jones You're assuming fascism would return as a historic reenactment of what it was before when it's just a political technology that adapts to whatever realities you have on the ground. People don't need to dying of hunger to turn to the far right, housing precarity, massive levels of private debt and medical bills are sufficient for that.
That's the opposite of what I'm doing. I've detailed the ways in which the "realities you have on the ground" in the United States are different from those that led to the form of fascism seen in interwar Germany and Italy. And for that matter from the conditions of repressive regimes in the Middle East and Africa that have been discussed here.
And because the conditions are different, what emerges has been and will be different.
My concrete prediction in this thread has been that there will not be any enduring "Trump coup", the details are in my previous post.
I don't think the other assumptions about capital or labour need to be true today either for a country to fully embrace fascism.
I'm not going to argue the terms, because we can either call the political tendencies emergent in de-industrialising western nation-states a new and different form of our image of historical fascism, or we can create a new term. My personal term for these tendencies has been "pseudofascism" (etymologically, "fake" or "false" fascism, because for political reasons it aimes to assume some of the appearance of historical fascism, while not sharing all of its character).
My take is roughly that the de-industrialised west has already undergone an unevenly distributed transformation to a new authoritarianism of which "pseudofascism" is the appearance of the ostensibly right-wing pole, but that this transformation has occured in ways that aren't decisively delineated by national enclosures.
The reason for the importance of national enclosures to historical fascism was the possibility of an ethnonationally organised and expressed law and culture being configured together with capital and labour, with capital expressed as a decisive bloc of the productive forces, and labour as an ethnonationalist supermajority of the population forming a somewhat enduring alliance with this bloc.
It should be noted that the fascist regimes did not last well at all for the most part, but instead accelerated rapidly to catastrophe. The new authoritarianism has already been with us for decades, developing since the 1970s or 1980s or so depending on how you chart it.
The law and culture of interwar Germany or Italy could incrementally reinforce a class-collaborative structure in which a large chunk of the bourgeoisie, and a supermajority of the population sought advantage from the exclusion of minority capitals and the social death and economic exclusion, or at the limit, the genocide of minority populations.
This possibility I've mentioned to a great extent isn't there in the de-industrialising west. In the de-industrialising west, the productive forces relied upon for socioeconomic reproduction are now distributed around the world after the process we call "globalisation" came underway. The workforces necessary to socioeconomic reproduction are (variably) diverse and mobile, often with a long tail of temporary workers with precarious visa status.
As it turns out, the nostalgic nationalist political vector of Brexit can't convert the UK into an ethnostate because the UK can't support itself based on internal production and there's no ethnos with a coherent supermajority of the population. So Brexit happens, and the result is that the origin states of Britain's abjected migrant and temporary workforce change, while nett migration fluctuates but remains broadly similar, and the hardline white constituency that self-identifies as "the ordinary people" (the Southport rioters, let's say) continues to fulminate in the total thwarting of its aspirational fantasies.
This is why I call the contemporary tendency in these nations "pseudofascism". The widespread psychological investment in its largely unattainable political objectives among the publics of de-industrialising western nation-states relies on nostalgia for the possibility of fascism, but also nostalgia for the muscular left-nationalist welfarism of les trentes glorieuses or the New Deal, and also nostalgia for "national social covenants" between capital and labour of the type that saw post-Federation Australian referred to as a "white workingman's paradise" in the early 20C. While there's a right-populist pole of this political expression, there's also a left-populist pole and I expect we'll see more of the latter in the medium term.
The question to ask given these conditions: why did these nation-states formerly have these national social covenants? The answer is that in the interwar period in the industrial west, organised labour was a powerful political force, so the bourgeoisie had to form alliances with it. It isn't a powerful force now, so these alliances are of far lesser importance.
There is no real need for national blocs of the bourgeoisie to conclude these sorts of covenants. Capital already rules: as you put it "capital has outgrown and overlapped labour so many times in recent years there's no need for it to be afraid of labour".
Elite economic domination has been a fact of political life in the United States for decades. Capitalists can obtain greater advantage and profit by being able to move their capital across borders, and remain out of any sort of ruling class solidarity formed in relation to an ethnonationalist working class, than they can by tying themselves down to national mass-political formations: as certain United States capitalists would do if they, for instance, financially supported the training and arming of large numbers of irregulars in support of a Trump coup or Trump-initiated civil war.
While attention-seeking dilettantes such as Musk and Zuckerberg seem to love nothing more than flirting with the Great Man theory of history by pretending they might do these sorts of things, there's no urgency to execute such projects, and unless they really do go hard on their cocaine and ketamine, I can't see them overruling their consiglieri and doing something like trying to saw off Texas as the headquarters of a breakaway Kkkristo-fascist wingnut gun-nut GPU-fabricating good-ole-boy republic.
To the extent that political valencies do determine access to increased rates of return on investment for the bourgeoisie, this has to do with management of sovereign risks, and kleptocratic access to state contracts, as we do see with the likes of Palantir or Musk. Silicon Valley billionaires can and will become the patrons of different political currents based solely on advantage, or even based on their personal whims. We've already seen them shift their alliances a few times, and it will happen again, but these features of today's United States don't reflect any determinate trajectory towards a nationally configured old-school fascism.
So yeah, "pseudofascism" is already here and in the United States. The trend will continue and deepen under any future Democrat administration that comes after Trump. I predict we'll see plenty more of the spectacle of both its right-populist and left-populist poles as the decline of United States hegemony continues.
Meanwhile, the technical form of the new authoritarianism is cybernetic (in the sense of parameterised feedback-based control) suppression and surveillance. Its factors are carried up through technology and violent law enforcement, through a sophisticated and flexible repertoire of neoliberal policy, through to laws which are the parametric containers of its programmatic enforcement of power. It serenely permits you individual freedoms and pleasures if you remain docile, and it serenely and efficiently reallocates its cost-optimised resources of violence to solely those segments of the population that need to be crushed at any given point. Its sociopathic system does not care if you live or die unless your labour may be needed, or your misery might serve as an example to others marginally less miserable, or it needs you to allocate a portion of your meagre wage to the consumption that sustains some circuit of profit.
From a certain point of view, the raison d'être of these new authoritarian state formations remains the same as the old: to broker to the otherwise barbaric contention of the bourgeoisie for profits an (increasingly fragile) illusion of society as a free and neutral association of owners of private property through markets. As before, this illusion is enforced by way of the state's monopoly on violence, and through its law and policy that focuses, by way of formally neutral but concretely prejudicial framing, on the preservation of concentrated and unequal private interests.
From another point of view, because in the wake of globalisation these new nation-state formations have far less determinate need of nationally organised working classes than they ever have before—as evidenced in general by the historical and geographical trajectories of globalisation and de-industrialisation—it seems to me they may incrementally and unevenly reveal themselves to be more open to killing workers or letting them die than the state has been in these nation-states at other points of history. But that in turn will depend on how much damaging organised unrest and resistance to the developing state of affairs manifests itself: evidently if it's more costly to kill us than let us live, we will be allowed to live on.
However, the only way the western masses will be restored to greater political power will be through developing a renewed mass-political solidarity around new methods for the organised disruption of production and profit, or the organised destruction of fixed capital, or the organised boycott of consumption. Profit-making is the only process (other than their individual lives) that is indispensable to the bourgeoisie.
