“It will always remain one of the best jokes of democracy, that it gave its deadly enemies the means by which it was destroyed”: these are the words of Joseph Goebbels, the man in charge of propaganda in Nazi Germany. Nazis came to power democratically through elections and then subverted democracy. There is always a door open for fascism in a bourgeois “democracy”.
Many organic intellectuals and advocates of capitalism draw parallels between Darwin’s theory of evolution and capitalism
- Mass production.
- Struggle for existence: competition among producers.
- Survival of fittest (though this is not a term coined by Darwin): the most efficient producer will survive.
This comparison aims to create the notion that Capitalism is natural and the best way to organise society. Though the classical economists claim that capitalism is based on fair competition and free trade, it’s very clear that with every crisis, competition perishes as the system tends more towards mergers and monopoly. Monopoly eradicates competition by gaining market share. Once competition is eradicated, investments do not go towards production but towards speculation and buying public assets through privatization. Hence Marx pointed out that unless we change the “mode of production” which has the “means of production” as private property and produces for profit, we cannot overcome these crises. It is inevitable that if profit is under threat capitalism will use fascism to suppress any opposition without any hesitation. As capitalism decays, fascism raises its head.
A Capitalist state rules either by persuasion (liberal democracy) when there is no threat or by coercion (fascism) when there arises a revolutionary potential in the society. Fascism convinces the working class with its populism and ultra-nationalism and the middle class, who are scared to see any drastic social change, fall in line.
It doesn’t take a big effort to hear the footsteps of fascism marching across the world. It may have tempered down a bit after Trump’s defeat in the US, after Bolsanaro lost in Brazil and in the Philippines when Rodrigo Duterte lost power. But looking at the election victory of Geert Wilders in Netherlands, Georgia Meloni in Italy, Javier Milei in Argentina, and Modi’s chances of reelection in India in 2024: the signs are ominous.
In India the early signs of fascism were very clear when intellectuals like Gauri Lankesh were assasinated by fascist mobs after Modi became the Prime Minister, following a genocide of Muslims in the state of Gujarat. Recently the editor of Newsclick, the left online magazine, Prabir Purkayastha was arrested without any charges. There was the institutional murder of Father Stan Swamy in jail (who suffered from Parkinson’s and was even denied a straw to drink water), who was arrested for mobilizing oppressed tribal communities. Recently in the Indian parliament 143 members were suspended for asking questions to the government regarding security concerns: in the meantime three laws were passed in their absence, without any debate, in the so-called largest “democracy”. Every law the Modi government brings is a step towards fascism, based on hatred for the Other (Muslims), whether it is the Citizens Amendment Act, or Abrogation of Article 370 giving special status to Jammu and Kashmir, or denying education to Muslim women on the basis of hijab, or the secular state and government itself involved in the building of Hindu temple after the demolition of Babri Masjid.
In Ukraine, neo-Nazis like the Azov Battalion are on the rise, in whose hands the arms and resources provided by imperialist nations end up, and who have killed thousands of people in the Donbass region.
At the same time in Africa’s Sahel region, countries are outraged by the on-going neo-colonial drain of wealth, overthrowing dictatorships of imperialist stooges through uprisings. There we might see a repeat of history, which is replete with examples of pro-people governments toppled by conspiracies using fascist actors.
Netanyahu’s fascism is evident in Palestine where apartheid Israel is orchestrating a genocide to eliminate indigenous people and grab land and oil resources off the coast of Gaza and to build the Ben Gurion Canal, from the tip of northern Gaza south into the Gulf of Aqaba, to challenge Egypt’s Suez Canal. The post-9/11 “war on terror” has branded even the liberation movements as terrorism and given a free hand to fascist forces to suppress the struggle against colonialism. The right wing are fascists who have not got the power yet and spread hate and appeal to the baser instincts of humans to mobilize them. We recently saw these dark clouds covering the Dublin sky immersing people in hate and violence. Fascism can only be defeated by working class unity and the constant struggle to overcome hurdles that prevent that unity.
