The formulation of a 2024 fascism

Reflections on the fascist theories of Thierry Maulnier, as refuted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Executions at Badajoz Bull Ring by Martí Bas, 1937

When a conversation about politics goes long enough, odds are that fascism will come up. Joe Biden is fascist. Donald Trump is even more fascist. Justin Trudeau is a sleepy fascist while Pierre Poilievre is an intentional and committed fascist. Jagmeet Singh flirts with fascism. It always ends with fascism or, at the very least, the conversation touches on things that are fascistic.

I could find examples to argue everything that I’ve just written. Maybe Biden isn’t doing fascism directly but he’s certainly funding and supporting fascism in Gaza. Maybe white North Americans don’t live under fascism but Black north Americans have for centuries. It’s kind of similar to the conversation about white supremacy: if all of Canada’s institutions uphold white supremacy (and they do), are they all white supremacist? Am I a racist if I say racist things or am I only saying racist things? If the state is white supremacist, what should we call a Nazi skin-head? Are these things the same thing?

These are all tricks of language, mundane remnants of the reality of our era, one where so many of our debates happen in text, online and in public fora. To debate fascism’s shades of grey (or the greys of anything, really) is difficult when we are manipulated into to picking a clear side and argue, through which monetised platforms build the tallest silos. But it’s in the greys, along the margins and in the fuzz of the debate that we can gain our greatest insights into any issue. And fascism, more than probably most other issues, is one where it’s worth it to get into the weeds of what the ideology really is, and how it operates. Because surely, the fascism of a Donald Trump is different than the fascism of a Justin Trudeau, isn’t it?

Well, let’s see. Maybe it isn’t.

In an essay called Concerning Marxism, written in August 1945, Maurice Merleau-Ponty chooses fascism as his focal point to illustrate what he believed to be characteristic of Marxism. He drew on the philosophical writing of Thierry Maulnier, a fascist theorist who believed that the biggest problem of European society in the 1940s was the polar forces that together, formed the basis of society: “the proletarian forces hading towards a classless society by means of economic and social revolution, and the forces which tended to preserve the nation, the form of Western European civilisation.” Merleau-Ponty explains that Maulnier’s interest in the political theory of fascism is it’s power to bring together these competing forces to eventually bring about a kind of workers’ revolution.

I think there’s a lot to be retained in this explanation of fascism, or the utility of fascism, as we consider social disintegration today. Fascism seeks to supplant the class question with a different question that creates different answers and possibilities for moving forward. In a society where the economic conditions are in decline and where the working class very well may be moved towards revolution as a way to improve their economic and social location, fascism provides an attractive antidote for people in power who would likely become the the targets of this revolution. Harness the working class by depressing any revolutionary thoughts or actions and instead give them a national identity to fight to save, that is rooted in an existential struggle for self preservation.

But it isn’t everyone’s self preservation. There still needs to be an enemy, and so it’s necessary to conceptualise a version of The Nation that is broad enough to capture a majority of people (majority here meaning majority-feeling — an active though sizeable minority may be enough to create the illusion of majority) and through appealing to the working class on nationalistic terms, the possibility of revolution is rendered unnecessary, even dangerous to the interests of the working class.

Maulnier believed that classic myths on which fascism were built were not enough to sustain a fascist movement: He describes: “The recourse to Action, Race, Blood, the predestined Leader, the superior mission of one people — all the spurious instruments of modern nationalism are nothing but the substitutes of faltering intelligence, man’s appeal to shadow in order to regain control of a world in which knowledge is powerless to guide him.” Maulnier was a fascist because he thought that this was the best political forward, if these elements of fascism could be transcended. A fascism that didn’t include racism, war or oppression was possible. His ideal fascism could transcend the class question by resolving it within the national question and without needing to rely on the primitive notions of Blood and Soil.

This is, I think, where we can see Maulnier’s theories start to make sense in 2024, and it’s where our modern politicians fit into a fascist framework. Through giving corporations near-total supremacy over democracy and keeping people pacified and scared through increasing the resources of the state security apparatus, fascistic tools of control become normalised without an explicit and outward program of national, racist violence. Racist violence of course continues to exist, and when you combine these tendencies with colonisation, we arrive with a different kind of racist, violent oppression than one that might be associated with a 1940s-era fascism (which, in practice, was inspired by North American colonial violence). Its violence as a meme remixed several times.

It is also through this lens that we can better see that the working class is the classic engine of the far right, including elements of fascist thinking that we would also apply to left wing ideology. It isn’t surprising that Trump appeals to the working class; it’s classically expected. Indeed, National Socialism didn’t come out of thin air. Within a fascist regroupment, there are competing tendencies that when isolated, can objectively look like they seek to advance left wing politics. This is incoherent with what fascism sets out to do as concentrated, strong leadership that is enforced by both street-based violence and state-controlled violence will always stop anything that has a whiff of left-wing revolutionary movements, but the presence of an ostensibly left wing politic is enough for liberals, who look at these extremes and sneer at the notion that politics should involve the working class at all, to pull out a horseshoe and tell the world that their bent piece of metal is the true political spectrum.

Merleau-Ponty rejects what Maulnier tried to do with this theory of fascism. He argues that it’s impossible to place the problem of the working class at the same level as the problem of the struggle to create a national identity that can surpass class segmentation because the working class can only choose revolution if it chooses it entirely — there are no half measures when it comes to revolution and the working class forms the conception of nation in its behaviours, choices, daily activities and everything else it does. By overthrowing the bounds of a national structure in and of itself, the working class has the chance to re-create a structure that places decision making into workers’ hands, with none of the vestiges of the capitalist state there to derail the revolutionary project, and the nation remains in control of the working class. That’s the theory, anyway.

But to go back to the principal problem: if the goal of the ruling class is to render working class revolution impossible and unthinkable, this theory of fascism, a political theory that tries to solve class within the confines of the state, is certainly an attractive possibility. Especially if you remove violence and racial oppression from the mix. On the balance of Maulnier’s two poles, North America’s political class, regardless of the party, all seek to calm social segmentation through appealing to The Nation: maintain national myths and identities, give people crumbs and make it such that no one is crazy enough to seriously and openly organise for revolution. As American hegemony continues to decline, this appeal will become less and less tenuous (and more and more grotesque) as the nation will provide its people less and less of what the people need. Class segmentation will solidify and people will move down the class ladder and the nationalist paintbrush will need to be even larger to broadly cover even more discontent and dissatisfaction than we have seen in the previous three decades. Merleau-Ponty may have thought that Maulnier’s theory of a workable fascism was unworkable but politicians in 2024 are operating within the same logic advanced by Maulnier eighty years ago.

And so we can easily conclude that fascistic appeals to nationalism and nationhood as a way to solve the problem of class segmentation do fit into a broad range of political strategies that fascists can claim as their own. It isn’t simply using nationalism to build a national consciousness, something that has been part of nation-building in Canada or the US since either ever existed; it’s building a nationalism that can be used as a hammer to break through any radical working class movements.

There are a few things that are critical to keep in mind: state racism and violence has always existed in North America and liberalism has absorbed them into how it operates in both countries too. In the United States, neoliberalism was necessarily imposed through violence (especially what we might call economic violence); it must be made clear that state-sanctioned violence, from systemic violence to acute expressions of violence, are part and parcel of liberalism and any eventual mainstream and functional fascism in Canada. It means that North American liberalism is already primed for a hard fascist turn.

It is also important to retain that these things exist on a spectrum, that the approach of one party versus the approach of another are still operating on through the same vehicle that is careening towards a state that seeks to exert more power over its people. That working class problem didn’t suddenly vanish when people lost the language of Marxism; when Marxist language was swept out by the language of Neoliberalism. We passed from one era to another; from an era that was defined by Marxism (to borrow a comment from Sartre) to an era that is defined by neoliberalism and despite the fact that the working class has been reconceptualized as clients and customers and The Middle Class, they remain the working class. Language and economic revolution have not solved the class problem either.

And maybe it’s there that the marriage between fascism and neoliberalism is the most potent. Neoliberalism is a global phenomenon that transcends borders in a way that Marxists could only dream of being able to do after we complete the work of international workers’ revolution. The global dominance of neoliberalism has been successful at erasing social class from the consciousness of the working class and it transcended class divisions by reformulating them. Impressively, it did this outside of the confines of The Nation. As a result, we’ve lost the language necessary to even talk about the working class in any revolutionary way. Instead, we speak in symbols. Things are either working class (like cars) or they aren’t (like urban design). You are either part of the 99% or you aren’t. You can either lose your job and keep your apartment or you lose your job and will be out on the street. The working class has been collapsed into amalgams that do not facilitate consciousness raising around class segmentation and identity.

The violence necessary to enforce neoliberalism and the wholesale control of the economy given to capital has produced a new beast that was barely contemplated by fascism — capitalism doesn’t need to be state-managed or controlled to be able to keep the masses in line. Capital can supplant government and nationalism can be replaced by an all-encompassing corporology - the idea that we, the people or the working class or whatever, exist only in relation to capital. Of course, Marx said this in the context of the nation state, and that by throwing off the confines of the nation state, we could build toward proletarian revolution. Except the revolution that happened did the opposite: corporations threw off the confines of the state (or, more accurately, they bent the confines of the state to their will). There is no working class under these conditions at all. There are just atomised, isolated little working units. Is fascism then, winning?

When Pierre Poilievre or even Donald Trump appeal to working class people, they aren’t stealing the language of the left; they are drinking from the well of a historic fascism that understood the need to transcend working class consciousness. That’s why Trump’s or Poilievre’s working class is anyone that they can convince to identify with it. It’s not based in income or job, it’s wholly divorced from a Marxist working class conception. Throw in the right amount of nationalist sentimentality, a strongman persona (even one that is impossible to buy, in the case of a Poilievre) and voilà, you have a potent 2024 fascism that can be used as a vehicle to impose a new form of fascist politic on an unwitting population.

But it isn’t just the Trumps and Poilievres of the world. No. Liberals (and the NDP) operate in a far more classic (or traditional) logic of fascism. They aren’t fascists — they’re liberals. Where conservatives have abandoned pretty much any hallmark of conservative thought or theory while keeping the moniker, liberals hold true to an ideal that walks a path that will eventually end up with fascism but isn’t yet there. They still believe that this tension between the nation and the working class can be managed by state reforms, while they give every permission to capital that the conservatives would give. This contradiction is not tenable and as we see the liberal order in an unmistakable decline, the only question is which way, Liberals? Right or left? Most people can guess which way they will go by their fidelity to neoliberalism, their obsession with funding police and the growth of our military, but it is a less developed path than where conservatives find themselves.

In all of this, there is little hope that any of these parties will save the people or eliminate class simply by turning class into the same thing with a different name, making working class revolution more urgent and necessary than ever. But, after 80 years of a liberal order, overlayered by 40 years of neoliberalism, working class institutions are in shambles and unshambling them is our biggest task.