By IGOR MENDES*
Excerpt, selected by the author, from the Afterword to the new edition of the recently released book
What is the reactivation of fascism? How to combat it?
The discourse of “law and order,” commonly associated with a religious and moral element, has been one of the catalysts for the emergence of a global phenomenon: the reactivation of fascism, the most significant event between the first edition of “The Little Prison,” in 2017, and this one, in 2024, including the Covid-19 pandemic and Jair Bolsonaro’s mismanagement. This fascism draws on what the famous Argentine jurist Raul Zaffaroni called “criminal law of the enemy.” In Europe and the United States, the “enemy” is the immigrant, represented as a terrorist; in Latin America, the poor native, represented as a drug trafficker.
In addition to the very real walls of reinforced concrete, insurmountable walls of social and cultural segregation are being erected, incubated at the end of the last century and the beginning of this one by the self-proclaimed “greatest Western democracy”, with its infamous “war on drugs” and “war on terror”, used as a pretext not only for the violation of international law, but also for hypervigilance and hatred against those considered dissidents and/or undesirables (in fact, after the televised genocide in Gaza, perpetrated by Benjamin Netanyahu’s hordes, is there still anything that can be called international law?).
Of course, like a radio broadcast, this civil war against the poor spread to the outskirts and was reinterpreted by countless local political leaders, ranging from fundamentalist pastors to “anarcho-capitalists,” who have in common the fact that they represent the worst of the flood of national political life in their respective countries. The political economy of this “leap backwards” was constituted by cataclysmic levels of unemployment, discouragement and unprecedented precariousness of labor relations, as well as the destruction of unions and the minimum of workers’ organization, pushing millions and millions of people into the wild “every man for himself” of the so-called informal economy – I’m not even referring to the marginal economy, which is the only one that shows constant dynamism in the ghettos and slums of the former industrial areas.
Between the moderate liberal discourse, which defends bourgeois democracy in the abstract but squanders or allows the squandering of concrete rights (especially economic and social rights), to which 90% of the forces that declare themselves to be left-wing have capitulated, on the one hand, and the cynical messianism of the fishermen of troubled waters, who say that if there is less protection and more competition, the best will “naturally” stand out, on the other – it is seductive to consider oneself to belong to the vague category of the “best”, even more so if this is associated with a long history of frustrations and resentments –, not only middle-class sectors desperate to fall into the “mass”, but even vast layers of poor workers have adhered to the preaching of the latter.
And this is not despite, but because of the very fact that they have been the greatest victims of the established order: the rich, protected in their impregnable bubbles, are practically immune to assaults and ordinary crime, which affect, above all, the poor; this also applies to the consequences of relentless drug addiction, which results in an endless list of family tragedies at the base of our social pyramid.
Since public services are so poorly provided, there is an internal logic to the reasoning: “well, since they don’t give them to me, at least they shouldn’t charge me taxes”; or, “if I don’t have a formal contract or job security, and I work like a donkey to put food on the table, then it should be the same for everyone”. It is an inverted egalitarianism, “if it was denied to me, then it should be denied to everyone”, whose underlying philosophy is a mix of social Darwinism and nihilism.
Regarding the popularity of the idea of “free competition” among impoverished workers in the 19th century, Raymond Williams points out that: “But we have the survival of the fittest, the struggle for existence – no one had to invent these descriptions as descriptions of 19th century society, since they were the daily experience of most people. Millions of people in this country went out each day knowing that they must be stronger and more cunning than their fellows if they were to survive or bring anything home to their families. The idea is in some ways as popular with the victims of this competitive process as with its promoters, because it corresponds so directly to their experience of daily life. Regardless of whether anyone can conceive of a better social order, the idea seems to fit the experience of life as it is usually lived.”[I]
The relevance of this quote proves, among other things, that life has returned to a situation of decadent social vulnerability. In this context, a leftist prisoner of “bourgeois respectability,” whose social base is made up of those (still) covered by labor laws and some fundamental guarantees, is unable to communicate with those who are exposed every day to the harsh conditions of the streets. This is not a technical problem: these are radically different types of sociability.
For these millions of people expropriated (materially and spiritually) by the capitalist order, the end of the world seems more feasible and closer than the transformation of this world for the better. It is no coincidence that we can perhaps consider dystopia as the best translation of the spirit of the times, a theme that has been exhaustively addressed in films, series and books. With the expectation of the future extinguished, everything must be uprooted, at any cost, from the present. In this sea of castaways, when the buoy of collective consciousness that was born of concentrated work disappeared, the only stable institution left, from which some solidarity is still expected, was the cellular family, which must be safeguarded against “cosmopolitan degeneration”.
Fighting the religious representation of these populations instead of fighting the heartless world that dehumanizes them, as Karl Marx would say, would be a gross mistake and a lost battle, as well as a stupid elitism disguised as “progressivism”.[ii] Few things could be more incoherent, or hateful, than so-called “democrats” who defend “fiscal adjustments” against workers with all their might: it is as if they were defending the death penalty, while insulting the executioners… Therefore, the so-called economic neoliberalism feeds, protects and is inseparable from political fascism, as the Pinochet and Friedman alliance exemplifies.
Avoiding calling the phenomenon by its name, that is, fascism, does not seem to me to be the most appropriate: in essence, it is the same preventive counterrevolution, the same fierce settling of accounts against the “surplus” and the resistant, the same militaristic discourse and, therefore, the practice of walling in and extermination. The fact that this reactivated fascism is not the same in Brazil, the United States or Eastern Europe does not mean that it should not be called that, because the classical fascisms (German, Italian and Japanese) were not identical to each other either.
In fact, a permanent trait of uncertainty, the attempt to present oneself as an alternative above or beyond social contradictions – which includes eventual speeches against the “establishment” or the diffuse “system” – has always been one of the conditions for an ideology linked to the most rapacious sectors of the financial oligarchy to be able to garner a broad and heterogeneous mass base.
This is what Johann Chapoutot says in his excellent book entitled The Nazi Cultural Revolution: “Given its miscellaneous character, endowed with strong coherence thanks to the postulate of race, the Nazi 'worldview' could be appropriated in different ways by the most diverse individuals. The aggregation of multiple elements meant that there was always a reason, an idea, an argument for being or becoming a Nazi: nationalism, racism, anti-Semitism, expansionism to the East, anti-Christianity… With all these factors present, anyone felt authorized to adhere to the Nazi discourse for at least one of the reasons”.[iii]
This is what we see: there is a bit of everything in 2022st century fascism, from religious fundamentalism to flat-earthers and societies of people who believe in paranormal experiences – who doesn’t remember the coup demonstrations that took place in Brazil between October 2023 and January XNUMX, in which some people lit up cell phones so that aliens could take notice and feel sorry for the sad situation of the self-proclaimed “patriots”? It is no coincidence that the most important Brazilian ideologist in this field is an astrologer with a past in occult sects, transformed into a champion of Christianity.
“Internal coherence” is not achieved by a defined identity of its own, but by the radical differentiation, obtained through the dehumanization, of what is considered “the other.” Furthermore, in order to attract the discontented, it is necessary to lend this deranged reactionism a transgressive aspect. If, in the past, classical fascism resorted to anti-capitalist agitation to mobilize workers deeply affected by the consequences of the World War and the 1929 crisis, in the present this transgressive aspect is less economic (in economic terms, as a rule, these forces close ranks with the ultraliberalism of Chicago, although in Western Europe there are demonstrations in defense of the welfare state for those considered natives) and more behavioral and linguistic, understood as “the right to say what one thinks without having to be politically correct.”
An apparent discursive incoherence, which openly resorts to lies if necessary, which says one thing and its opposite in the same sentence, which disregards what is commonly called “culture” (generally, when stated in this way, erudite culture) is not a weakness, but the strength of this movement, because such occasionalism can be attractive at some point to anyone and is almost impossible to defeat through debate. After all, how many arguments can one muster against irrationalism?
One thing, however, is undeniable: fascist is still synonymous with pariah. Coining this term cost a lot on the battlefields of the Second World War, so it would be an unjustifiable concession to stop using it against its successors, thus forcing them to reveal themselves in public.
Of course, it would be a mistake to trivialize the expression and the fight against fascism, even more so if it is used as a pretext to suspend the mobilization for workers' rights – this is always the meaning that the liberal bourgeoisie and its social-democratic Siamese brothers seek to convey –, but when one realizes that in Brazil preparatory acts have been organized for a coup d'état at the end of 2022, anchored in a not inconsiderable capacity for mobilization, one must think that this would be a problem of lesser gravity compared to underestimating the period we are going through and its possible consequences, because underestimation is another way of capitulating to the ill-fated policy of appeasement.
These retrograde forces could not win in the long run; but, once installed in power (I do not refer only to the government), they could not be quickly displaced either, especially because their rise in several of the world's main political centers indicates and prepares the ground for a new round of imperialist wars.
It is necessary to block their path and respond to their provocations, measure by measure, whenever they arise. Writing books and manifestos is necessary, without a doubt, but it is even more necessary to raise effective social struggles and defend an economic program that opposes the dictates of the Washington Consensus, on whose ruins our beautiful contemporary world is proliferating. Through the struggle for concrete interests, such as a decent wage, housing, public services, civil rights, etc., and only through struggle, can we separate the hard core of this contemporary fascism, the political agents who act with knowledge of the facts, financed by very powerful international lobbies (such as the arms industry), from the millions of discontented poor people whom they seek to rally, ultimately, against their own interests. This is the beast's Achilles heel, today as yesterday. If “fascist” is synonymous with pariah, “anti-fascism” retains a strong mobilizing appeal.
Now, let this not be confused with my defense of a narrow economicism. It is also necessary to engage in public political and ideological struggle, and to dispute both the past and the future, which the forces of reaction seek to mythologize. Narrow pragmatism, which sees only the need to make concessions and postpone major clashes, has led us, step by step, to the edge of the precipice, because the defense of a state of desolation is something very unmoving.
We need to recover a sense of historical hope, which has nothing to do with a naïve determinism, because history is not an entity with a will of its own, but with the awareness that it is women and men as they exist today who write their destiny – the economy and politics of the time are only the backdrop, the stage on which our actions unfold. Dispossession and poverty also have, within all their negativity, a latent transformative power: it is urgent to mobilize it.
Intellectuals in general, and artists in particular, have much to contribute in this regard, because aesthetic creation has the powerful power to bring together what is still fragile in life, anticipating in the present what has not yet become effective. In the same way, it is necessary to foster and extend new forms of political inventiveness, born from the ground of struggles, not to renounce, but to successfully carry out in our time the assault on the heavens, the redemption of the damned of the earth.
In short, anyone who wants to understand and change the barbaric reality of prisons must first understand and change the society that increasingly resembles a vast prison. This conviction, which is at the heart of this book, remains unchanged on my part.
*Igor Mendes is a writer and teacher. Author, among other books, of Feverish June (n-1 editions).
Reference
Igor Mendes. The little prison. Sao Paulo, n-1 editions, 2024. [https://amzn.to/4i9k1As]
Notes
[I] Raymond Williams, Culture and materialism. New York, New York, pp. 122-123.
[ii] Anyone who wants to get a clear idea of what I'm saying should go to the door of a prison on visiting day: apart from the police, the only institution present are the evangelical churches, which act as a doctor's office, employment agency and legal aid at the same time.
[iii] Johann Chapoutot, The Nazi Cultural Revolution, ed. Da Vinci, p. 19.
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