Thinking about our society: Existential repression and the essence of fascism

Social power, in our late modern, state capitalist police society world, is often 'existential'. One way this can operate is to target people who seem to express some kind of rebellion against, or resistance to, the way things are, and to do this by targeting their person so completely that they are invalidated by being told:

1) Your rebellion is insanity; you are sick in the head. Something is wrong with you (what can it mean to say that of someone?), and this means that

2) what you think and feel cannot be true. Moreover,

3) If you persist in thinking it is, know that no one will believe you.

(To demonstrate this, we will try to put you in a situation where your (political) beliefs are invalidated, and you are relentlessly pressured by everyone around you to give in, say uncle, and admit that you can only blame yourself, as your rebellion is deviance, and deviance is sickness in the head.)

Our society is selectively fascist. The more extreme and obvious forms of institutional and social repression affect many people, but leave whole classes and groups relatively unaffected. True, their lives might be less interesting than some alternative, but there is little evidence of that, so it remains hypothetical, and most people who manage to be successful enough to have a house, job, education, family -- the things most people are persuaded and socialized to want -- never notice, or it does not occur to them to suppose, that anything is fundamentally wrong with the society they live in, in terms that would affect their own experience (rather than something more easily remediable like the poverty of some others). The forms of repression used are extreme in their violence and coercive and repressive qualities, but only prisoners, psychiatric patients, people harassed by the police, or those living in ghettoes, will be affected by it in any obvious way.

But if you are affected and it does bother you, there are massively powerful strategies and tactics of repression, and what they generally do is target not people's political or other convictions, but their person. Something is wrong with them as a person. They are criminal, or deviant, or just sick. Masses of people, tens of millions, must be sick, in this logic, because they are excluded from the society's benefits, or because they don't like it, and that cannot be tolerated.

Such 'existential' oppression can be called fascist. Indeed, the forms of social repression in use in America today are not fundamentally different from how they were in places like fascist Italy, the Soviet Union, etc. Nazism is of course an extreme, vastly worse in some ways, disturbingly not so different in others. But even if one resists the seeming hysteria of drawing that connection too tightly for credibility or seeming good sense, the similarity to fascist and totalitarian societies of the not too distant past is striking enough.

The claim is partly that fascism is a form of capitalism that is highly repressive, especially reliant on police, prisons, and related things, including perhaps social control in other areas. It would be a society that is highly intolerant of social deviance. It would be a society that is centered on labor in capitalist employment (or the 'socialist' variant of it, which is not so different), at the expense of whatever else a person might do with their life. Education would be for the sake of this employment. The society would be organized to benefit those with capital, power, and wealth. The classes of people in professional jobs would have particular power over others. People who do not succeed highly in gaining property and wealth, capital and power, would be targeted for pitiless and punitive exclusions.

A different society would be not just one with full employment and a more equitable distribution of wealth. It might be a society no longer focused as ours is on labor and profit. It might be one that has cultural riches that are enjoyed by and available to broad masses of people, with an educational system that is oriented to notions of the good life and an active participatory citizenship or involvement in the public and institutional life of the society.

We don't have this second kind of society; we do have the first. Some people think the key difference of fascism is the abolition of 'democratic' institutions and constitutional and civil liberties. These are important, but less determining than some liberal elites believe with regard to the character of everyday life. The essence of fascism is a focus on capitalist institutions proper and values that correspond to them. It is highly coercive and punitive in the interests of maintaining that system, and its relatively authoritarian character has to do with using military and other police powers to do so, with exclusions, coerciveness, and punishments for large numbers of people who forms of living are marginal with respect to that system. Fascism is a capitalist police state. Those societies that have been thought worthy of the name are not so different from ours. In many ways, the essence is the same. Fascism means the use of policing to manage the exclusion of large numbers of people from a system that is centered around economics and thus wealth and power. People who might naturally form part of the opposition are targeted as individuals and treated as criminals or otherwise excludable. I call this 'existential' repression. Its primary means are discourses and practice around the ideas of crime and mental illness. (That means that liberal attempts to replace the former with the latter can provide no alternative.).