SEASON ONE, MONTH TWO: SHALLOW WINTER, EMBERS OF FASCISM
Hello, hello. Welcome to the second month of DEEP SOCKS, a year-long, live serial exploration of the depths of what lies beneath political economy. If you’re joining now, we have recently completed the first month of season one, Managerial Society in Winter. In that section, we examined the stasis of the current managerial society, aiming to outline the freeze in thought and its consequences.
Over the next month, we will approach this icy stasis from a second angle, that of the integration of fascism into modern society. It certainly has not been rehabilitated, no! But instead, the functioning techne of it and its many variations have found their ways into our lives. Managerial society since the Great American Bankruptcy of the early 1970s has looked all over the world and all across the political spectrum to find techniques that can extend the dominion and reign of the managed corporation and improve the functioning of society.
Megafirms attempted, then discarded, the ideal of the corporation as a social agent. They’re in fact picking it back up again only recently. It is hard to say in the light of its success, but perhaps neoliberalism was not the only answer. Neoliberalism is the incorporation of monarchical and fascistic tendencies that are part and parcel of ownership and performance-based hierarchies. Neoliberalism’s specific techne that dug many firms out of the hole of the Great American Bankruptcy and the resulting stagflation and social sorrow came from Japan, Taiwan, and Germany, states that, for all their self-flagellation, never could fully exorcise their past demons.
Actually existing fascism
There are a number of existing pseudofascist states and cryptofascist states. They are typically excoriated in media for their illiberality and their hatred of freedom or diversity or some other such nonsense. They are also, coincidentally, often geostrategic rivals of America and its peripheries.
These are states like Russia, Brazil, Japan, India, China, Hungary, Poland, Ukraine, and North Korea that all have strong traits of fascism—though they may not be formally nor totally fascist, nor deploy all techniques of fascism in their political life. They may be nominally Marxist, in fact! They in fact may be formally antifascist, as is the case for Russia and China, but fascism is a virulent strain of politics, not so much a coherent ideology that may be repudiated eternally or by historic example. Like a virus, it integrates inside a host and does its work inside.
These are states that are avowedly nationalist, and in one way or another pitted against a present, US-centered managerialist society. Their opposition to managerial society and its norms is the general barometer of integration or non-integration into the US-centered managerworld. Political movements in the imperial core and periphery of America that set sights on fascist politics are, of course, excoriated and treated as fundamentally seditious, dangerous, borderline terroristic.
The first and second extinguishments
Fascism’s political history is commenced in the early-mid 20th century, and comes to an end as a viable and functioning system of government by the end of the 1970s, dying off in two great waves. The end of World War 2 demolished the most aggressive and powerful fascist forces, Germany, Italy, and Japan. Following this, many fascist states remained, and most fascist politicians and firms were successfully and happily reintegrated into economic, political, and intellectual life, with only a few being made to bear the national sin.
But more ‘pacific’ fascism endured, supported by the eternal friend of fascism (abroad), the Americans. South Korea, Portugal, Spain, Taiwan, Indonesia, Greece, Chile, and likely a few more we’re forgetting all fell under the control of fascist governments, and many compromises were made in the name of anticommunism.
These regimes though proved exceptionally infertile, and were unable to produce more than one generation of leadership who was willing to hold tight to these ideals of the mythic and unified nation, radical opposition to Marxism. By the 1980s, these regimes had all died and replaced themselves with varying stripes of liberal democracy, quite happily. Some, like Spain, returned to a sort of farcical monarchy, finding some family to stand in as royalty.
The rise of managerialism in former fascist states
Concurrent with the collapse of fascism, former fascist states Japan and Germany made exceptional strides in managerial power and technique that had profound implications for the world of the Third Industrial Revolution. Innovations like statistical quality control, Toyotism, and practices like managers learning the disciplines of all those underneath in their team created rapid economic gains and, for Japan, launched them to an unprecedented height as the world’s second largest economy.
These remarkable gains in power, influence, and wealth happened more or less simultaneously with the Great American Bankruptcy of the 1970s, forcing a debasement of the dollar and turning America into an irretrievable black hole for borrowing, its loans only being repaid in-kind via its military. In order to recover their lost place in the sun and to successfully integrate these new techniques of corporate control and discipline, Western firms began pioneering concepts that came to be known as neoliberalism.
This is the return of the owner in managerial society, with ownership rights being replaced by profit-participation. States that had strong elements of fascist political culture, especially the East Asian ones, were rapidly gaining in wealth and power—and for the sake revitalizing their fortunes increasingly bureaucratic and moribund American businesses sought a return to monarchical values under a strong CEO, a classical conception of business, and naked corporate struggle. Perhaps it is no coincidence that the chief lesson learned from the integration of formerly fascist states into the heights of the club of nations was the lesson that fascist power dynamics worked.
Why isn’t management just fascism by another name?
Fascist power dynamics, of course, take their queues from the monarchical, while integrating a very particular historiography and political technique. The monarchical system of authority and the fascistic system of authority have extreme and direct overlaps—the king-father commands, the subject-child obeys, and unity is maintained through obedience to a natural and proper chain of command.
Monarchy is a direct and intuitive power relation. Heredity establishes kingship, might, conquest, cunning combine in the figure of a near-mythical founder-king who establishes the kingdom. The glory of the accomplishment is an assertion of a fundamental right of power over others—after all, the king has made himself king. To question his authority is to invite yourself to experience his fearsome powers. In fascism, the leader assumes these roles, and outwardly champions a particular vision of society, and rather than establishing myth through power, seeks to establish power through myth. This inversion is often due to the fact that fascist political projects seek to succeed in electoral politics, and gain the assent of (at least a plurality of) a modern body politic.
There are many analogies for this to the modern firm. It is indeed a place where something like monarchical authority is most present and visible in society. Should the CEO turn his gaze to a problem, the labor of the firm must turn there as well. But this simple fact belies the reality that most modern firms, even with powerful and charismatic CEOs, are constitutional monarchies, and the CEO is often quite interchangeable in firms without powerful and charismatic CEOs. The CEO is limited, his capacities and reach only as good as those underneath. The fantasy of absolute governance, emanating from one man is necessarily limited. The CEO is the king of a company often in the way that the president is the king of the United States of America. It is in some senses a ceremonial role—the ministers largely run the show on their own, with vague priorities set by the nominal leader.
A difference in quality and kind
But besides the general diminution of kingly leadership by the vast size, scale, and complexity of firms, the modern firm is managerial in nature, not just in its technique. The differentiation between monarch/Fuhrer and CEO is quite apparent when you examine the ends and the means of the monarchy when compared to the managerial firm.
The Fascist Society necessarily seeks its enlargement, glorification, and eternal rejuvenation of the nation and its avatar, the sovereign-father. This in a sense is what firms wish for as well, only in the more explicitly formal triad of profit, prestige, and power. The fascist society applies power downward, to any node in the network of command and control necessary. It is bureaucratic and performance-oriented, of course, but unlike but it is also, most critically, is justified by its mythic past, not its future projection, nor its current process. All history is made mythical in a fascist society—it is the mirror that justifies and explains its political reality.
The Managerial Society also necessarily seeks its enlargement, but under specific and measurable rubrics. Kings do not have KPIs, and are, generally, unaccountable by formal and legal means. The nominal monarchs of today, presidents, prime ministers, premiers, and so on are judged continuously—bills passed, opinion polling, and so on. CEOs as well—did stonks go up? They are judged by this bare fact as much as the many mystifying elements underlying stonk price. It accomplishes this by a continuous iterative cycle of business practice—plan, execute, learn. It does this in a rational way, and the underlying assumption of this business practice is that the past is not justification for present behavior, but rather it is fundamentally flawed, and always in need of examination and improvement. History is always polemical in managerial society; it is an adversary that must be overcome in a landscape of competition.
Absorption, iteration, transformation
The fallen Fascist states of the 20th century’s political legacy is close to nonexistent. Where these societies left issue was in the world of business. The analogy to monarchy is popular for the CEO, but it is the modern firm’s fixation on technology, unity of purpose, the Founder, and competition that find analogy with fascism. Steve Jobs might not have been a fascist—but he was a Fuhrer nonetheless. This contradiction is possible because of the intercourse between liberal and fascist states, as well as the explicit political diminution of fascism. Its traits and heredity are concealed as neoliberalism, but what made neoliberalism possible was the infusion of fascistic/monarchical power relations, and their enduring in the nation-states that outcompeted America during its harrowing in the 1970s.
Fascism has been successfully molded and neutered into a potentially friendly and amenable force to the managerial state. But the process of molding and neutering has produced a cleavage between people who see the incredible potential of hierarchy and fascistic power relations. That is to say, there are now fascists (who do not acknowledge themselves as such) and Fascists (who certainly won’t shut the fuck up about it).
This small-f fascist’s mental world is possible because the techniques of domination and power are separated from the mythic past, and instead welded to a new history. The small-f fascism that lives undetected inside managerial society is feminized, bureaucratic, and merely a cousin to the big F Fascism. It repudiates its own past in order to build an endless cycle that unifies people under strong leadership seeking a common value of product and service improvement.
For Fascists, the past is critical to nation building, and as a national movement of unity and force, Fascism is mystical, patriarchal, and uses power to imagine a world that could have been, and must be redeemed. Fascist societies have strong futurist obsessions, but this obsession with progress and technology is in service to reviving and making real a myth—too good to be the past, too strange to be the present, too beautiful to be the future.
Petty tyranny is what we expect now
The end product of small f fascism is the petty tyrannies of daily life in the workplace and under the little grabby bits of government that we interface with day-to-day. Consuming fascism has left managerial society with a penchant for vindictive and petty tyranny, and it is today expected as a potential in us all, to unleash the desire for the power of unity, and unity of power—serving such a narrow and parochial vision as ‘shipping the update on time’ or ‘hitting the marketing campaign’s targets.’
The petty tyrannies of managerial society often have their lineage placed with monarchy. But monarchy is a method of group control that places the confidence of those without power into a sovereign, who is in a power conflict with the nobility. The monarch gains real power from his power as a symbolic figure. The lineage instead is most clearly with the fascist leader—this leader gains total power through acting on behalf of a symbol. The fascist leader eliminates opposition to this symbolic order, which he acts on behalf of.
The manager has no intermediate body between himself and the subject worker. Instead, the manager has through a process of competition and manipulation successfully eliminated other barriers between himself and the subject. The manager acts on behalf of the product and process. The manager is not invested with majesty, only with office and responsibility.
Dreaming of a hero
The manager who fucks off for orgies and tourneys is not merely a bad manager—they will not be a manager. The monarch, of course, can do this. The fascist leader, less so, though certainly many must have been given to all kinds of vice. This is all to say that between the values represented by Il Duce and King Louis XIV, the modern manager has the most in common with Il Duce—and this shows a lineage of the form.
But there are in fact outsider-type managers who represent the charisma of a king and the duties of the Leader. They tend to have larger-than-life charisma, or at least a PR team that can provide the simulacra thereof. Elon Musk comes to mind, but before him there was Steve Jobs. Jack Welch and Donald Trump existed in this rarefied space of the kingly manager, who successfully posed himself as a public figure between the consumer and the indifferent corporate nobility. There is a reason people yearn for Musk’s musky power instead of say, the anonymous and interchangeable CEO of Ford.
There is a reason why Kanye is running for president, and not Jay-Z, and it’s not just that Shawn doesn’t want the hassle of being president. It is because Ye has a yearning for majesty and power, the same as someone like Musk or Jobs or Trump, a yearning that is not satisfied by the petty tyrannies afforded to them in business. These people are celebrated by the Deep Right because they combine the grandeur of monarchy with the modern process of business.
In a sense, they promise a return to the promise of Fascism: life as myth under a great king, the potential for rationality, achievement and wealth of the present. A morally activated, spiritually alive nation.
The embers are still glowing
Managerialism has absorbed to a large extent all sides of the political spectrum from the 20th century. It has taken the ruins of the Marxist edifice and the glowing coals of the fascist fire that swallowed the earth in the 40s and somehow made a system not just of economics but of life that is borderline invisible and polymorphic. As a social paradigm it is in some ways nearly perfect, in that those who operate it are barely cognizant of the kinds and sorts of power they hold, nor of the ideas that govern that power. It has thoroughly outcompeted fascism and state socialism in improvement of the material qualities of life. But it is still obviously lacking.
Its polymorphism is for all its dynamism, imitative and uninspiring. Fascism inspired whole nations on courses of action that were as suicidal as they were murderous. Managerial society has inspired its subjects to get fat, have fewer kids, buy more shit, and focus on what’s really important: nothing. Sometimes, it might be nothing, hiding behind a narrative. But it’s never not nothing. A society with an invisible governing principle, whose failings are scapegoated onto its ancestors—this does not provide a spirit to its subjects.
Fascism’s many faults and failings obscure the fact that it is a perennially popular form of government among any group of people when they get the shitty end of the stick. Why should Hungary and Poland and Russia and Ukraine and India and Brazil all turn to something that walks and talks an awful lot like Fascism? They arrived to these answers, wrong as they may seem to us, because of the fact that the liberal-managerial society offered sterility and exploitation, the state socialist answer utopia after some indeterminate period of atrocity and Fascism-by-some-other-name offered vengeance and glory.
What generates fascism is still red hot
Some higher purpose in our spirits gets mistreated by managerial society.
Fascism typically succeeds in the wake of dismal liberal-managerial failure and an overbearing Marxist-socialist menace to everything that ever was. History still drives and impels us, and we seek glory and achievement, and we are still group beings, who see ourselves in our community and our Big Community, the race or nation.
To any keen observer, whether they name it as managerial society or not, what they see is a paradigm of depoliticized invisible tyranny. What hurts us most cannot be named, and seeing it is like seeing a sheer and unscalable cliff. What they see is a system that is objectively socially cancerous and has presided over the diminishment of the greatest empire in history to a shell game of control over payments processors and a few commodity markets. It is glacial in its pace and its consequences. This society strives for and achieves certain kinds of improvement, but seemingly fails to achieve greatness and often generates sickness and anxiety. It disavows the past, neither the future it wants nor the future it seems it will get are desirable.
This keeps the embers burning.