[One of us contributed the text below – in an only slightly different version – at the Anti-Fascist Church, an artistic initiative by Jonas Staal and Jeanne van Heeswijk on October 11 in the Paradijskerk in Rotterdam. We thank all of the organizers, participants and those present for the opportunity to share these thoughts.]
In one of his letters to his brother John, George Jackson – Black revolutionary, political prisoner, militant philosopher – reminds us: “Pure fascism […] is not possible. Hierarchy has had six thousand years of trial. It will never succeed for long in any form.”1
Fascism does not itself represent an order, or even a definite form of government. It is and must be entirely parasitic and predatory. It exists because it feeds on a host. That host has a name: the economy. It is the economy that lets fascism in, invites it to the table and nourishes its appetite. Fascism grows larger and larger by feeding on what the economy prepares, yet it is never satisfied. The economy is the preparation for fascism. To think economically, to believe that you have economic interests, is to prepare for fascism, to begin to want it, to identify with the empty pit in your stomach and believe that you have a right to fill it. And therefore, somebody somewhere along the chains of value must make themselves available to you, must be sacrificed for your access to the future.
So, as long as we are governed economically and stage politics as the expression of economic interests, including those of a supposedly forgotten white working class, we are bringing fascism to the table. And however we cut it, the question will be who can be sacrificed. And let’s not pretend that we don’t know who we are offering up to be devoured:
the Palestinians continue to be slaughtered and the economy continues to exist;
the Indigenous continue to be eliminated and the economy continues to exist;
the Muslims continue to be murdered and the economy continues to exist;
the queer continue to be suffocated and the economy continues to exist;
the Congolese continue to be burned and the economy continues to exist;
the migrants continue to drown and the economy continues to exist;
the poor continue to starve and the economy continues to exist.
The economy is exactly what it appears to be, what both Du Bois2, Walter Benjamin3 and Mobb Deep4 said it is: hell on earth.
And the rich and powerful sense, correctly, that they will be next, that there is no reason why their lives will not be accounted as superfluous, as waste waiting to be burned and buried. Because what we, Westerners have invented and call the economy only means one thing: make money or die. It is this economic principle that fascism proposes to collapse in on itself: if rock bottom, in material reality, there is nothing but social Darwinism, nothing but predation, nothing but the expenditure of energy, then why pretend to be an enlightened citizen, why not enjoy the violence while it lasts? And yet, a pure fascism is not possible. Actually existing fascism must project, beyond wholesale murder, some image of life: the Family, the Nation, and the Aristocracy of Whiteness. In other words, even fascism cannot escape the horizon of the economy, because even fascism must promise its followers the rewards of sexual access, national security and planetary supremacy after the dirty work of total violence has ended. There is still, in fascism, the quintessential economic idea that we can deserve what we want, that as long as we can suffer the cost, we should receive the reward.
Never does fascism actually threaten the economy. It merely pulls the economy to its logical, demonic conclusion: it whispers “we can always just get rid of them.” Liberal democracy was, from the beginning, a way of dealing with this option, and what we call the welfare state was its most advanced form. No wonder that those who now call for the defense of the welfare state are also those who support the preparation for war.
We come to understand that there is no outrunning the economy, its horizon simply recedes and it waits until we are exhausted to pull us back to its table of negotiations, back to the chopping block. That is fascism’s fatal mistake. It promises an escape from the hell that is the economy, and fascists may even believe that they are the true socialists, but no brutality, no fascist program of genocide and military government is more violent, more ferocious, more insatiable than what the economy already performs on a daily basis. Every day that a billionaire lives is a day that millions die. Our task should not be to accelerate, to rush towards a future, but instead to dig our way out of this hell. The way out is right beneath our feet, below the many layers of capitalist logistics and the vertical borders of the nation-state. Our escape is everywhere, our escape is earth itself.
As the economy continues to prepare fascism’s meals, now explicitly in anticipation of an all-out ground war, we can make our own preparations. In fact, we can come to recognize that we have been making such preparations all along, underneath this hell that They have invented. This is what George Jackson called the autonomous infrastructure. He wrote:
“If it is our eventual goal to wear away the establishment’s ability to produce and distribute goods, to feed its war machine, or organize any sort of social activity; then, of course, we must, at the same time, provide ourselves with the means of performing these functions on at least a subsistence level.”5
Each moment and every situation in which we are able to figure out what we want, what our life in common could be, is us tunneling our way out of the economy. Every infrastructure that enables us to share instead of consume, to build instead of possess, to multiply instead of accumulate, brings us one step closer to the way out of this hell. This is what the liberals must deny themselves and what the fascists must fully acknowledge:
We are and continue to be the living announcement of a life without the economy. Antifa is real, we are everywhere!
Finally, we remember what the life and death of the Christ, and the life and death of George Jackson, demonstrated here on earth: there is life beneath the rubble, beneath the destruction of the economy. There is, for us, life after death, but only if we live for those who will come to replace us, only if we want our replacement, only if we refuse to calculate what others will cost us and, instead, build our cooperatives, our gardens, our hospitals, our habitats, our workshops, our schools, our baths, our libraries and our playgrounds, each as one small fragment of an infrastructure that will pulverize and recycle the evil snake that is the economy.
- Jackson, G. 1972. Blood in My Eye. Black Classic Press, p. 130. ↩︎
- The notion of hell recurs throughout the Du Boisian discourse. Most pertinent to the reference here are the following lines from an article reprinting a speech that Du Bois made at his 90th birthday party issuing advice to his newborn great-grandson: “The return from your work must be the satisfaction which that work brings you and the world’s need of that work. With this, life is heaven or as near heaven as you can get. Without this – with work that you despise, which bores you and which the world does not need – this life is hell. And believe me, many a $25,000-a-year executive is living in just such a hell today.” (Du Bois, 1958: 4). ↩︎
- Benjamin, W. 1982. Das Passagen-Werk. Gesammelte Schriften, Band V – I & II. Suhrkamp, p. 676. ↩︎
- Mobb Deep infamously titled their third album Hell on Earth. Of specific relevance is the chorus of Front Lines (Hell of Earth):
“Ayo, it’s Hell on Earth
Whose necks are gonna be first?
The projects is front line
And the enemy is one-time
I ain’t gotta tell you
It’s right in front of your eyes.”
The term ‘one-time’ is slang for ‘the police.’ ↩︎ - Jackson, G. 1972. Blood in My Eye. Black Classic Press, p. 69. ↩︎