‘brings about radical changes in the economic and social structure on which the ruling class had based its maintenance of power, replacing them with a new society’. ⁴⁴ As Rupert argues, the ‘necessary condition for any sort of transformative project whatever is a reopening of political horizons effectively foreclosed by capitalist social relations and their associated self-understandings’.

Whatever else they may be, transformative politics from within a capitalist context must necessarily entail shared anti-capitalist commitments in order to open up future possible worlds which are obscured by the social identities of abstract individualism and disabling ideologies of fetishism and reification produced by capitalism. ⁴⁵

Unable to rise above the myth of ‘manifest destiny’ (an imperial myth shared by non-fascist powers which is linked to the narrative of rationalization in western culture ⁴⁶ ), fascism offered a beguiling glimpse into the transgressive power of the modern postdemocratic corporate state, pointing towards a social structure of accumulation based on an appropriation of the cooperative capacities, natural resources and democratic potential of society by capital. Despite its ‘energizing’ force as a political commodity, the fascist myth of regeneration constitutes an alienated political value which conceals the degenerative process of a capitalist society. By consolidating and intensifying the ‘animal spirits’ latent in the Darwinian logic of capitalist rivalry, fascism constitutes a grimly irrational manifestation of the rapacity and decay it sought to overcome through the aestheticization of struggle and war. ⁴⁷

II

Fascism disrupts the familiar narrative of modernity as universal progress towards enlightenment, but unlike conservatism is consistent with the historical development of capital. To understand fascism as counter-revolutionary myth, it is necessary to explain how it is generated in the fetish character of the commodity-form as it produces consciousness, disorganizing critical subjectivity through the authoritarian recodification of involuntary collective identities which bind populations to specific racial-cultural frameworks. This disorganization is contingent not on force also but on the suppression of creative self-activity through the functionalization of reason as a mode of intellectual production. While the revalorization of commodities in market society is based on their capacity to arrest consciousness by disrupting autonomous self-development (ruling out unmediated forms of interaction/exchange), revalorization at an ideological level can be theorized in terms of the ‘integrative capacity’ of the corporate state to overcome the ‘separation-in-unity’ of state and civil society. Though directed against the stratification and abstraction of commodity-determined society, fascism can itself be understood as a political commodity which employs nationalist mythologies of power to usurp the terrain of democratic organization. Its appearance is rooted less in a primordial revolt against ‘civilizational despair’ than in the aestheticization of politics and the fetishization of identities which conceal the operation of the commodity-form as a structured social practice, reproducing a ‘post-auratic’ representation of identity and power which critical theorists following Benjamin locate in the ‘historical breakthrough of technical arts that no longer produced originals’. ⁴⁸ ‘At its best,’ argues Koepnick,

… to invoke the auratic under the aegis of post-auratic culture could not but lead to a violation of formal inventory of technological art; at its worst, in resulted in what Benjamin famously called the aestheticization of politics, that is, fascism, understood as an attempt to satisfy the masses with symbolic spectacles of collectivity that obscure the factual fragmentation and stratification of society. ⁴⁹

Lukács argued in 1933 that myth has always played a decisive role in bourgeois ideology, consolidating the social basis of hegemony. ⁵⁰ To understand the dialectical relation between myth and modernity and the location of fascism in post-enlightenment thought, we need to examine the opposition between two philosophical-developmental currents in modernity which Habermas links to the emergence of critical subjectivity. However powerful, he argues, myths do not grow from the ‘soil of modernity’ because modernity constitutes a philosophical-developmental trajectory which achieves ‘self-consciousness by way of a reflection that prohibit[s] any systematic recourse to such exemplary pasts’. ⁵¹ Although enlightenment is burdened by its own self-justifying myths, an ‘unprecedented modernity, open to the future, anxious for novelty, can only fashion its criteria out of itself. The only source of normativity that presents itself is the principle of subjectivity from which the very time-consciousness of modernity arose.’ ⁵² Opening an era of ‘uninterrupted crisis, modernity presents two distinct dimensions: on the one hand, it announces the ‘immanence of the new paradigm of the world and life’, placing humanity at the ‘centre of history’; on the other, it ‘poses a transcendent constituted power against an immanent, constituent power’, a counter-revolutionary social dynamic opposed to the democratic organization of sovereignty. ⁵³ At the centre of this bifurcation is Hegel, whose philosophy stands at the juncture of the classical and modern idea of politics, signalling a critical transition from the neo-Aristotelian idea of a unified domestic economy encompassing polity and economy to a functionally differentiated society characterized by the separation of state and civil society, and the division between public citizenship and private individuality. For Hegel, the ‘peculiar character of the modern state first comes into view … when the principle of civil society is conceived as a principle of marketlike – and this means nonstatelike – association’. ⁵⁴ Via the state, substantive unity is achieved by defining subjectivity as ‘self-subsistent personal particularity’: the state functions as a ‘positive universal’ through which Hegel solves the ‘problem of mediation by the sublation of society in the constitutional monarchy’. ⁵⁵ Although his ‘conceptually orchestrated reconciliation’ of individual and nation state fails (the ‘subjectifying magic of national sovereignty upholds the value of individual freedom only to repress it all the more effectively in the competitive inefficiencies universally demanded of its hapless agents’ ⁵⁶ ), Hegel sets the stage for a critique of modernity in which ‘integrative processes of social normalization’ become conditions for the actualization of freedom and obstacles to the realization of universal emancipation.

This raises the question: to what extent can a radical resolution of the crisis of modernity originate outside the self-constitutive framework of modernity, which Marx defined as the unity of critical subjectivity and objective development, but which right-wing thinkers define through myth? Koselleck argues that the separation of state and society and subordination of morality to reason of state in modernity encouraged a critique and crisis of authority, as citizens denied the right to an active share in democratic governance invested non-political (cultural/economic) pursuits with rival moral authority. Absolutism, in other words, produced a counter-reaction which fatally weakened its legitimacy, resulting in the rise of bourgeois society. ⁵⁷ Hegel’s (failed) solution to the violent fragmentation (diremption) of modernity was to locate reason in the movement of absolute knowledge to overcome the dichotomy between private individuals and public citizens. Yet, as Habermas argues,

… as absolute knowledge, reason assumes a form so overwhelming that it not only solves the initial problem of a self-reassurance of modernity, but solves it too well … reason has now taken over the place of fate and knows that every event of essential significance has already been decided. ⁵⁸

As a result, he notes,

Hegel’s philosophy satisfies the need of modernity for self-grounding only at the cost of devaluing present-day reality and blunting critique. In the end, philosophy removes all importance from its own present age . . . and deprives it of the calling to self-critical renewal. ⁵⁹

It was left to future interpreters, however, to mediate between universality and particularity. This led to a ‘Left Hegelian’ defence of reason against the ‘partial modernization of bourgeois modernity’, ⁶⁰ and a ‘Right Hegelian’ demand for an authoritative civic religion to compensate for the dissolution of modernity, finding expression in the neoconservative rejection of modernism for the stabilizing force of authority and tradition.

In this dialectic of modernity, one path leads to the Hegelian-Marxist concept of totality – to a ‘coherent and meaningful unity’ in which the ‘whole expresses the intentionality and praxis of a creator-subject, who recognizes itself in the objective world around it’. ⁶¹ Left Hegelianism reveals ‘a type of self-organization of society that eliminates the split between the public and the private person and destroys both the fiction of the sovereignty of the citizen and the alienated existence of human beings subsumed ‘under the domination of inhuman conditions’. ⁶² Revolution is driven not by abstract ideas or myth but is immanent in the constitution of reality. In Hegel’s system ‘all categories terminate in the existing order, while in Marx’s they refer to the negation of this order. They aim at a new form of society even when describing its current form.’ ⁶³ Unlike Hegel, Marx grounds development in the practical-critical action of subjects rather than the reflection of an abstract subject, relocating emancipation in the practical-critical activity of historically acting individuals. Another path leads to a defence of facticity over normativity: whereas rationalism is equated with revolution, neoconservatives reject Hegel’s absolute reason, separating modernity from its own time-consciousness, while demanding a compensatory reactivation of the ‘privatized powers of belief’ against the levelling effects of capitalism. ⁶⁴ Right Hegelians also seek to transcend the economic and cultural contradictions of capitalism which erode the societal support functions of non-capitalist institutions and undermine virtuous citizenship, locating emancipation in the equation of civil and political society. As Habermas observes, this

.… intellectual history leads via Carl Schmitt to the constitutional law scholars who believed, in reviewing the ungovernability of the Weimar Republic, that they should justify a total state. Along this strand of tradition, the concept of the substantive state could be transformed into one that is nakedly authoritarian, because in the meantime the hierarchy of subjective, objective, and absolute spirit … had been fundamentally destroyed. ⁶⁵

This intellectual tendency is apparent in the conservative-revolutionary ideology of Stahl, in whose work absolute reason is ‘superseded by authority, freedom by submission, right by duty, and the individual is put at the mercy of the unquestionable claims of a hypostatized whole’. In contrast to critical social theory, Stahl’s philosophy of right ‘gathers together some of the fundamental conceptions that later guided the preparation of National Socialist ideology’. ⁶⁶ Yet it is only in the work of proto-fascist thinkers like Spann that the implications of this worldview are revealed, for even Hegel viewed the state as a ‘person’ which can ‘never entirely rid itself of the metaphysical substance of freedom – self-realization’. ⁶⁷ By contrast, argues Polanyi, Spann ‘relegates the state to a most modest position … and reserves totality to society as a whole. By this subtle move he eliminates the very possibility of freedom.’ ⁶⁸ Spann’s universalism establishes the precedence of society over citizens who no longer have immediate relations independent of those mediated through the totality. He thus denies the possibility of rational agency as a basis for ethical life, whether in the liberal sense of voluntary association or the Marxist sense of a harmony of goods. Fascism follows a similar logic, stressing an unaccountable will-to-power which recognizes no limits on the capacity of ‘mystical naturalistic entities’ to (re)shape their destiny in a cosmos governed by perpetual conflict.

The political modernism of fascism is not in dispute – particularly if we consider the sophisticated exploitation of image and rhetoric in the legitimation of fascist rule. What is in doubt is the revolutionary quality of aesthetic politics as an alternative modernity: aesthetic politics turns political values into emotional experience, nullifying the complexity of modernity by reducing the capacity of subjects to practise normative differentiation: ‘Driven by the idea of pure politics,’ argues Koepnick, fascism attempts to ‘unchain political action from normative debates, and undo the emasculating effects of procedural politics’. ⁶⁹ eidegerHeidThrough a rapprochement of modernity and myth fascist modernism attacks the ‘culture of dissatisfaction’ in liberalism, with its origins in the inadequate realization of autonomy as a condition for self-emancipation; yet the prescription offered in fascism is no more coherent or convincing that the nature-reverence of philosophical vitalism. ⁷⁰ Prominent in this discursive strategy is the ‘self-heroizing of man’ – an idea developed in Heidegger’s phenomenology of natural ontic existence which ‘recreates the reifying, mythological magic of Hegel’s idea of natural history’ in opposition to Adorno’s identification of freedom in the ‘non-identical yet mediating relations of history and nature’. ⁷¹

The mythic narrative force of fascism functionalizes reason in a radically new form through irrationalist naturalism. For Marcuse, the ‘irrationalist theory of society finds it unnecessary to deny radically the reality of critical reason: between binding reason to pregiven ‘natural-organic’ facts and enslaving it to the ‘beast of prey within man, there is sufficiently wide latitude for all sorts of derivative reason’. In fascism, he adds,

… irrational givens (‘nature’, ‘blood and soil’, ‘folkhood’, ‘existential facts’, ‘totality’, and so forth) are placed prior to the autonomy of reason and as its limit in principle (not merely in fact), and reason is and remains causally, functionally, or organically dependent on them. ⁷²

Through the corruption of intellectual and political life, fascism substitutes subject-centred reason for the absolute will-formation of a mythic universal totality, leaving society aesthetically deformed, morally discouraged and politically defeated: fascism destroys democracy because democracy provides the institutional link between socialism and an authentic individualism of equals, exacting new forms of purgative violence which transgress the traditional norms of bourgeois morality through an antiliberal naturalism in which the numinous authority of the ‘people’ becomes the final arbiter of meaning and morality in public discourse. ⁷³ The revolutionary claim of Marxism, on the other hand, consists in a hyperrationalist defence of enlightenment as unfinished project, an ‘ontology of freedom’ contingent on self-mediating productive activity adequate to the conscious transformation of the social process. ‘Where Marx departs from Hegel,’ argues McNally, ‘and this departure signals a theoretical and political revolution – is in his insistence that concrete freedom, genuinely self-mediating activity, begins with (and returns to) the most foundational and practical activities – labour as praxis.’ ⁷⁴ The concept of totality amounts to meaningless abstraction unless it is mediated by socioeconomic conditions. Without an adequate conception of the ‘immanently mediating force of historical relations’, we cannot comprehend the contradictions of capitalist modernity. ⁷⁵ For Lukács, ‘totality could be concrete precisely because it included all of the mediations that linked the seemingly isolated facts [in a historical formation]’. ⁷⁶ Spann’s doctrine of universal totality, on the other hand, is antithetical to totality because it is an ideal-type, in which citizens ‘hold intercourse with each other, not as individuals, but only as coordinate members of the whole – that is, again, not directly with each other but only indirectly through the medium of the totality’. ⁷⁷

Yet the distinction between liberal rationalism and the irrationalist naturalism of fascist myth may be less concrete than is often supposed, for the functionalization of reason in fascist ideology becomes the philosophical ground for a mythic totality in which rationalist justifications for capitalism based on the ‘accidental harmony’ of the market yield to irrationalist justifications based on universalism and nature. ⁷⁸ Echoing Marcuse, Jay observes that where

.… liberalism was identified solely with its laissez-faire, utilitarian, individualistic traditions, holism was an anti-liberal phenomenon. But where the task of political unification loomed much larger than the maintenance of a capitalist economy, liberalism could take on more holistic forms. ⁷⁹

It might be added that, where the illusion of harmony can no longer be sustained, authoritarian liberalism reverts to irrational justifications for capitalism, creating oligarchy as a corrective to democracy. The effective force of fascist myth as a political commodity lies less in the bellicose nationalism of rabble-rousers or the conspiratorial manipulation of elites than in the economic and cultural reorganization of modernity which is form-determined by capital: in contrast with pre-modern historical formations where social relations are determined by diverse structuring principles, capitalism is a totalizing social system which develops through the resolution of contradiction, reproducing the social and political conditions of accumulation through the consolidation of non-market institutions. In this sense, fascism can be understood as a radical form of political capitalism in which corporate actors deploy the state for private gain in return for accepting limited regulation, leading to the privatization of profit, socialization of risk and intensification of state control over the free development of productive forces. As Gaetano Salvemini observed at first hand, in fascism the ‘state, i.e. the taxpayer, [becomes] responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise .… Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social.’ ⁸⁰ This observation remains as true now as it was in the 1930s, and provides a prescient insight into the concentration of economic power in the modern corporate state. But while ‘totalitarian’ capitalism may stabilize accumulation in the short term by reasserting the structural hegemony of unprofitable industrial and financial interests, it achieves this stabilization effect by extinguishing political and entrepreneurial freedom.

III

Myth constitutes a decisive element of ideological thought and finds creative expression in the distorted forms of apparatus Marxism (‘socialism in one country’, ‘really existing socialism’, ‘developed socialism’, etc.) which emerged under Stalin. ⁸¹ Yet the uniquely counter-revolutionary quality of fascist myth lies in its creative orchestration of popular emotion to restabilize social relations – in contrast to the contrived enthusiasm which so often characterized Soviet Marxism. In the interwar era fascists acquired and consolidated state power by mobilizing supporters through nationalist rituals and parades. Exploiting aesthetic and social-psychological techniques developed in modern marketing, they used mass gatherings to generate feelings of belonging, proclaiming a non-class-specific populist identity which diluted support for socialism. As contemporary research indicates, however, the intrusion of emotion into politics is hardly restricted to populist movements. Rather, orchestrated emotion has become a key feature of modern technocratic politics as ostensibly ‘rational’ politicians strive to coopt the resentment of insecure native working class voters offended by the economic injustice of neoliberalism. As Ost argues, anger is present in modern politics ‘either explicitly in the form of political mobilization, or in its congealed form known as political stability. As Marx calls capital “congealed labor”, we can call political stability “congealed anger”.’ ⁸²

In this sense, the logic of fascism in the continuum of counter-revolutionary ideology lies not simply in the irrational naturalism of myth as the antithesis to liberal rationalism, but in the production of right-wing populism through the politics of enmity. As a populist mass movement of the right, fascism provides an early cautionary example of the political force of the friend–enemy distinction, which demarcates a zone of exclusion or ‘internal periphery’ as a basis for political (re)action, channelling the ‘congealed anger’ of the dispossessed into support for patriotism, domestic repression and military adventurism. Though unparalleled in its intensity, the model of fascist myth has been adapted (consciously or otherwise) by latter-day conservative revolutionaries seeking to manage the economic and cultural contradictions entailed in the displacement of state sovereignty by the transnational hegemonic sovereignty of global financial capital. Like the neo-Straussian myth of manifest destiny in American neoconservative ideology, which refuses to mourn the corruption of western democracy as an unintended consequence of the anti-democratic feedback of democratic imperialism, ⁸³ the fascist myth of permanent war against a providential enemy provides a powerful means to contain opposition to the corporate reorganization of politics. Fascism subdues the self-revolutionizing dynamic of capital in a Darwinian dramatization of perpetual conflict, announcing the self-alienated condition of mankind to be the natural condition of society in a neo-Hobbesian universe structured by the realist logic of global anarchy and inter-state rivalry. ⁸⁴ Yet as Albritton cautions, while critical theorists rightly emphasize the determinate effect of capital’s inner logic on history, it is necessary to preserve space for ‘alternative forms of practice’ in the development of totalizing capitalism, for ‘social forms such as fundamentalist religion or nationalism may develop as a reaction to capitalism, only to gain sufficient strength and autonomy to act back on capitalism and alter it’. ⁸⁵