By now perhaps you’re wondering why such a longer view isn’t included in many of the dominant theories about fascism. In fact, such a view might also strike you as a little too apologetic for these authoritarian impulses. To both of these points I can only answer by invoking the legacy of two anti-fascist thinkers from the middle of last century, Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin.
Georges Bataille was a French artist and writer who lived through the Nazi occupation of France. Walter Benjamin was a German Jewish historian and writer who fled through France into Spain, where he died (by suicide, or potentially by assassination). They were also friends, sharing a passion for mysticism and other heretical ideas that caused them both to be accused of fascism themselves.
Bataille’s primary work on the subject, The Psychological Structure of Fascism, is almost never quoted in discourse around fascism. This is unfortunate, but also unsurprising: besides being a difficult text, Bataille argues uncomfortably that fascism is a revolutionary force, one that seeks to establish order in times of political crisis in order to perpetuate the order. That is, for Bataille, fascism is a way of renewing a society, of keeping it going, uniting it and resurrecting it so it can progress into the future. From Bataille’s view, Trump’s slogan “Make American Great Again” is not so much about the real past as it about a utopian future. The rise of fascist movements now can also be seen not as attempts to return to a mythic past but to create unity to survive a tumultuous future.
Because of the way he rejected the myth of utopian socialist “progress,” Bataille’s ideas were labeled dangerous and even sympathetic to fascism by others. So, too, were the ideas of his friend Walter Benjamin, who had the unfortunate distinction of being one of the few men of that time wanted dead by both Stalinists and Nazis for his ideas.
For Benjamin, the rise of fascism was exactly the pull towards the future which I suggest we be fearful of. Highly critical of the way that industrialization had changed our conception of reality (for example, through the mechanical reproduction of art) and how it turned politics into aesthetic, Benjamin argued that “progress” was not some great destination towards which we must valiantly march, but a terrible destination over which we had no control. In his remarks about a painting in his possession (hidden from the Nazis on his behalf by Bataille), he wrote:
A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
And in a footnote in that same work, he outlines a theory of revolution as anti-future:
“Marx said that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps things are very different. It may be that revolutions are the act by which the human race traveling in the train applies the emergency brake.”
For both Benjamin and Bataille, then, fascism was not a reactionary impulse, nor an attempt by those losing power to regain it. Instead, fascism is the inevitable future of civilizations built upon capitalist exploitation of people and the earth, the final point of “progress” for industrial society. And though neither were nearly as aware of how dire the situation in the world is now, their words feel much more prophetic—and true—than the comforting yet false idea that fascism is merely reaction to social progress.
Their ideas point to an awful truth: it is no co-incidence that the authoritarian impulses of governments and people are exploding around us at the very same time that catastrophic climate change has begun manifesting itself. In fact, the racist, nationalist, and fascist movements that arise everywhere now are a response to the impending resource crises caused by that climate change.
Though this is not the future we were promised nor the progress we were hoping for, this was always the only future that was ever possible for our industrialized civilizations.
But this doesn’t mean this is the only future possible for humanity or the earth. There were other futures before, other futures still—but only for different kinds of societies, ones not dependent upon dwindling resources for their perpetual growth. It has always been possible to live without petroleum and coal, without deforestation and extinctions, without international finance capital and instant digital commerce, without immigration laws and border walls, without corporate and state surveillance and militarized police.
To get to such a future, though, we need to pull the emergency brake on this future first. Then we can do the work of remembering how to survive without all these things, the way humans have done for thousands and thousands of years. While the future of our current civilization is fascist, our past is full of other futures, other hopes, and other ways of being with each other. It’s to this past we must look, even as the wreckage of history piles up. We must resist the storm of false “progress,” awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed.
