“Fascism is not a historical accident, but the logical continuation of liberal capitalism at the stage of monopoly.”
- Max Horkheimer
There is something almost offensively inconvenient about Horkheimer’s sentence.
It refuses the comforting story.
Fascism is not a monster that crawls out of the forest while respectable society watches helplessly from the window.
It does not require civilisation to suddenly disappear.
It can emerge from within existing institutions, existing hierarchies, existing economic relations.
That is the point.
When capital concentrates, inequality deepens and economic crises become structural rather than exceptional, the question becomes increasingly unpleasant: what happens when democracy starts getting in the way of concentrated power?
One possible answer is reform.
Another is repression.
And fascism is, among other things, a particularly vicious political answer to that contradiction.
It preserves hierarchy by redirecting popular anger away from the structures producing insecurity and towards convenient human targets.
The unemployed become lazy. The migrant becomes dangerous. The queer person becomes corrupting. The dissident becomes subversive.
The system remains innocent.
The victim becomes the problem.
And this is why I find the contemporary habit of treating fascism as something belonging exclusively to history so profoundly dangerous.
Fascism rarely introduces itself as:
Hello. I am fascism.
It tends to arrive as an administrative measure.
A moral panic.
A security policy.
A campaign against “degeneracy.”
A little restriction here.
A little dehumanisation there.
A political movement discovers that cruelty polls well, and suddenly cruelty acquires a press office.
Horkheimer was not offering a prophecy.
He was offering a warning about structure.
And structures do not care whether we find them aesthetically unpleasant.
They simply keep producing consequences.
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