Are We Out of Time? Thinking about Neoliberalism and Fascism in an Age of Radical Transition

I. Introduction

In the age of Trump it might seem as if, in retrospect, all liberal roads lead to fascism. ¹ That is, it may be that Trump is not the exception to a long history of liberal democracy but its logical conclusion. Marxist theory holds that when liberal ideology fails to convince subjects to remain quiescent under conditions of capitalism, fascism must follow to protect the core mission of capital societies: the ongoing dominance of the market mechanism and the security of the capitalist elite who make that market function. In the 1930s when the Great Depression took place, there was a wave of fascism around the world culminating in the Third Reich. More recently, the Great Recession in the US and ongoing economic stagnation in countries around the world has led to a phenomenon that might be called neo-fascism. This is a more mediatized model of ethnic nationalism and state authoritarianism responding to the particular contexts of neoliberalism and swapping out anti-Semitism (at least some of the time) for Islamophobia (all of the time). In such a context, it is the pro market but non-fascist Barack Obama who is the exception. Trump on the other hand is, or has become, the rule, even if his own brand of fascism seems to be uniquely incompetent at times.

This is one way to think about the current state of affairs, and it’s a story that fills many, liberals and leftists alike, with despair. Liberals feel despair because they truly do believe in the rights and principles of liberal ideology. Leftists feel despair because for all of their dislike for liberalism, the fascist variant is far more horrible. But if despair is all we have, the prognosis is very bleak.

If this is our destiny, then we really are in for it. But what if this isn’t the only way to tell this story? In this commentary, I consider the teleological tale that I have just sketched out in more detail. I will address the rise of neoliberalism to think about where it comes from and also where it is going. But I will also tell the story from a different angle, one that resists the inevitable, teleological bent of the way we usually think about history, politics and economics and the way they interact. This other way of thinking is based on the writings of Walter Benjamin who in 1940, as fascism was coming down around him, did not submit to the despair that his situation seemed to demand. In his well-known essay “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin considered how to resist fascism without recourse to any sense of inevitability or doom. Quite the opposite, Benjamin argued that by subscribing to a sense of teleology, one is trapped by its temporal logic. That is to say, if you believe in teleology – even if you don’t know that you believe in it – if you believe in vast temporal patterns, in inevitability and “fate,” you will be destined to whatever doom you foresee. By renouncing this, Benjamin broke from determinism and offered a different way (I wouldn’t even say a different path forward, because the very idea of going forward is itself a product of believing in progress and teleology).

Therefore, in this commentary, I am going to first visit our contemporary condition from within the context of teleological modes of thought and then switch to a Benjaminian temporality. The purpose of doing this is to contrast the range of political options that seem available from within a sense of progress and destiny from those that become evident when that sense is interfered with. The key point is that the idea of time is inherently political; when we think about time in a different way, a different form of politics also becomes possible (more accurately it has always been possible but we have to accept a radically different form of temporality in order to be able to both recognize and act upon that difference). In saying this, I don’t want to pretend that I am immune to teleological thinking. No one is; it is a deeply held, fundamental aspect of how people think about time and reality in a world formed by liberal capitalism. Even so, none of us are completely determined by teleology. It is this non-teleological space that I would like to think about further here.

II. Neoliberalism and the Space of Politics

To begin this discussion from within the frame of teleological constructions of time, I’ll discuss two questions. The first question is whether neoliberalism is an offshoot of liberalism or whether it represents something wholly new. The second question, which I alluded to previously, is whether neoliberalism is intrinsically connected to fascism. I’ll treat each of these questions in turn.

Wendy Brown is one of the best-known scholars who directly considers the question of neoliberalism and its relationship to liberalism. Although Brown has made a career of criticizing liberalism, she finds that, in comparison to neoliberalism, it is revealed to have certain beneficial characteristics. Above all, for Brown, liberals believe in an autonomous political space. Thinkers like Locke and Mill actively sought to keep the political separate from the economic and other spheres of social life. This separation was not generally well intended; an autonomous space for the political created a rich white man’s club that was produced on the backs of the poor, women and black and brown people of all genders. Yet for Brown, neoliberalism has further reduced this political space to the vanishing point. ²

Michel Feher says something even starker, that under conditions of neoliberalism, we have moved from a market based on “free” labor to a market based on human capital. ³ Here, even the most intimate of human spaces becomes taken over by an economic absolutism.

These arguments for a clear break between liberalism and neoliberalism are not universally agreed on. Feher says that even “neoliberal” economists like Schultz and Becker originally saw their work as largely occurring within the confines of neoclassical economics. David Harvey also challenges this view. What we normally call liberalism, he calls “embedded liberalism” which he defines as a situation in which liberalism is limited by states and other social actors in order to allow for what he calls a “class compromise.” ⁴ Read this way, neoliberalism is not qualitatively different than liberalism; it represents a reorientation of the political to the market (into a position of utter subservience) but the market principle itself remains relatively constant, if greatly expanded.

In my own view, I tend more towards the Harvey end of the spectrum. I am less inclined than some to concede that liberalism had a genuine interest in the political. Perhaps more accurately, I recognize that the political is not a false category for liberal political thought but that its political vision has always been limited by a market logic that sits deep within its political vision (and from which that vision cannot be readily extracted).

Such thoughts lead to the next question. If neoliberalism is either radically new or at least a concentration of the very worst aspects of liberalism, the next question becomes what then is its relationship to fascism? In the US mainstream media the perception has largely been that these are deeply opposed forces. Of course, the mainstream media eschews both the term neoliberalism and fascism, but even without these terms the 2016 election was definitely portrayed as a dire choice between Clinton (the neoliberal) and Trump (the fascist or at least white nationalist authoritarian which, in my view, is pretty much the same thing). The fact that Trump won the election – or at least got to be president – has upset a lot of orthodox apple-carts. The main sentiment expressed in the mainstream media has been that widespread concerns about global trade, white nationalism and the like suggest that the thirty years of unopposed neoliberalization are finally coming to a halt and the much ballyhooed “white working class” has finally had enough and is going another (fascist) way. I would say that this idea may have less salience with the passing months insofar as Trump has proven himself to be quite comfortable cozying up to Wall Street.

Whatever the accuracy of such notions, there is another way to think about these questions, one that links neoliberalism much closer to fascism, as suggested by Marx’s analysis of the rise of what might be called proto-fascism under Napoleon III. In “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon,” his account of the coup that put Napoleon III into power, Marx argues that there are times when the state actually turns against its capitalist masters, not to support the proletariat or other subservient classes per se but rather to discipline and, in effect, save capitalism from its own excesses. Marx writes that Napoleon III turns on the bourgeoisie because they were short-sightedly threatening to topple the French economy with the enormous debt that they held over the small peasantry. ⁵ This prevented the development of the kind of centralized power structure that was necessary to move France into modern capitalism.

If that sounds familiar, it may suggest that our current moment is much the same. It could be argued that Steve Bannon is trying to do today something very similar to what Napoleon III did in France. Fearing that the capitalist classes have gotten too focused on profit at all costs, he wants to use the state to force an income readjustment slightly away from the uber rich and massively away from black and brown people to benefit – at least somewhat – his white nationalist constituency. He too, therefore could be said to seek to discipline the dominant class for its own sake. If his power has waned that simply means that in this instance the bourgeoisie could not be tamed; their march towards a neoliberal future continues unabated.

Whether or not this kind of self-correcting mechanism actually works, I would say that based on these phenomena, neoliberalism and fascism can indeed be seen as going hand in hand. With the 2016 election, we saw rebellions on the right (Trump) and the left (Sanders) and clearly the center did not hold. Fascism solves a problem for neoliberalism that Foucault identified, namely how a biopolitical system based on “making live” could simultaneously continue to kill, as sovereign authority requires. For Foucault, racism solves this problem. The state can protect its favored community and threaten and kill everyone else. Trump’s fascist tendency with his overt racism, Islamophobia and subtler anti-semitism all serve this agenda perfectly. It gives the state a new raison d’être while allowing the markets to thrive (the Dow Jones is off the charts these days). Even if it doesn’t give the super rich every single thing they want (hence the need to discipline them by a fascist state) it preserves the basis for their wealth and furthermore appeases a large chunk of the (white) population so that the elites don’t have to worry about communism or anarchism (although the new movement to punch Nazis might give them pause).

III. Dissociated time

At this point, I’d like to reverse course and speak against the presumption of teleology that has animated this discussion so far. I want to argue that so long as we subscribe to a sense of a determinant teleology, we remain bound within that system and so the questions that we ask are themselves determined by teleology. We expect that just because one phenomenon “came first” it must be the cause of something that came immediately afterwards (or, if not that phenomenon, some other one; there always has to be a cause and an effect).

What we miss out with all of this teleology is a sense of the aleatory, the idea that time is “dissociated,” to cite Benjamin. ⁶ In this other way of thinking about temporality, we no longer need to look for great repeating patterns in time; we don’t have to plug events into a dialectical formula. As noted earlier, while writing “On the Concept of History” in 1940, Benjamin found himself at what felt like a historical dead end – the dark side of the telos. He combatted this despair with a realization that however much human beings projected their vision of progress and continuity onto time – with predictably horrible political results – they could not so determine time that other ways of thinking about and experiencing it were impossible.

In “On the Concept of History,” Benjamin tells us that rather than looking forward to the progressive future, we should turn our eyes to the past:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from inquiring into the future: the Torah and the Jews instructed them in remembrance. This disenchanted future, which holds sway over all those who turn to soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future became homogenous, empty time. For every second was the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter. ⁷

In other words, for Benjamin, no one second is any better, more pregnant with possibility or more fated than any other. Benjamin has what I would call an anarchist sense of temporality which refuses to privilege any one moment over others. So, for example, a great moment like the Paris Commune could have come at literally any moment and still could come again. Accordingly, Benjamin turns his back on the future, which for liberalism and fascism alike is the place where everything that matters finally happens. To believe in a perfect future not only justifies all kinds of wicked deeds in the present, but it also depoliticizes them insofar as time carries these deeds forward in a way that surpasses human agency. For Benjamin, the idea of the future is “homogenous empty time,” under both liberalism and fascism because it is utterly false, a black box into which all the hopes and justifications of the present are said to be worked out.

For Benjamin, rather than being empty time in this sense the future is empty in a different way. It is “empty” insofar as it has not yet occurred and our job is to keep it that way to avoid binding future generations by our own phantasms. This is where the aleatory element enters into his work because the future serves as the guarantor of the possibility that anything could be otherwise.

Benjamin also provocatively tells us that just as the future is not the shining end of time, the past is not the lost and inaccessible site that we normally take it to be. He writes that:

the only historian capable of fanning the spark of hope in the past is the one who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he is victorious. ⁸

In saying that “even the dead” are implicated in our current actions, Benjamin brings an aleatory dimension to the past (and present) as well. Accordingly, Benjamin tells us the real connection between temporal moments comes, not from proximity, but rather from the material presence of each moment and the way they interact.

Accordingly, our mission is to make connections and constellations “through events that may be separated from [one another] by thousands of years.” ⁹ I see this as also being an anarchist approach to time because any subject of history is empowered to give a charge to various moments of time by associating them together. Rather than letting the notion of progress dictate the sequence and meaning of events, Benjamin allows those moments to interact as such, creating a new basis for how to think and act both forward and backwards through time.

IV. Are We Out of Time?

With this discussion of Benjaminian (or anarchist) time in mind, let me revisit the questions that I posed in the first part of this commentary. As I’ve already indicated, I think that subscribing to a teleological sense of time creates certain implications – often very subtle ones – that help ensure that we ask certain questions and not others.

Thus the initial question that I posed, whether neoliberalism is related to liberalism, already shows evidence of a particular temporal perspective. The fact that one seems to follow the other in succession is one of the main reasons why we tend to think that they are causally related. Interestingly, there has been a lot of recent work that has related neoliberalism, not to liberalism but to feudalism. ¹⁰ The idea that a feudal economic structure could be compatible with neoliberalism might seem shocking but that may be in part because we are so accustomed to think of time moving in one direction only.

I’m not saying that neoliberalism necessarily is the same thing or a revival of feudalism. I don’t think Benjamin’s point is to replace one set of temporal tautologies (the thing that comes after another thing is related to that other thing) with another (a thing must be related to other things even if the temporal gap between them is very large). Instead I take his point to be that what he calls historical materialism (to which I’d add the word anarchist so let’s call it anarchist historical materialism) does not find “true” connections or repeated patterns throughout history. Rather they uproot and subvert each separate temporal condition by engaging with the materiality of another time. Here, the emphasis is not on the quality or character of the time but rather the effect of the historical materialist’s connection between two temporal moments for the purposes of releasing both of those moments from the prison of their ordering. The point is to use time against itself as a way to break out of a perceived temporal deadlock.

Here, it’s important to stress that the sense that we are out of time – at the end of time but in a bad way – is itself a product of thinking about time in a particular way. Believing in “the future” as a teleological destiny means once again that we are not in control of time and action. But an anarchist approach says not only is it not too late to upend neoliberalism but further that there is no such thing as being too late; there is no destiny in time.

The other question I asked was whether neoliberalism is connected to fascism. Once again, when you revisit this question from a Benjaminian perspective you get to ask different questions. From this position, I think it doesn’t matter if these phenomena are connected or not. In fact, I’d say it’s unlikely that they are completely connected because these different regimes, once again, come out of a much more complex and aleatory order than a teleological sense of time suggests. Here again, I’d turn for a moment to Foucault because he shows how epistemic regimes are like icebergs; they encounter each other, crashing together and forming new shapes that are a result of their intermixing. You don’t ask if this iceberg is related to that iceberg, you just see the new formations coming at you and act accordingly.

In my view, to think this way gives you a lot more leeway in terms of how to respond, avoiding the well-tread grooves of teleological thought. Even leftists can and often do fall into these traps because systems of thought like Marxism often have very teleological formulations (although I think that Marx himself is sometimes distinctly anti-teleological as are many Marxists who came after him).

I think that for all the terror and dread of our moment, this is also a very exciting time to be alive. The waves of discontent, the contradictory factions and beliefs of our time are all signs, I think, of a teleology that is growing very thin. The comforts and promises of teleology are significant and so the challenge to it is terrifying but the opportunity to think differently about politics and even time and history is only possible (or at least more possible) under these kinds of conditions.

It is true that the courage that Benjamin’s thought experiment in “On the Concept of History” did not save him in any usual sense of the word. But as he himself shows, the dead are not entirely dead, nor entirely gone. If “even the dead” are not safe so long as the enemy is victorious, the opposite is also true: even the dead can be saved if the enemy is defeated and so Benjamin’s courage in the face of teleology might not only serve to save the living, but also, retroactively, save him and the rest of the dead as well.