“The former fascists have given in to the democratic game and handed over their flags and swastikas to some crazy people. And why not? That is the way of the men of power. Gossip comes and goes, political realism is eternal.” Alfredo M. Bonanno
To the extent that the state reduces social services, it must arm itself in its function as a social police force, for example by aligning labor policy with the increased use of repressive methods (restrictive administration of unemployment and poverty by the Federal Employment Agency and Hartz4). Austerity and authoritarianism go hand in hand. Or, to put it another way, the market and a strong state are mutually exclusive in neoliberal doctrine, but not in practice. But we have to note also, that there is no causality between austerity and fascism.
State poverty policies yer appear to strengthen the influence of neo-fascist parties and encourage the influx of impoverished sections of the population in particular. The fact that such movements do not move towards left-wing parties depends on political and cultural moods, power relations and the constitution of politicized social masses. The last few months have once again confirmed this in Germany. With its new budget plans, the coalition government intends to cut up to one billion citizens’ benefits. In future, anyone who refuses a job offer will no longer receive any money for two months. The citizens’ income bonus, which was only introduced in the summer, will also be scrapped. Job seekers were to receive an additional 75 euros per month if they qualified for the job market by completing language courses or further training. The austerity policy is therefore broad-based, sanctioning both desired and undesired behavior. It also means that new punitive measures are being used to force workers into the low-wage sector and discipline them there. At the same time, prices in certain sectors such as catering are being driven up by tax increases. We can assume, as examples in other countries show, that the new right-wing parties such as the AfD would pursue a very similar austerity policy here in order to eliminate the stigmatized “social parasite”.
The situation is no different when it comes to migration policy. The AfD largely dominates the field here by succeeding in replacing the social antagonism between rich and poor with the propaganda of “Germans versus foreigners” in the public eye, and all the major centrist parties have more or less aligned their policies with the AfD’s interjections. A Sea-Watch spokesperson puts it clearly: “Unlike the AfD, the German government doesn’t need a secret meeting to discuss the mass disenfranchisement of people, it simply proposes it as law.” The new Repatriation Improvement Act tightens deportation measures and further restricts the rights of people seeking protection. In future, humanitarian aid could be punished with up to 10 years in prison. New legal opinions fear that sea rescue organizations could also be prosecuted for rescuing minors. The major centrist parties have long been expanding the state deportation apparatus, building Europe’s largest deportation prison and effectively abolishing the right to asylum at European level. No wonder that a xenophobic population prefers to vote for the original, namely the new right.
But when the major parties then mobilize on the streets and have the audacity to play or simulate antifa for a few demonstrations, it shows that no highly concentrated vulgar shabbiness is too good for this country. The demonstrations currently taking place can be qualified as a large-scale white-washing of German racism, a kind of dissolution of negativity into euphoria, with a constant transfusion of old sentiments. Under the surgical compulsion to amputate things of their negative traits, one can then return to the practice of cultivating racism after every demonstration. Wolfgang Pohrt had already stated in the 1990s: “Although the locals can’t do anything, not even their own language, so well that a foreigner couldn’t catch up with and surpass them in two years; although they are actually cultureless barbarians, measured against an emphatic concept of culture, they consider themselves to belong to a high culture that differs from the primitive one of the immigrant Romanian gypsies, and in doing so invoke their ability to press the right lever in the toilet.” With their tireless warnings about the AfD, the enlightened wing of the Germans shows above all that they are determined to carry on as before, to stick together in their little country and close both eyes to the world outside, except to imagine it as a cheap vacation paradise and a dumping ground for their own goods, and in social amnesia, to take every institution to which one submits as a matter of course and, above all, to see everything that disturbs, even the AFD, as an occasion for mental indigestion, which could possibly lead to a further increase in depression in two years’ time and a sharp rise in admissions to closed institutions. Attributing racism solely to the AFD masks the racism of the majority. It is considered common knowledge that in order to control refugees, they must be integrated or, alternatively, turned into potential criminals, into racist, despised subjects. For the refugee, integration means mimicking the German. This was and is the misunderstood idea of German education: to educate a monkey.
When, after the financial crisis of 2008, the management of the financial collapse, which consisted in part of transferring the debts of private banks to the taxpayers, was accepted, it was clear that the transnational war machine would have to set in motion a new wave of internal and external colonization in order to absorb the debt through austerity policies on the one hand, and to find an enemy to blame for the misery on the other. Racist policies, especially institutionalized racism, were part of this colonization and represented the subjective aspect of the exit from the crisis. After the 2008 crisis, racism and nationalism were thus elevated to the level of a state strategy. The national preferences staged in the process cannot become part of the smooth functioning of the state’s social welfare without constantly constructing, spreading and mobilizing fear of migrants, refugees and Muslims, and also putting this fear entirely at the service of controlling the mobility of populations that have to migrate from the South of the globe to the North in order to survive. The contrast between, on the one hand, the complete freedom of goods, money and capital flows and, on the other hand, the lack of mobility of large parts of the world’s population must be pacified by specific forms of regulation, which are materialized by the state apparatuses and ideologically fuelled by populist neo-fascist movements.
Corona has then clearly shown that the entire internal national space can be quarantined if only the appropriate reasons are at hand. The cross-border flow of goods, services and capital continues to take precedence over the mobility of people, whereby highly qualified foreign workers from the South should certainly be integrated into the economies of the metropolises, but only the owners and managers of big capital as well as the political and cultural elites are guaranteed free movement around the globe. A large part of humanity today is simply stuck in more or less camp-like conditions and dwellings. (Of course, even the camp is first and foremost a protection for the refugee, but his treatment is not based on the help that is necessary for him, but is oriented towards him as an incident. If the Bild newspaper and AFD believe that refugees are above all criminals, rapists, drug dealers or terrorists and large sections of the population join in with this, then this is only true to the extent that criminality can also be found in every domestic population, whereby the criminals here are often enough excluded from wealth and have to spend their lives in the virtual Hartz4 camp or as part of the precariat and therefore come up with the not entirely absurd idea of becoming descriminals). The clearly fixed borderline has long since given way to an unstable and flexible border area, whereby the division into countries of refuge, transit and camp states, countries of origin or safe third countries does not represent a violation of the sovereignty of these states, but is intended to develop instruments to regulate refugee routes on a global level, such as the EU’s relocation of borders deep into Africa.
Today’s state fascization is by no means taking place through a primitive conspiracy between fascist movements and the state, which itself is riddled with gangs, but is primarily a structural and sequential transformation of the political system and its apparatuses driven by the state itself. The fascization of the state is therefore not characterized by brown uniforms in the streets and the takeover of ministries by right-wing groups, but by a tendency that is prepared, driven forward and executed in the ministries and apparatuses themselves. The tendency towards fascization, in turn, does not concern the state organs alone, but all those forms of the deep state to which the new expert regimes, managers and non-state organizations belong, a network that contradicts the old national forms of fascism, a multiverse of strategies and tactics that not only belong to state power and its fields, but include vectors that serve the control and modulation of labor power, the modeling of individuals and the enforcement of life forms, and not least the semiotic control systems, as Guattari says, education, sport, media, marketing and all kinds of wellness techniques, from psychiatry to solar centers, which are to be mentioned here as pillars.
The new neo-fascist movements subordinate the capitalist economy to the logic of civil war (without, however, touching the economy in its rules of the game), especially when, as today, it no longer seems possible for parts of the middle classes to follow various neoliberal postulates that demand the enrichment of the self, the self-responsible entrepreneur and cultural singularity. In its boom phase, the neoliberal project propagated individualism without the individual as well as competition and fed the resentment (of the middle classes) in the face of the threat of decline, thereby promoting identitarian policies, the nationalization of work and paranoia. The post-fascist movements have adopted this conglomerate of governance practices in order to configure a set of dispositifs that intensify civil war. The biopolitical concept of these post-fascisms consists in the direct implantation of race war in class conflicts (and this can go hand in hand with new forms of colonization, as the case of Greece shows, where all possible apparatuses of the war machines of capital have been mobilized to colonize all social relations). The important operations of identitarian and neo-fascist politics, which operate in the real milieu of war with and against populations, focus as enemies above all on the deeply colonized and molecularized sections of the population such as foreigners, migrants, refugees and Muslims.
Paranoia is the mass psychological fuel of neo-fascist movements and finds its suitable object in vulnerable foreigners. Fear turns into passion, and with every call for more fences, this passion reaches a higher level of libidinous paranoia, which, remarkably, solidifies in new infrastructural and architectural forms. This paranoia remains presupposed by the state form of government of the insecurity of security, which requires the global entente between states and the organization of a global police force that ensures that more and more people are marked as virtual terrorists. It is therefore necessary to understand how the new forms of social policing and militarization cannot be separated from the discursive construction of a new figure of the enemy, a monstrosity that culminates in the general virtualization of an unspecific and unqualified enemy, actualized through accelerated procedures of qualification and continuous requalification, at the cost of a growing criminalization of all those social practices that do not conform to the institutions of capital and the state. Paranoia flows continuously through symbolic and imaginary monuments, through sluices and into channeling systems that are constantly flooded with the desires of a thoroughly possessive individualism. It is therefore not surprising that the paranoia is permanently enriched with identitarian delusions, fake news and delirium to finally reach such a highly explosive state, a tipping point, so to speak, at which the politics of emotions demands genocide for the sake of its own happiness, to be carried out on the stranger, the poor and the invader, on the global surplus population. The accompanying transformation of political affairs into religious conflicts, fake news and wars of civilization has, incidentally, been pursued by all the apparatuses of neoliberal power from the very beginning. The resistant subjects in this context, who are now politically sui generis, as they are quasi integrated into the global world market as a homogeneous group and thus express the truth of today’s economic and political world situation, are the migrants and refugees who risk their lives while fleeing. The Schmittian construction of migration policies must be stopped at all costs: For him, nomadism is always only a temporary phenomenon of migration, so that it must inevitably become the source of a new territorial order between imperialisms or states; it finds its historical destiny in becoming part of these formations, and if certain conditions are denied by it, then acts of violence quickly occur that destroy it.
translated by deepl.