By LARA FERREIRA LORENZONI, MARCELO SIANO LIMA & LIGIA MAFRA*

Big capital transforms the cancellation of conflicts into a dogma to be maintained under any pretext, including the use of state and para-state violence.

1.

A series of recent events have been viewed with concern. Gestures, speeches and positions on morality, public policies and foreign policy are being attributed to a historical social phenomenon of the extreme right: fascism. In order to know whether this perception of the facts is correct, it is worth asking: after all, what is fascism?

The origin and development of fascism are closely linked to the specific historical context of Italy between the two world wars, devastated and living in the context of an imminent social explosion. Under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, a movement was formed, then a Party, which gathered around itself the ideal of redemption of the country and its population living in conditions of misery and despair. The conception that refers exclusively to “classical fascism” restricts it to this specific period and place.

However, several scholars – such as Umberto Eco, Robert Paxton, Jason Stanley and Leandro Konder – do not link fascism to a single and unrepeatable historical period. On the contrary, they recognize it as a latent danger that democracies, throughout human history, need to constantly guard against.

Fascism is invariably a political movement with a conservative social content, disguised under a modernizing mask. It is permeated by a profound sense of crisis and decline. This catastrophic vision of reality leads to an idealization of the past and an obsessive search for a supposed “lost greatness,” for mythically produced identity values, for a national unity, seen as the only solution to the community’s problems, which supposedly cannot be resolved by traditional political means. It also involves the affirmation of an authoritarian and exclusionary nationalism, the projection of virility and “power,” and the absolute control of the State and its entire apparatus.

All this revolves around a leader, a masculine and paternalistic figure, the most accomplished example of “national identity.” Someone who, with his power of communication, summons the childish fantasies of the masses about the imminent “dangers” to the “homeland” and, in a more private sphere, to the “family.” In the mad search for an intangible “purity,” democratic freedoms are rejected in favor of goals of ethnic purification and domination, justified, through a sophisticated propaganda system, by a violence considered redemptive and, therefore, limitless.

Fascists have an absolute contempt for softness, complacency, empathy, Enlightenment values, parliamentarism, liberal democracy and its institutions, as well as for any and all types of political agreement. They are hegemons: an entire society must bow to them, which then comes under the tutelage of their ideology. The main sign of fascism is the division of the population into “us” (the included, the worthy) and “them” (the excluded and unworthy, in a word, the “enemies” – internal and external), appealing to ethnic, religious or racial distinctions. Fear is the dominant affect – fear of the other, fear of difference. All forms of state and para-state violence are justified against fear.

2.

In the context of capitalism, fascist regimes have always found favor with the holders of big capital. Historical fascism, in the 1920s and 1930s, embodied movements to contain a working class that was living under intense economic crises, due to the destruction caused by the First World War (1914-1918) and the seduction radiated by the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, then the Soviet Union, in 1917.

Their authoritarian, repressive and anti-communist theses and practices pleased big capital, as they contained the working masses in terms of left-wing revolutionary impulses and co-opted them into an ideological dimension in which they manipulated emotions and the entire cosmology of symbols and organizational paradigms.

Today, in the 21st century, we are witnessing the rebirth of fascism, radiated by a competent populism that has taken over social networks, which have become the great instrument for propagating all the ideas of purification and salvation that are falling upon societies and economies eroded by the systemic crises of capitalism in its neoliberal version.

Neoliberalism, as the “new reason of the world” as defined by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, has disrupted the productive economy by imposing the dominance of financialization, leading to a deepening of crises and the formation of a social liability of biblical proportions. Technological unemployment has never had such a huge and rapid impact as it has in current times, with millions of people being laid off from their jobs and production lines simply ceasing to exist.

In the economy of political and social relations, economic crises generate tensions and frustrations in people, individually and collectively, a situation that is favorable to the actions propagated by populism. This, nationally and internationally appropriated by far-right political forces, produces a parallel reality, with its own grammar, and leads millions of human beings to it, enchanted by the chimera characteristic of this field. All the destructive force of fascist populism is directed against the symbols and foundations of a thought and way of life that it wants to suppress, unleashing deep and deadly hatreds. In it, big capital transforms the cancellation of conflicts into a dogma to be maintained under any pretext, including the use of state and para-state violence.

3.

Technology plays a central role in this phenomenon. Digital platforms, with their algorithms designed to maximize engagement, favor the dissemination of polarized discourses and content that stimulate intense emotional reactions, increasing political radicalization and strengthening contemporary fascist narratives. Artificial intelligence, in turn, is used to personalize messages, identify target audiences and drive disinformation campaigns, becoming a powerful tool for large-scale political manipulation.

Furthermore, digital surveillance and mass data collection allow authoritarian governments and far-right political groups (including private groups such as large corporations and their less-than-republican interests) to monitor citizens, suppress dissent, and restrict fundamental freedoms. Surveillance capitalism, as described by Shoshana Zuboff, enhances social control by transforming everyday life into a continuous stream of data that can be exploited to anticipate behavior, influence decisions, and reinforce authoritarian power structures.

In the midst of collapse, frustration and discouragement, forces emerge that ultimately change the course of all human societies. What we are experiencing today is the predominance of platform capitalism, a financialized economy and the increasing lack of jobs for a population that is growing at a dizzying rate. Several thinkers have warned that the planet is incapable of supporting the levels of consumption demanded today.

The scenario of worsening crises is “real and immediate,” with the deterioration of liberal democracies and their institutions, incapable of responding to social demands. However, the blame does not fall on the owners of capital and their insane greed for ever greater profits, regardless of the planetary annihilation and climate emergencies that this generates, but rather on the invented enemies of the moment: immigrants, black people, the poor, artists, teachers, LGBTQIAPN+ people, etc.

In short, we hover over the abyss, fearful of being thrown into it by forces uncommitted to life and democracy. We fear for our future, both personal and collective, because we cannot see any promising prospects on the horizon before us. At least not within the framework of a financial, platform-based capitalism, with prisons and police in the name of “security,” but without factories, without an organized working class, a scenario that sterilizes any democratic breath.

Thus, we ask: would the Cartesian responses inaugurated by the liberal revolutions in the early days of modernity be the most appropriate to confront fascism in the 21st century? Would liberal reforms, in the long term, be sufficient to contain the monster that devours hearts, ecosystems, minds and freedoms? What else can we learn from historical experience and the techno-tyranny of the present? We will have to see.

*Lara Ferreira Lorenzoni, lawyer, holds a PhD in Fundamental Rights and Guarantees from the Faculty of Law of Vitória (FDV).

*Marcelo Siano Lima, historian, is a doctoral student in Fundamental Rights and Guarantees at the Faculty of Law of Vitória (FDV).

*Lygia Mafra, lawyer, is a PhD candidate in Fundamental Rights and Guarantees at the Faculty of Law of Vitória (FDV).

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