By HUGO DIONÍSIO*
Neoliberalism: the antechamber of fascism! Here’s what’s hidden behind the German elections
1.
The elections in Thuringia and Saxony, seen as a referendum on the Scholz/Baerbock government and a preview of what is to come in 2025, confirmed the erosion of the German government, demonstrating that the “Zelensky curse” is very much alive. The closer the relationship with the former president of Ukraine and temporary dictator-at-large, the greater the likelihood of a government’s fall. This is an almost inexorable trend.
However, almost 80 years after the end of Nazi terror, the neoliberal center comes to preach the fear of fascism as its favorite banner. While they frighten their people with the AFDs of this life, they support Banderismo in Ukraine, Javier Milei in Argentina and far-right coup plotters in Venezuela. And with this we catch them: the fight of the neoliberal center against the far right is nothing more than an opportunistic torpor, in which a privileged caste that considers itself civilized does not want to be replaced by another, more dishonest caste.
And while they point to the dangers of the “extreme right”, eliminating those who could really fight it, they do not, however, prevent their own self-destruction, as is the case with the Sholz/Baerbock government. This is also the story of many other governments associated with the neoliberal center. But this self-destructive susceptibility is only the visible face – in Germany – of an even deeper social dynamic that can be identified throughout the European Union, experienced throughout the 21st century, and which has imposed itself, in my opinion, through four critical accelerating processes, created/used to produce the political effect that we observe today. This dynamic, if not stopped, will lead, deliberately and inexorably, to a new fascist, neo-fascist farce, whatever you want to call it.
2.
The first critical acceleration of the neoliberal project in Europe coincided with Bush's "War on Terror", which involved all of NATO following attacks in Spain, England and France, resulting in the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring and the destruction of Libya and Syria. It was in this sequence that a process of over-surveillance and centralisation of information and intelligence was imposed from Washington, giving the US the power to analyse, monitor and coordinate efforts at the level of security and creating, among the population, the subjective conditions for accepting what would come next: mass surveillance of their every move, with a view to maintaining their security.
Another critical moment was the 2008 financial crisis, which imposed the “Permanent Austerity State”, preparing the population for the idea that tomorrow, after all, will not be better than yesterday – only for some –, accelerating the process of destruction of the welfare state and bringing about the greatest transition of value between classes in recent history, which had occurred in the USA and the United Kingdom, shortly after the unspeakable “Washington Consensus”. It was with the 2008 crisis that the Washington Consensus finally became official policy of the European Union. Throughout this time, American “investors” occupied dominant positions in important sectors throughout Europe.
The third critical moment was Covid-19, with the introduction of the Davos “Great Reset” and the entire ideology of the “new normal”. Exacerbated individualism, narcissism, internal migration from the poorest to the richest regions and immigration from outside, into the Western bloc, uprooting populations from their homeland, culture and language, and the disappearance of the social fabric that gives cohesion to societies. “Uberization” destroyed the remaining economic frontiers that resisted.
A company in California operates in the West, from the US, without intermediaries, without spending a penny on local logistics. Bypassing laws and all national sovereignty, it collects data, sells it, classifies it and reaps profits. On the other hand, Covid-19, accompanied by the entire logic of submission to forced confinement, movement restriction and mandatory vaccination, has created the subjective conditions for uncritical submission to a governance model.
As if that were not enough, with Operation Ukraine, the last shred of sovereignty was swept away from the central countries of the “Rules-Based Order”: the armed forces. “Interoperability” returned and, with it, the standardization of the NATO standard, which is to say, the US standard, bought in the US, made under US license. Military strategy and tactics are now developed in Washington, where the European states are nothing more than outposts of the “Rules-Based Order”.
Information and intelligence; economy and finance; social and political organization; defense and security: these are the dimensions that were centralized and consolidated at each of the critical moments. Each of these four moments represented an evolutionary leap in the strength with which the United States dominates the Rules-Based Order.
To dominate the new century, the living space must be consolidated, coordinated from a recognized center, creating a bloc, in which the relations between them are defined for an organic whole. All this to prepare the confrontation between blocs. The economic and social results of this process of improvement, directed at Europe and designed to relegate it to secondary status, have determined a relative loss of power, felt by the populations and, unable to explain it, they channel this frustration to those who verbalize it like no one else: the extreme right. Faced with the impotence, postponed promises and contradiction between discourse and practice, coming from the neoliberal center, the solution lies in those who show themselves to be resolute and effective, even if brutal.
Let’s make a pertinent historical comparison to understand what we’re talking about. During the period when fascism emerged in the West (yes, in the US there was apartheid for blacks and fascism, even with supposed elections), wealth was distributed as follows: between the 20s and 40s, after the “First Red Terror in the US”, the richest 10% received between 43% and 49% of income each year, the richest 1% received between 19% and 22%, and the poorest 50% received between 14% and 15%. The World Inequality Report does not have aggregated data for Europe, but in France, the results were not very different from those we see in the US. Basically, the US represented the trend of the most advanced economies.
3.
The first conclusion to be drawn from this is obvious: the period of growth of fascism in the Western world coincided with a period of worsening inequalities, in the concentration of income, of enormous concentration of wealth and consequent worsening of living and working conditions. The system's response to this crisis and to the increase in the power of workers to demand, who organized themselves into powerful unions, coincided with the creation of fascism, corporatism (which defended social peace as opposed to dialectical struggle) and repression. We refer to the term “crisis” when we witness a worsening of the contradictions resulting from the disparity in income distribution between the richest and the poorest.
The defeat of Nazi-fascism changed everything! In the US, as early as 1945, the poorest 50% began to earn more income than the richest 1% (15,8% to 14,2%), while the richest 10% dropped to 35,3%. It is this difference, of almost 15% lost by the richest 10%, that explains the strengthening of the American middle class and the construction of the so-called American dream. Without this transfer, the US would hardly have become the superpower it was, nor would it have defeated the USSR. This also explains the emergence of McCarthyism (the “second Red Terror” from 1950 to 57), a fascist trend that “cleansed” trade unions and class organizations in the US.
Until the 70s, the situation of American workers continued to improve, and the data attest to this. In 1970, the wealth controlled by the poorest 50% reached its peak (21,1%) and that of the richest 10% (and the richest 1%) reached its lowest point (34% and 10,1% respectively). The data could not be clearer: the golden age of the United States coincided with the period in which the distribution of wealth produced was fairer; it was also the period with greater freedom, democracy, political engagement and better living conditions.
In France it was no different, once Nazi-fascism was defeated and, from 1945 onwards, the richest 10% reached their lowest point (31,4%), the richest 1% 8,5% and the poorest 50% fell from 14,6% in 1934 to 20,5% in 1945. It is a pity we do not have data from Germany, but if this does not speak for itself…
This relationship, in the US, for better or worse, continued until the end of the USSR and, in 1995, everything was reversed back to the period before the Second World War. The “Washington Consensus” of 1989, which decreed the globalization of neoliberalism according to the “Chicago school”, coincided with the year in which the richest 1% once again concentrated more than 14% of annual income, something that had not happened since the 50s.
From 1989 onwards, the following figures have been consistently observed: in 2022, the richest 10% of the population received 48,3% of the annual income, the richest 1% received 20,9% and the poorest 50% received only 10,4%. It should be noted that, since records began, the poorest 50% had never had such a low annual income. The lowest they had received in the US was 11% around 1850!
Returning to the German elections. We are currently living in a period in modern Western history in which the redistribution of produced wealth (if we talk about existing wealth, it is even worse) is at an all-time low. In Europe, the situation is not yet as serious as in the US, but these four critical accelerators that I have identified (War on Terror, Sovereign Crisis; Covid-4; Cold War 19) will necessarily produce the same effect of wealth concentration that is already degrading and destroying the European welfare state, built on the back of a redistribution that, for better or worse, still maintains some standards of justice.
Although there have been no major changes in the amount of wealth earned by the poorest 50%, in the main European countries with a record in World Inequality Report, it is from the so-called “middle class” that many of the complaints are heard. In countries such as Sweden, Spain, Portugal, France, Germany, the Netherlands and others, the tendency, although more tenuous than in the USA, at the end of the last century, is for the poorest 50% to lose ground to the richest 10%. In other words, economic relations are gradually developing that will produce a material reality typical of the period in which fascism was formed.
Hence, it is time to dispel one of the most important myths, or dogmas, that the official narrative propagates about fascism: the main characteristic of fascism is not repression, but rather the acceleration of the concentration of wealth and its distribution to an ever-smaller number of people. Fewer and fewer people have more economic power, with which they buy political power and make the political system, even those that call themselves “democratic,” work according to their terms. lobbying, campaign financing and Think thanks or even the academy itself, are some of the most used means to interfere and shape the recommended political solutions.
Instead of the process of wealth concentration, repression can occur in any system when it is in crisis or feels threatened. Except in cases of psychopathology, repression is an organic response justified by an external or internal attack. Only someone who is very detached or alienated from reality would believe that there is no repression in the US and, more recently, intensified in the European Union. All state systems have a repressive apparatus at their disposal and its use – of coercive means – depends on the level of threat. In a fascist state, repressive power is at the service of the wealthiest layers of the population.
The same is true of elections. It is not the existence of elections that determines the fascist or democratic nature of a system. What determines its democratic nature is the scope of its policies. Whether they encompass the interests of the majority or not. A choice between equals, as in the US, is not democracy, it is suffragism. In the end, it will be the military-industrial complex and Wall Street that rule.
Another characteristic of democracy is its ability to change economic policy when it does not serve the interests of the majority. Sterile elections with little participation in which minority parties govern, as is increasingly the case in Europe, cannot be explained by democracy. These minority parties govern because the economic base they serve allows them to do so, even in the minority. In short, it is possible to have fascism with elections. And you will never see a fascist admitting that he is one.
If the state the US already finds itself in explains the emergence of a Donald Trump, an impotent “response” to ending the armies of homeless people, junkies and people living in cars, roulottes or tents; in the European Union, this process is no different and, although it has come later, it is now taking place. In Europe, too, the system is responding to the crisis resulting from the deepening contradiction in the redistribution of wealth. The greater the contradiction, the more unjust the redistribution, the more the system will produce demagogic, reactionary agents who will charm the poorest masses by blaming the poorest themselves: emigrants, refugees and others, brought here precisely by those who accumulate the most wealth.
4.
It is therefore unacceptable that someone responsible and knowledgeable about social dynamics and in possession of reliable information should be surprised by the electoral bias towards the “extreme right”. It becomes even more serious when political representatives of the neoliberal center, which is situated between the wokism and ultraliberalism (parties wokists Eurosocialists and social democrats accuse Nicolás Maduro of committing fraud, but consider Javier Milei a clean player!), once again, as in the 20s and 30s, they appear to create the material conditions by succumbing to the dynamics of wealth concentration, whether through corruption, enchantment or fear of being destroyed (and they are right), providing, in turn and once again, the emergence of the fascist opportunity (whether it is the case of the AFD or not). The moment in which the super-rich use state repression to protect the process of wealth concentration.
Thus, no one can be surprised that the discontented, impoverished working masses, victims of plunder, much of it exercised from Washington, vote for the “far right”. After waves of historical revisionism comparing fascism to communism (and socialism) and the USSR to Nazi Germany, it was the neoliberal center itself that legitimized the far right. If we compare accepted parties, which have never promoted hatred and discrimination (such as the communist parties), with parties that make the doctrine of hatred and discrimination their banners, we end up normalizing the latter.
Furthermore, unlike voting for progressive parties (in an economic, Marxist sense), which reject and denounce the wokism While deviant to the right, the “far right” parties, on the contrary, do not pose any danger to the economic base that sustains the neoliberal center. No fascist regime has changed the process of wealth concentration; on the contrary, it has reinforced it. Even today, the “far right” advocates only the deepening of the existing economic model, which, as I have shown, led to its emergence.
And here we have seen that historical revisionism is not innocent. It aims to create an escape, an alternative to the neoliberal center, without the real power, the power of accumulated wealth in the economy, changing hands. In this way, the great concentrators gain time, deceiving the masses once again, trapping them in fascist repression.
When the fascist coup, the fascist deviation or the neoliberal extremist drift is overthrown, the masses are once again deceived by the neoliberal center, to the extent that they do not identify it as belonging to the same economic base that feeds the fascist state. And so they perpetuate their exploitation, circulating between more or less aggressive forms of the same remedy.
For now, the German elections only confirm this vicious cycle. And being trapped in this cycle, once again in a process of historical repetition, hides the greatest achievement of neoliberal, federalist, financialized globalism: the formatting of knowledge to such an extent that specialists, highly competent in their field, are incapable of looking beyond what they have been taught. In this sense, fascism is nothing more than a specialization, a deepening of the current stage of globalist neoliberalism.
Warmongering itself, whether in the US (which will not end with Donald Trump) or in the neoliberal center (for now), is also one of the consequences of the process of “economic fascism” in political life. It results from an increasingly aggressive tendency to appropriate wealth, even if it is through war.
When I hear highly competent economists (I am not being ironic) with well-known channels criticizing the West for succumbing, among other reasons, due to high wages, I realize that the neoliberal ideological legacy is indeed very heavy. None of these highly competent economists is capable of looking beyond the neoliberal scheme they were taught. They merely reproduce what they are taught, being mere instruments of the Western logic of accumulation and plunder.
The inability to dream and strive for what is now considered impossible is the heaviest legacy the United States has had to hand down to us over the last 100 years. The German elections, with their division between dreamers, proponents and proponents, demonstrate this latent tension. They show that there are those who dream, but the forces of fear, hatred and reaction are stronger than ever. Neoliberalism is their favorite food.
Neoliberalism: the antechamber of fascism! This is what lies behind the German elections.
*Hugo Dionísio is a lawyer, geopolitical analyst, researcher at the Studies Office of the General Confederation of Portuguese Workers (CGTP-IN).
Originally published in Strategic Culture Foundation.
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