José Ernesto Guerrero
Photo: Bill Hackwell
We will only be able to successfully confront capitalism, its colonizing desires and the neo-fascism that beats in its entrails from a common class front, from a fully emancipated consciousness.
At the end of June and beginning of July the XXVI edition of the Sao Paulo Forum will be held in Brasilia, a space that brings together political parties and leftist forces of diverse origins, but all focused on thinking and articulating strategies to face the great challenges of the contemporary world. The aim of the following notes is to reflect on fascism and neocolonialism as central issues in the debate of all progressive forces.
Capitalism is in a new phase of crisis, the product of several tendencies contained within it and of the consequences generated by its mode of production and consumption. Also, in addition to the financial, political, military and social crisis, there is the ecological crisis, with its unforeseeable consequences for the stability of life on the planet.
In this context of systemic crisis, we see how the liberal discourse and common sense are being permeated with increasingly ultraconservative and fascist positions. And how fascism goes from being a latent tendency within contemporary capitalism to become organized and gaining strength and political gravitation in many societies, even coming to power in countries of the hard core of today’s capitalism.
This emergence of fascism is the result, on the one hand, of the crisis and the deterioration of the standard of living of the working middle class. The social pacts that had maintained the economic status of this class after World War II were violently erased by neoliberalism since the 1980s.
The large amounts of social assistance, free quality public services and income protection policies gave way to successive waves of privatization and the disappearance of all these supports for their standard of living. The cataclysm was global and dismantled the precarious order that capitalism had sustained, not without contradictions, since 1945.
The fall of the Soviet Union convinced millions of militants, at least for a short time, that Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal mantra: “There is no alternative”, was absolutely true. Many of these ex-militants not only broke with their militancy, but have been a willing part of the campaigns to demonize any revolutionary anti-systemic alternative.
So the current neo-fascism is nourished by the deterioration of the quality of life of the workers and the middle classes (where its main cadres and ideologues come from), by the crisis of the fall of the USSR and the delegitimization of the radical revolutionary alternatives and by the crisis of the world capitalist system itself. And to the extent that these crises deepen we will see how fascism, which is nothing other than the most reactionary entrails of capitalism, will continue to gain strength and structure and to add new sectors of the nation within which it develops, appealing to the chauvinist and pseudo-social discourse.
In a simultaneous process, we see how contemporary capitalism deploys its powerful tools of symbolic production in an effort to accompany its financial tentacles with the domination of consciences. Specialized texts already speak of 4th generation warfare to refer to that which understands the consciousness and the universe of representations of the subjects as a space to wage the battle for domination and, to this end, an amazing repertoire of means is deployed as a result of the joint work of diverse knowledges, all placed in function with the same objective: to produce a person who, at the same time that his intellectual capacities are diminished and lethargic, is a faithful reproducer of the dominant logic and, even more important, a self-sacrificing servant of capital.
We will be able to successfully confront capitalism, its colonizing desires and the neo-fascism that pulsates in its entrails from a common class front, from a fully emancipated consciousness.
It is in this scenario that we must reflect in order to fight our battle. Therefore, without wishing to exhaust the subject, we dare to point out some scenarios where we can and must give battle against these logics:
1.The battle for “common sense”.
In his Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci points out the need for revolutionary forces, in the process of building their hegemony, to impose themselves, also, as common sense.
Common sense is socially constructed and in it are sediment, in the form of the most elementary logic, of practically pre ideological appearance, an infinite number of formulas and elements that reproduce the logics and meanings of the prevailing class and system of production. This is what happens with the right to private property or with other even cruder myths, such as that of the poor seen exclusively as a lazy person who has not wanted to work hard enough to get out of his situation. Dynamiting this common sense has been the first task of the revolutionary forces in all epochs. That was the task that fell to the Enlightenment, in the stage that preceded the Great French Revolution and which has a very illustrative example in the Dictionary on which Diderot and D’Alembert worked.
In the battle for common sense, neo-fascism, like its historical counterpart, appeals to populism, pseudo-science and lies. Our bet must be on truth and ethics, even if it is sometimes a longer and more tortuous path. In this battle we have on our side the weapons of criticism (as a prelude to the criticism of weapons) and we must use them systematically to deconstruct its logic and show the flaws and dangers it masks.
2. Digital social networks as a scenario of symbolic dispute
Digital social networks are tools that emerged in capitalist modernity and that respond to its logics and needs. As Marcuse pointed out in The One-Dimensional Man, the technologically advanced societies of contemporary capitalism produce the technology they need and that which responds to their interests. Technology is not neutral; on the contrary, it is a tool that complements and perfects the domination of contemporary capitalism. This not only gives it a character and meaning, but also gives it a clear ideological bias.
We see then in digital social networks how, with the consent of the algorithm and the owners of the algorithm, the most conservative discourses and the most extreme right-wing positions are gaining more and more space. By its own configuration, the algorithm is very useful when it comes to isolate in bubbles the left-wing and counter-systemic positions, but it is not at all effective when it comes to isolate the ultra-right-wing ones. It is no coincidence then that groups, pages and profiles proliferate where this discourse is produced and reproduced with relative ease.
And as the colonizing and neo-fascist discourse rests on the passive consent of the prevailing order and its allegation consists, in essence, of ideological truths that pretend to be disguised as common sense, it is no coincidence that they find easy and rapid dissemination both in the form of memes and videos on YouTube and other platforms and a long etcetera.
Confronting them requires understanding the nature of these digital social networks, so that we use them to fight the symbolic battle with full awareness of our starting disadvantage. Understanding them not as the central space, but as a complementary space. Digital social networks should serve us to create real social networks, where activism and cyber activism combine.
We gain nothing by being a mass of passive workers who in the evenings vent all their frustration on digital profiles, often under false names. Our battle has to be in communities, in interpersonal interaction, a central element. Digital social networks are tools of contemporary capitalism to isolate us, to enclose us in bubbles of self-reaffirmation and to permeate us with liberal ideology. To wage the symbolic battle in these networks implies not losing sight of these elements and understanding that militancy must extend beyond them.
3. The battle for culture
The consolidation of any political, economic and social order always passes through the consolidation of a new culture. Culture is both the space of symbolic resistance of the peoples and the fundamental stage of the hegemonic dispute.
Contemporary capitalism, with its powerful cultural industries, has been trying for decades, with greater or lesser success, to impose a hegemonic cultural form (North American) to the detriment of all others. To the point that even the countries of the central core of capitalism see their own cultures threatened. This hegemony of North American culture is parallel to the hegemony of North American capitalism.
Thus, to the traditional confrontation between “the cultured” and “the popular”, in which every more or less developed national culture is debated, is added the confrontation between the dominant culture and the dominated cultures and, at another level, we can also speak of the battle between the hegemonic culture of the status quo and the battle of the truly counter-hegemonic cultural forms.
The counter-hegemonic culture has the power to corrode the established order and it does so both through biting mockery and through the starkest and most expressive denunciation. In that sense, both Brecth’s The Avoidable Ascension of Arturo Ui and Picasso’s Guernica have done so much damage to fascism, to its symbolic legitimization. The tenacious (and sometimes shocking, though always heroic) resistance of Cuba and the diverse forms of popular self-organization with which the peoples resist barbarism have done as much damage to the domination of capitalism. All cultural production, be it artistic or organizational, of ideas or practices, which oppose capital must be supported, studied and promoted.
4. The battle for History
With complete accuracy, Néstor Kohan points out in his book Marx in his (third) world that the Materialist Conception of History turns this, history, into a weapon at the service of revolution. Against the idealist and romantic conception of history, Marxists raise the understanding of history as a systematic plundering of one class by another, of some peoples by others. In angry reaction against the Hegelian thesis that the Spirit was incarnated in each epoch in specific peoples, which sustained the eighteenth-century and nineteenth-century conception of colonialism as a civilizing enterprise, they raise the brutal understanding of how each mode of production was built and sustained, up to capitalism which, to use Marx’s graphic expression, comes into the world dripping blood from all its pores.
Marxism sustains before history what Walter Benjamin would later put in one of his Theses on the philosophy of history: every document of civilization is at the same time a document of barbarism. We cannot accept the history of the victors nor that other history that tends to normalize, to convert into natural, into eternal, that which are nothing more than transitory modes of production.
5. The battle for revolutionary consciousness
The proletarians are still today the subjects of revolutionary change. The proletarian is not the industrial worker, as seemed to be identified in a stage of stereotypical type of work. The proletarian is anyone who does not own any means of production and has nothing to sell but his physical or intellectual labor power. In this sense the proletariat is the great mass of contemporary societies, in which the process of concentration of capital deprives more and more people of their means of life.
To strip this growing proletarian mass of its class and revolutionary consciousness, contemporary capitalism has applied the old Latin maxim: divide and rule. That is why an infinite number of theories and militancy have flourished that place an exclusive and often exclusive emphasis on gender identity, sex, skin color, etc. They reduce us to a partial determination and thereby rob us of the collective point of view of totality, which, as Lukács argued, is fundamental for the emergence of full class consciousness.
In this battle against fragmented identities, critical thinking is fundamental. Disputing meanings and narratives, in an era where narratives are as or more important than truth itself. To understand that we can only successfully confront capitalism, its colonizing desires and the neo-fascism that beats in its entrails from a common class front, from a fully emancipated consciousness. And it is not to ignore the partial identities of the subject, it is not to reduce it to them. It is to understand that the common cause is not my happiness, but the happiness of all. It is the unity where the different, the plural is contained.
Either we give birth to this class consciousness among the oppressed or we will be brutally overwhelmed by the tanks of colonialism and fascism.
José Ernesto Guerrero is the Co ordinator of the Network in Defense of Humanity – Cuba
Source: Network in Defense of Humanity– Cuba
Translation by Resumen Latinoamericano – English
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