Critical Ethnic And Community Studies

Andrés Fabián Henao Castro,
Assistant Professor Department of Political Science and TCCS faculty, UMass Boston

Editor’s note: This blogpost is a “Special feature” from Andres Fabian Henao Castro due to their exceptional level of analysis and critique.

The 2016 election of Donald Trump to the Presidency of the US marks a decisive rise of US fascism.

Fascism is a process in which the intensification of imperialist hetero-patriarchal white nationalist ideology accompanies a deepening of the connections between the state and capital in the formation of the corporative state.

This process leads, logically, to the destruction of the public space, the attack on democratic forms of collective power, and the widening of inequality across all vectors of difference.

In this post, however, I would like to highlight the significance of Iyko Day’s concept of “romantic anticapitalism,” for an understanding of US Neoliberal Fascism.

Day defines romantic anticapitalism as “the misperception of the appearance of capitalist relations for their essence, a misperception that stems from Marx’s notion of the fetish.” Fetishism is Marx’ way of naming the ways in which capitalism conceals the real source of value—that is, the socially necessary labor-time that goes into the production of the commodity. Through the fetishization of the commodity, capitalism misperceives the appearance for the essence, that is, it makes it look as if it was the commodity that had value on its own. Thus, when Day claims that romantic anticapitalism stems from Marx’ notion of the fetish she means two things.

On the one hand, that this misperception means to conceive of the opposition between the concrete (use-value) and the abstract (exchange-value) in the form of antinomical realms of society. On the other hand, that the antinomy between these two realms of society translates into a “[glorification of] the concrete dimension while casting as evil the abstract domination of capitalism.”

Day, it is worth stressing, was interested in understanding the settler colonial history by which Asians would end up personifying the misperceived evilness of capitalism in contemporary North-America.

Thus, she distinguished between two settler colonial logics that historically organized these different social positionalities in an structural antinomy: an ongoing logic of elimination—structuring the land-based relationship of expropriation between the settler and the native—and an ongoing logic of exclusion—structuring the labor-based relationship of expropriation between the settler and the alien.

“Alien” is Day’s way of naming a coerced form of migratory labor that, although not native to the territory, can never occupy the position of the settler, as it remains forever excluded from the social order.

The position of the “alien” was originally occupied by enslaved Africans during the British/French/Spanish/Portuguese colonization of native territories, renamed as the Americas after the violent Conquest. This position of the “alien” Day also attributes to Asians who, unlike enslaved black people, were not spatially alienated, as their ancestors were not systematically enslaved and then transported through the Atlantic as commodities to be sold in the market.

This means that Asians constitute a “disposable” form of alien labor. They can be deported, or refused entry, meaning that their dominant forms of social exclusion take place at the border, or outside of the national territory, unlike the domestic forms of social control to which black people are subjected.

And yet, what interests Day most is the more sophisticated form that such logic of exclusion takes under multicultural neoliberalism. The neoliberal exclusion of that alien labor force operates no longer through the openly racist form of the “yellow peril” (materialized in the US internment camps of the 40s), but through the more politically neutralized form of assimilation since the 70s, in the otherwise valorized form of the “model minority.” The neoliberal valorization of this exclusion links Asians to the evil of abstraction as a form of “efficient labor.” And it is this pervasive valorization that facilitates Day’s qualification of the status of Asians in North America as the “new Jews.” The parallel goes as follows:

Just like Jews were made to racially personify the abstract domination of capitalism in Nazi Germany, as a result of their historical segregation into financial sectors of the economy, the neoliberal association of Asians with temporally efficient labor made them eligible to the same personification of evil in contemporary North-America.

The racialization of the misperceived capitalist antinomy between the abstract and the concrete, by which people of color are made to personify the evil of abstraction, and white nationalists the authentic embodiments of the concrete—Jews and Germans respectively during the classic form of fascism—has become, however, more racially diverse. What I would add to Day’s claim is that US Fascism has, in short, taken advantage of the multicultural turn of neoliberalism. On the one hand, the anti-blackness that targets black people with domestic exclusion via systems that reproduce their conditions of social death, inclusive of the prison-industrial complex, police brutality, and the new segregation regime articulated around the criminalization of blackness, no longer targets black people exclusively—even if they continue to be the primary targets of white supremacy.

On the other hand, disposable forms of alien labor have also diversified. After all, the inclusive exclusion of Asians through the assimilation of “efficient labor” does not eliminate the exclusive inclusion of “cheap labor,” which finds its racialized substitute in the figure of the Mexican—or the Central and South-American more broadly.

Undocumented migrants, and “undesirable” ones, are targeted with harsher immigration policies outside of the US and more repressive forms of surveillance. These include but are not reducible to, unequal labor agreements, the construction of walls, the militarization of the borders, as well as the creation of a parallel prison-industrial complex misnamed as detention centers without the legal protections afforded to prisoners.

Muslims personify a more complex and affectively stronger form of evil, which is altogether misperceived as outside of capitalism. Muslims have become the systematic target of war, the primary targets of the remaining, if territorial displaced camps—as in the case of Guantánamo—and the subjects of travel bans. US fascism feeds off a broader racist spectrum that in the multicultural style of neoliberalism, diversifies the differences out of which it fuels the romantic glorification of the concrete in the form of white nationalism.

The consequence of this racial diversification is a more fluid and interchangeable implementation of both logics of elimination and exclusion indistinctively and iteratively against multiplied forms of racialized and gendered labor. But more importantly, these logics are today directly part of the circuit of capital accumulation.

The now global military industrial complex, which includes a plethora of repressive apparatuses of the state, the para-state, and the corporation, functions as an extractive machine seeking to convert human and non-human energy into value-in-motion.

The ideological multiplication of the racialized and gendered threat through which the white-nationalist subject is romanticized as the “real” victim not only obscures capitalism as the real source of inequality and environmental destruction, but replaces it with a fictitious social welfare state seeking to unjustly regulate it in order to favor the allegedly underserved. The intensification of this violence marks a significant change with regards to the classic form of fascism. Old fascism still conceived of the state as a relatively autonomous space for corporative capital to manage the common affairs of the elite through the mega-media construction of a unified racial threat. Neoliberal fascism no longer needs the illusion of the relative autonomy of the state, or the unity of the racial threat.

This is evident in the appointments of Marvin Odum, former President of Shell Oil Co., as the “Chief Recovery Officer” after the ecological devastation of Houston; the appointment of Scott Pruitt, who does not believe in environmental protection and denies climate change, as the Administrator of the EPA; the appointment of anti-public education Betsy DeVos as the Secretary of Education; the appointment of Ajit Pai, a former Verizon lawyer and current advocate for the destruction of net neutrality as the Secretary of the Federal Communications Commission; and the appointment of the ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson as Secretary of the State, to mention only a few.

These appointments are logically accompanied by legislation seeking not only to destroy whatever “public goods” remain, but to make the very possibility of reviving their public character impossible in the future. US neoliberal fascism goes beyond the traditional commodification of the state, which gives to corporations an indirect yet de facto power to legislate via their unrestricted power to finance candidates, political parties, and lobbies.

The commodification of the state now operates through the literal subsumption of public institutions into the corporative mega-machine and the global logic of capitalist accumulation.

Within this neoliberal scenario capitalism is no longer the structural cause of ecological devastation, gross socio-economic inequality, and the erosion of democratic power, but the solution to a misperceived problem that personifies the evils of capitalism through a diversified racist ideology that makes non-whites into the differential evil abusers of a fictitious welfare state that turns deserving whites into the undeserving victims of that abuse.