Zeynep Gambetti

It is my contention that neither the violence nor the struggles that we are experiencing at the dawn of the twenty-first century have found their concepts yet. The problems and contradictions inherent in them have not yet been adequately exposed, particularly because we keep trying to subsume these experiences under known schemes, using known epistemic paradigms. I seriously think that we have to come to terms with the limits of a conventional type of (Marxist or non-Marxist) praxis as well as theorising.

In this respect, I welcome but would also like to challenge Ugo Palheta’s precious attempt to rethink fascism in the light of contemporary conditions that are significantly different than those in the 1920s and 30s.1 It is precious because, in most accounts of fascism, what goes amiss is the pre-history of the new fascist moment, which cannot be acknowledged by ossifying fascism, that is, by taking the inter-war circumstances of the twentieth century as thesine qua non prelude to its emergence. Would we identify democracy only in those conditions that replicate the ancient Athenianpolis or insist that only the presence of an aristocracy would justify calling any discourse “conservative,” since conservatism is the product of a nineteenth-century counter-revolution by the aristocracy against otherwise uncontainable working-class demands? Hanging obstinately on to former instances of any -ism results in a failure to take into account the massive political, economic, cultural, technological and societal transformations undergone ever since they emerged. These transformations have modified all other ideological discourses and practices (we talk of neo-conservatism as well as of multiple permutations of modern democracy). So why should not fascism change? Palheta’s questions, as to whether fascisation will necessarily involve the formation of armed militias, or whether the forces standing against fascisation should not be enlarged to include not only the proletariat but also contemporary struggles against racism, sexism and precarity, are therefore pivotal in determining how fascism may and will evolve. In short, contrasting earlier cases of fascism with potential signs of a fascist revival today in order to debunk the latter risks leading us astray. We need to be much more attuned to the troubles inherent in ourown times.

I nevertheless note with surprise that Palheta does not fully pursue the implications of his claim that the abandonment by the ruling class of liberal democratic discourses precedes present-day fascisation. He too tends to distinguish between fascism and neoliberalism, failing to think through the fascistic nature of the neoliberal transformation. Although today’s fascistic trends do reflect a crisis in political hegemony (to use the Gramscian terms Palheta espouses), the crisis dates back to the 1970s, long before far-right movements started regaining traction. The neoliberal doctrine of monetarism was advanced during that period, mainly by Chicago School economists, to overcome both the OPEC oil crisis and the shrinking GDP share of the bourgeoisie in advanced capitalist countries having adopted Keynesian or other forms of welfarism.2 The bourgeoisie itself brought about the collapse of the social welfare state through the Washington Consensus, leaving liberal political discourses (rule of law, human rights, checks and balances) largely incongruent and impotent in justifying the great neoliberal transformation. It is then that neoconservatism (or the New Right) emerged as the most appropriate ideological project with which to stitch back the layers of social tissue torn to shreds by the neoliberal assault on rights, social security, public services and class cohesion. But, not before having donned fascist attire. We tend to forget all too easily that the neoliberal experiment was initiated in Chile with a bloody coup as early as 1973. Likewise, in Turkey, the military junta seized power in 1980 to implement neoliberal reforms while at the same time eradicating revolutionary unions, left-wing parties and all other opposition movements. Neoliberalism was fascist at the onset. The complicity between neoliberalism and neoconservatism in core countries momentarily postponed the fascist moment that was instantiated in its naked form in the periphery.3 Put bluntly, my thesis is that new fascisms should be inscribed within the lineage of neoliberalism. These are not two distinct phenomena, but two sides of the same coin.

As opposed to the idea that fascism must necessarily consist of a militarised solution to the crises of capitalism, Palheta’s endorsement of the term fascism (instead of authoritarianism or populism, the euphemistic alternatives) opens up much needed debate on what the F-word entails in our day and age. Euphemistic alternatives are usually preferred by scholars, since the erosion of the bourgeois principle of rule of law and the rise to predominance of the executive branch of government are rightly identified as belonging to a whole range of authoritarian practices that are not specifically fascist – dictatorships, monarchies, Bonapartist instances also excel in eliminating so-called checks and balances. But then, here is the problem: this same argument can be turned against the definition espoused by Palheta and many others. Does fascism consist in “a political project for the ‘regeneration’ of an imaginary community – generally the nation – involving a vast operation of purification, in other words, the destruction of everything that, from the fascist point of view, is seen as hindering its phantasmagorical homogeneity, impeding its chimerical unity, depriving it of its imaginary essence and dissolving its profound identity”? One objection among several others would be that the construction of imaginary communities goes as far back as the idea of nationhood and that the purification of phantasmagorical unities is not specific to fascism.

I contend that, as distinct from other forms of authoritarianism, the distinguishing feature of fascism must be sought in its ability to move masses toactively desire to undertake internal cleansing and external expansion, as Robert Paxton has suggested.4 Once we overlook this mobilising desire that fascism generates, we tend to confuse it with militaristic or dictatorial regimes of oppression. The problem of desire prompts us to ask questions that cannot be resolved by identifying particular ideological elements that supposedly make a movement or regime fascist. Among such questions, the following seem crucial to me: What kind of power does fascism wield? What kind of governmental strategy may effectively mobilise masses into desiring the eradication of legal and ethical restraints? And apart from its obvious historical manifestations, where else could we locate analogous forms of governing? Such inquiries are important, since conditions once referenced as fascism may have assumed new forms in today’s social configurations.

What I am getting at is that we need a new theory of fascism from the Left.5 We need to revisit previous insights into the connections between colonialism, capitalist imperialism and fascism, and deduce from them a number of techniques of government that would enable us to identify similar prospects within the biopolitics-security-neoliberalism nexus.6 If historical fascisms emerged from the permutation and crystallisation of societal transformations throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we must concede that new fascisms will entail the permutation and crystallisation of neoliberal modes of dehumanisation involvingnew technologies, not the exact same ones used in the twentieth century.

To begin with: the abandonment in the neoliberal era of the Taylorist model of production should urge us to inquire into potentials for violence inherent in practices such as outsourcing, flexibilisation, dislocation, and precaritisation. Taylorism coincided with the centralised state and allowed for centralised ideologies and struggles between classes. In the post-Fordist model of production actually preponderant under neoliberal conditions, struggles as well as forms of political and economic power are both dispersed and pervasive.

Palheta notes that the inability of the bourgeoisie to impose its political domination “proceeds, in particular, from a weakening of the links between representatives and represented, or more precisely, of the mediations between political power and citizens.” A powerful explanation resides in the observation that the neoliberal bourgeoisie dissolved traditional institutions and mass organizations, but failed to replace them with cohesive forms of adhesion. Fascism inserts itself into this “organic crisis” by calling the state, the nation and other phantasms of strength and unity back in. What is missing in this analysis, despite its brilliance, is the alternative explanation as to the results of decades of neoliberal transformation: instead of forcing the state to withdraw from the economic and social spheres, neoliberalism can be said to have successfully summoned hegemonic consent to expand the field of governmental interventions by public as well as private actors. The Washington Consensus was not solely imposed by force; it was also globalised through discursive mechanisms that whetted the appetite of not only the bourgeoisie, but also large portions of the middle classes and proletariat. All aspects of social life were henceforth made to bow to (mainly financial) market imperatives. The political instance no longer retains even a semblance of autonomy vis-à-vis the economic instance, nor do ideological state apparatuses (to borrow Althusser’s terms) enjoy relative autonomy. As Palheta also underlines, both repressive and ideological state apparatuses have undergone an endogenous transformation. Thatcher’s infamous slogan “there is no alternative” (TINA) ominously heralded the merger between state, civil society and the private sector. Whether on the left or on the right, political parties acquiesced to remaining within the parameters of neoliberal market economy, thereby effacing the differences between political ideologies.7

If political power and economic power have merged in complex ways in such a way that hegemony is cemented not so much from above, but from below and from all sorts of other directions, then do we have any reason to assume that “popular participation in fascist movements […] is for the most part ordered from above, in its objectives as well as in its forms” as Palheta claims? After all, what command does any societal instance (or state apparatus) have on, say, the derivatives market where not only debts are traded as though they were assets, but also where a whole chain of hedge funds make tracking of algorithmic transactions extremely difficult, if not impossible? Or what command do states have on metadata collected by private corporations that preside over the most effective means of consent formation in our day and age? Fascistic tendencies arise as much from below as they do through political parties and leaders, owing to the filter bubbles and anonymous chat sites enabled by the digital revolution. Theoretically speaking, the passage from formally institutionalised (and hence ramified, compartmentalised) societies to informal, dispersed and multiple flows of capital, information, labour and subjective investment, must urge us to rethink the possibility of centralised command over violence.

Likewise, the reason why working-class cohesion has waned cannot be solely imputed to the weakening of labour unions and left-wing parties. Neoliberalism has devised new techniques of internal and external expropriation that are deployed across the globe in more or less similar ways, despite contextual differences. We would have to accept that neoliberal financialisation is not a mere extractive practice or a parasitic form of capitalisation. On the contrary, financialisation is constitutive of neoliberal capitalist relations – and, as Kawashima remarks, today’s “fascism is fundamentally financial in nature.”8 The principal medium through which contemporary valorisation takes place is finance rather than the production process where labour is the measure of value. Debt is the stable continuum (future bind) in an unstable and discontinuous labour market. Debt is what conditions and disciplines the now and the here.

The expropriation and colonisation of the included takes the form of the precaritisation of salaried workers and, consequently, the colonisation of their life-worlds. Neoliberalism produces a peculiar type of morality that makes individuals abandon notions of equality and solidarity because they internalise the idea that “losers” are responsible for their own failure. In other words, risk and uncertainty allow neoliberalism to capture individualsfrom within. It produces radically individualist desires, moving individuals away from the notion of the commons, not towards it.9 Salaried employers have no other option than to become “shareholders,” that is, actors in the financial sector. This new form of subjectivation is not only subjective, it has a material basis and so it cannot be remedied without transforming that basis.

The expropriation of the excluded works through the colonisation of the life processes of marginalised portions of the population: non-salaried or informal workers, migrants, domestic workers, sweatshop workers, the majority of which are women, particularly in the global South.10 These categories are simultaneously the products and the victims of the neoliberal system. But they are also subject to a form of inclusion through debt. There are several incentives that facilitate obtaining credit cards, micro-credits, and bank loans for personal consumption or for housing, irrespective of whether one has a regular salary or not. Payment by instalments is also a very common form of inciting the marginalised to consumenow and paylater. More sinisterly, government subsidies and social assistance now target the marginalised in such a way as to integrate them, not through labour into the production sector, but through debt into the finance sector. In fact, I ask whether the inclusion of the marginalised is not the purest instance where capital radically colonises life itself. Primitive accumulation is at its crudest here: the very bodies and life-reproducing activities of the marginalised, especially in “developing” societies like Turkey and Argentina, become crucial relays of colonisation through finance.Contra Palheta, therefore, I argue that it is not the disaffection of workers that attracts them to reactionary movements. It is rather their material and subjective (re)investment into the system.

In short, the capitalist law of population does not solely consist in the creation of a reserve army of labourers. Constant displacement and replacement, disinvestment and reinvestment, inclusion and exclusion, “war of position” and “war of movement” (Palheta) are techniques of governance that are absolutely necessary for the neoliberal project to succeed. This project is the ground upon which the new fascisms of our century will emerge. The latter will appear to discursively pose as an alternative to neoliberalism, but will deploy the very technologies of government that the neoliberal order has devised in order to perpetuate it, as Kawashima convincingly argues. These technologies are not liberal, but specifically new. It must also be said thatcontra Traverso, I strongly believe, that theneoliberal anthropological model is in fact a project for society, proposing a new “civilisation” in which certain characteristics of historical fascisms will be drastically transformed.11

For instance, militarism in the twenty-first century does not have to be exercised through the national state; it can be outsourced or trans-nationalised. Instead of national armies, private military companies like Blackwater are enough to do the job. Irredentist wars need not take the form of territorial conquest, but of “operations” or “military sanctions,” as is the case in Turkey’s incursion into northern Syria. Are dramatic acts such as the March on Rome or a Reichstag fire even necessary in an era in which citing anti-terrorism laws or security concerns produces a mass desire for extraordinary measures and the willingness to assume vigilante functions? The so-called “war on terror” has proved to be an incredibly efficient dispositif for criminalizing non-compliant portions of the population and preventing popular scrutiny of governmental power. It simultaneously enables the brutal institution of markets in domestic and international sites left outside of the global economy. And do we really need masses to attend enormous militarised rallies in an era of social media campaigns, online lynching, and large armies of trolls and bots, some of which can be operated from overseas or through algorithms? Unlike the armies of the twentieth century, an army of trolls is invisible yet scandalously successful in provoking states of mass hysteria. Social media and artificial intelligence have become overwhelming powers that the Left will have to take into account when analysing political hegemonies.12

           Or take, for instance, securitisation. The concern for security is an indispensable component of market fundamentalism, which is predicated upon the production of disposable bodies. Racism today is biopolitical, working through the population principle that postulates a hierarchy in the right to existence. But indirect killing, murder by proxy, asphyxiation through refugee camps, walls and blockades, not to mention drone wars, are now among the arsenal of political leaders to do away with “lives unworthy of being lived.”13 The “dehumanisation of death” by the new capitalist laws of population is not legitimised by resorting to the language of eugenics and social Darwinism. Letting die is rather couched in moralising terms: those who are killed or left to die are “infrahuman” in that they are unable to compete or they pose an abstract threat that must be pre-empted. Securitisation produces the desire for fascism, not only at the state level, but also in the form of micro-fascisms.14 As micro-violences augment and reach unprecedented levels, the demand for militarization comes from below. Thus, focusing only at movements, parties, leaders, state actors will not do. What needs to be theorised is not only the fascisation of the state but also the fascisation of society.

            Securitarian neoliberal governmentality does not produce an “iron band” binding masses together, but is best captured by the metaphor of “network.” Terranova expresses this well: “As a mechanism of security the totalization that can be achieved through a network will […] be characterized by a kind of action that is immanent to that which it tries to regulate.”15The network centrifugally organises and allows for the development of ever-wider circuits. Unlike the “iron band,” the network points to a kind of “fascism from below.” Processes of fascisation might be “eminently contradictory and therefore highly unstable,” as Palheta notes, but they arefascisations all the same.

In short, normalisation today involves the coexistence of normality and destruction, identification with imagined communitiesand disaffiliation. Facing this dilemma, the most important task of the Left, in my view, is to ask what the alternatives are and who will become the collective subject that will embody these alternatives. To repeat Balibar’s question: who are the communists today and what vision of the future do they propose?16 Let us admit that satisfactory answers are yet to be produced.

Given this shortcoming, the best option is for the Left to find ways of collectivising existing struggles and cultivating a mode of political transversality by interlinking all the modes of value production as well as exploitation and extraction. It should, at least, engage in producing the desire for alternative economies and forms of belonging. Against neoliberalism’s capacity for abstraction, left theories must be as concrete as possible. They must (1) make clearly visible the structural causes behind the frustration felt by thousands who revolt across the globe today; and (2) make clearly visible how fascism, xenophobia, racism, white supremacy, and anti-gender reaction are illusory solutions to illusory problems. In this, I agree with Palheta when he writes: “We can see now how the challenge for antifascism is not simply to forge alliances with activists of other causes that leave each partner unchanged, but to redefine and enrich antifascism from the perspectives that emerge within the trade-union, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, feminist or ecological struggles, while nourishing the latter with antifascist perspectives.” I would like to add that these myriad struggles would have to urge us to rethink who or what the proletariat is (in addition to what fascism is) in our day and age.

Zeynep Gambetti is Associate Professor of Political Theory affiliated with Bogazici University, Istanbul. She is the co-editor of Rhetorics of Insecurity: Belonging and Violence in the Neoliberal Era (New York University Press, 2013), and ofThe Kurdish Issue in Turkey: A Spatial Perspective (London and New York: Routledge, 2015). Among her recent publications are Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (eds),Vulnerability in Resistance: Politics, Feminism, Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

Image: "Trump Maga Rally in Charlotte, North Carolina" byThe Epoch Times is licensed underCC BY-NC 2.0

• 1. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism
• 2. David Harvey, A Brief history of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
• 3. The neoconservatives in the US administration were formulating the strategy of the “New American Century” long before fascist movements took on noticeable proportions.
• 4. Robert Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004)
• 5. I do not have time to elaborate at length, but I want very quickly to note that in order to avoid the historicist definition, I use fascism to denote a form of power or a form of governing (not a regime). Fascism designates those socio-political formations that disrupt hitherto established references and transgress external limits while constantly fabricating internal boundaries by setting bodies up for liquidation.
• 6. Cf. my “Exploratory Notes on the Origins of New Fascisms,” Critical Times 3(1) (2020): 1-32.
• 7. Let us remember that it was Mitterand’s Socialist Party rule that broke the post-war social welfare agreement in France.
• 8. https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-reaction-to-capitalist-crisis-stage-imperialism
• 9. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015).
• 10. Cf. Veronica Gago, Neoliberalism From Below: Popular Pragmatics and Baroque Economies (Durhan and London: Duke University Press, 2017); Achille Mbembe, “The Society of Enmity,” Radical Philosophy 200 (Nov/Dec 2016); J.K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as we know it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996)
• 11. Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (London: Verso, 2019) and https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/universal-fascism-response-to-ugo-palheta
• 12. Cf. Christian Fuchs, “Information and communication technologies and society: a contribution to the critique of the political economy of internet”, European Journal of Communication 24(1) (2009): 69-87; Bernard Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2015).
• 13. One might object that there’s a renewed demand for boundaries that reinstate national sovereignty. But even the construction of thick borders (as in Gaza, the US-Mexican border, or the Turco-Syrian border) follows a model of threat, which is legitimized through highly equivocal notions of the “enemy.” The “enemy” today is not a concrete menace, but a potential one. Security is defined probabilistically: even when there are no imminent attacks to thwart, there are probable ones. And probability suffices as justification for chastisement.
• 14. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London: Continuum, 2004).
• 15. Tiziana Terranova, “Another Life: The Nature of Political Economy in Foucault’s Genealogy of Biopolitics,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (6) (2009), p. 243.
• 16. Etienne Balibar, “Communism as Commitment, Imagination, and Politics” in Slavoj Zizek (ed.), The Idea of Communism 2: The New York Conference (London: Verso, 2013).

Reconsidering the Sexual Politics of Fascism

Robyn Marasco

1.

Two women were killed in the riots on the US Capitol but only one of them, Ashli Babbitt, has become a martyr for the movement. The other woman, Roseanne Boyland, was trampled by a crowd of Trump supporters shortly after arriving at the Capitol and seen in video waving a Gadsen (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag. The tragic irony of Boyland’s death became a comic meme on the Left. But, on the Right, it was Ashli Babbitt who was remembered and memorialised. Now her name trends with every high-profile police killing of a Black person. #Sayhername, the hashtag used to bring visibility to patterns of police violence against Black women, was swiftly appropriated to obscure that violence.1 Ashli Babbitt became the Right’s counter-image to Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor, proof that only some lives mattered to the Left and that some women were willing to sacrifice everything for their country.

Video footage, captured in the moments before her death, show the 35-year old Air Force veteran storming the US Capitol building with an American flag draped around her shoulders like a cape, then being hoisted through a broken glass door to enter the building, and finally being shot in the neck by a plain-clothes police officer before falling to the floor. Babbitt was unarmed when she was shot, though many in the crowd around her were carrying weapons and, just beyond the broken glass, several members of the US House of Representatives were in the midst of a hurried escape. Two weeks later, the Right organized a “Million Martyr March” to commemorate Babbitt. The poster, all in black, featured an illustration of a woman in white at its centre, in front of the Capitol dome, a teardrop of red blood at her neck, haloed by four white stars. The riot of January 6th generated a whole gallery of images that will be used by the Right as recruiting devices in the years to come. Ashli Babbitt reimaged as Lady Liberty is distinctive for its “feminine” aesthetic.

The martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt raises two separate but related questions – what the Right says about women and what the Right saysto women – whose answers will tell us something about how it has adapted to changes in the social structure and how it foments contradictory forms of political reaction. Writing in the 1970s on fascism and femininity, Marxist-feminist Maria Antonietta Macciocchi noted the strange silence on these questions, as if we could understand fascism without also understanding how it speaks to and about women.2 For Macciocchi, a critical theory of fascism had to begin with the distinctive form of “female antifeminism” bred by male supremacy.3 She challenged the old Left for its failure to take sex seriously as a site of domination and struggle. And she insisted that anti-fascist theory and practice become feminist theory and practice, which is to say that it comprehend and combat the sexual politics of the Right, as well as the fascistic tendencies of the Left.

Macciocchi found resources for a feminist theory of fascism within Marxism, especially Antonio Gramsci, and in the psychoanalytic tradition, especially Wilhelm Reich. La Donna “Nera”: Consenso Femminile e fascismo, published in 1976, is remarkable for being one of the few texts in the long history of Freudian-Marxism driven by feminist aims and a feminist agenda. For Macciocchi, psychoanalysis provided the explanation for women’s consent to fascism, which she saw as a form of female masochism and mass irrationalism. Whatever the limits of this argument, Macciocchi posed a primary question of politics as a question for and about women in particular: Why do women fight for their servitude as if it was their salvation? How do women come to desire their own domination and even defend it to the death? How does femininity itself get constructed around this bizarre death drive?

Just a few years later, in 1979, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin published “The Promise of the Ultra-Right,” which would become the first chapter of Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females, which aimed to show how “movement conservatism” in the United States had succeeded in mobilising womenas women on behalf of male supremacy.4 Though she was not a Marxist or a Freudian, and her book is noteworthy for the absence of reference to these established traditions, Dworkin echoes Macciocchi in emphasizing the role of women in right-wing mobilization. She was focused specifically on the American case, undoubtedly different from the movements in Italy and Latin America that Macciocchi studied.5 And she saw white women’s support for the Far Right as a mostly rational calculation, quite unlike Macciocchi’s ideas about instinct and irrationalism. But Dworkin, too, insists that the sexual politics of the Right are key to its success. She emphasises the power of women like Anita Bryant, Ruth Carter Stapleton, and especially Phyllis Schlafly in mobilising the support of women for their own subservience and second-class status – preferable, after all, to no status at all. Like Macciocchi, Dworkin takes aim at the cult of femininity that anchors male supremacism in the hearts of conservative women, as well as in men. She also sees “female antifeminism” as a potent political force, often neglected and easily misunderstood. Both thinkers treat the institution and ideology of the patriarchal family as breeding ground for fascism.

The contemporary conjuncture throws new light on these old texts and the image of “female antifeminism” that emerges from both. I begin with Ashli Babbitt precisely because she was not the typical housewife from the Eagle Forum mailing list. Nor was she the mournful Madonna that Macciocchi saw at the roots of fascist movements. She embodies neither traditional nor mythic femininity. Indeed, Ashli was more likeone of the guys. A veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Babbitt served 14 years in United States Air Force, 4 on active duty, 2 as a reservist, and another 6 on the National Guard. She retired from the military in the lower ranks of leadership, with a few medals for her service but before becoming eligible for a full pension. In photographs that circulated after her death, she embodies the sun-kissed, tomboy sexuality of a sex-integrated society (and military): ponytail, red MAGA cap, tank tops, fatigues, sunglasses, cutoff denim, American flags, in flexed pose. Ashli was divorced and remarried, with no children, living with her second husband and his girlfriend in what tabloids say was a “throuple” but was, at any rate, not entirely conventional. Her Twitter feed indicates that she once voted for Barack Obama but was “radicalised” by an intense hatred of Hillary Clinton. She found other targets in Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, and Kamala Harris. It was a novel strain of “female antifeminism” that took hold of Babbitt, concentrated in reaction against women leaders of the Democratic Party. When she left for the Capitol protest, she was the owner of a failing pool supply shop in suburban San Diego, deep in debt. The sign on the door of her storefront declared it a “Mask Free Autonomous Zone” in protest against the state’s Covid-19 restrictions. Further down, the sign read: “We shake hands like men.”

If the “Ultra-Right” (Dworkin’s term) had once promised white women the security and safety of patriarchal domesticity, today it offers something else, something more immediately transgressive, more responsive to destructive impulses and antisocial forces, and more proximate to the equality that it rejects and the freedom it renounces. It offers white women an account of their unhappiness and an affective arena to express their rage.6 Schlafly and other “movement conservatives” once heralded “the power of the positive woman,” but the Right today understands the power and potency of the negative. It relishes white women’s anger and feeds their resentment. It encourages their aggression. And this, I would suggest, is at least part of its appeal. It is not simply a question of protecting one’s interests (as white women, petit-bourgeois women, women with American citizenship), or even desiring one’s own domination, but of gaining access to the pleasures of “masculine” affect and agency. It is a privilege reserved only for some women, which is part of the point. And it is a form of “female antifeminism” that mirrors the neoliberal feminism it opposes, another degraded version ofhaving it all, where instead of the corporate career and the heterosexual reproductive family, women can have combat training, AR 15s, polyamorous sexuality, conspiracism, and, above all, a semblance of power that substitutes for the real thing. Some women want a seat at the boardroom table. Others want to be in the eye of the storm.

Ocean Beach, the “bohemian” neighbourhood that Babbitt called home, is about 40 miles away from Camp Pendleton, one of the largest Marine Corps bases in the United States. The military, the beach, and the border are the most powerful institutions in San Diego and give the region its distinctive political culture. For several decades now, the Far Right has adopted a deliberate strategy to infiltrate the US military. And Southern California has long been a hotbed of white supremacist and skinhead gang activity. But it does not appear that Babbitt was a part of this scene, or even that she was radicalised during her time in the Air Force. More likely, she was schooled, like millions of others, in the lower ranks of the American security apparatus, shaped by the local politics of a national border just 25 miles from her home, and steered to the Far Right by her own “common sense” and community. Women comprise about 15% of the US military, where they are subject to shocking levels of sexual harassment and assault. It is also where women learn how to “shake hands like men” and participate in the rituals of gendered violence to which they are routinely subject.

Macciocchi’s portrait of female masochism cannot capture the complexities of an Ashli Babbitt. And Dworkin’s representation of right-wing women captures none of the irrationalism, for which psychoanalysis remains our best available theoretical vocabulary. Nonetheless, both thinkers are highly attuned to what Horkheimer and Adorno describe as the “potential fascism” latent in our existing institutions, as well as the dynamics of fascisation, to use Ugo Palheta’s very helpful terminology, that harness this potential.7 Both see that sex is a key instrument of fascisation.

Palheta defines fascisation as a “whole historical period” and process that prepares a population for fascism.8 He identifies “two main vectors” of fascisation: “the authoritarian hardening of the state and the rise of racism.”9 I think it is well worth thinking about this authoritarian hardening of the state in connection with the hardening of personality that the Reichian idea of “character armour” implies. But, on an even more basic level, can we speak of the fascisation without speaking of sex? Will we be in any position to understand the fascism of our present and how it relates to fascisms past? Will we understand how online misogyny becomes gateway drug to Far Right, how the world of men’s rights activists, pick-up artists, MGTOW trolls, and “involuntary celibates” overlaps with that of white supremacists, militia men, and proud boys, or even how a relatively minor episode like #gamergate could be plausibly described one of the inaugural events of the Trump era? Will we recognise in the “Great Replacement” myth a bid for control of women’s sexuality, as well as racist and culturalist panic? Even more to my point here, without seeing sex as an instrument of fascisation, can we make sense of the anti-vaxxers, yoga moms, and wellness gurus who are part of the new Right resurgence, how the Q-anon conspiracy mobilises women’s fears for their children? Can we appreciate how the politics of #MeToo – which positions some as victims of the boss’s unwanted sexual advances, some as the boss’s wife, and some as mothers who hope their young sons will grow up to be bosses – shapes the present moment? Can we explain how a relatively fringe movement, like #tradlife, relates to the larger political project of anti-feminism on the Right? Can we hear its softer echoes among the “fash-curious” and trad-socialist Left? Can we comprehend a political situation in which Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) do the bidding of religious fundamentalists and cultural nationalists? Will we grasp why trans liberation is not only a feminist but also an antifascist project?

What both Macciocchi and Dworkin saw as novel in the reactionary movements they observed, namely the mobilisation of “female antifeminism” in defence of male dominance, might appear instead as an ongoing and evolving strategy of the Right. It is striking that neither Macciocchi nor Dworkin get much attention in debates about fascism today, especially when it seems that every major thinker of the twentieth-century has by now been reread to have predicted these developments. It is as if the Left does not yet know how to talk about women and the Right, with the implication that it does not know how to fight for the liberation that feminism demands.

2.

It is not obvious that Macciocchi and Dworkin belong in the same analysis. They wrote in different national and historical contexts, held to very different ideas about history and society, and advanced different feminist politics and fought different reactionary movements. They also took opposed positions on the ultimate compatibility of Marxism and feminism and the uses of psychoanalysis for feminist politics. Macciocchi was born in the year that Mussolini took power, to anti-fascist parents living in the Lazio region. She would become an established journalist and an elected politician, though her early critical theory of fascism, which fuses Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytical arguments, remains obscure and mostly forgotten. She was a member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and a follower of Gramsci, introducing his ideas to French audiences in Paris and Algiers and defending them against critics, including Louis Althusser. Her correspondence with Althusser in the late 1960s led to a significant rift with the PCI.10 By the 1970s, she was expelled from the party for her support for Maoism and the Cultural Revolution. Later in life, after meeting Pope John Paul II, she repositioned herself toward the Church and its teachings.

Though this late “conversion” is in some ways surprising, it is also true that Macciocchi always saw the Church and religion as being at the centre of Italian political life. Her earlier argument in La Donna “Nera” was that the Catholic myth of female sexuality – the virgin mother as the counterimage to the pitiful whore – provided the ideological-psychological basis for fascism. Mussolini entered a political terrain already set and significantly shaped by conservative institutions and ideologies. And he engaged women on this terrain, women who had lost their sons and brothers in war and wanted a politics that valorised and venerated death. A “martyred, baneful, and necrophiliac femininity” lie at the foundations of fascism, according to Macciocchi.11 Though she occasionally lapses into a simplistic view of women as “instinctually” submissive and prone to the irrational, much of her analysis focuses on what contemporary critics have called the “death cult” of fascism, and the ways that women assume the “character armour” of fascism. She took this last idea from Wilhelm Reich, who treated the rise of fascism as a sickness of sexual repression, inhibition, and anxiety.12 Like others in the Freudian-Marxist tradition, Macciocchi saw fascism as a kind of mass irrationalism, afflicting women in distinctive ways. She found in psychoanalysis the tools to explain how an aggressively masculinist project gains its surest support among women, even those who would be its victims.

The basic point, for Macciocchi, was that a Marxist analysis had to be slightly stretched to deal with the sexual politics of fascism. She emphasises that working women fared miserably under Mussolini’s regime. Wages for women dropped up to fifty percent. Women were dismissed from work, especially in the professions, and barred from the practice of medicine. They were prohibited from teaching at certain institutions and prevented from studying certain subjects. Women’s reproductive autonomy and agency was severely curtailed. They were even stripped of their gold, for instance on 18 December 1935, when Mussolini declaredThe Day of Faith and asked Italian wives to give their wedding rings to the State. It was just one month after the League of Nations had imposed sanctions against Italy for the invasion of Ethiopia and the regime was desperate for money and for a show of support. In Rome alone, fascists collected hundreds of thousands of rings. In Milan, they collected nearly as many. Even in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago, thousands of women sent gold to the Duce, with estimates that the Italian government received up to $100 million in gold from women around the world. In return, women received little iron rings to wear in place of their wedding bands, sometimes engraved with Mussolini’s signature. They were used in remarriage ceremonies, to cement a woman’s second marriage to the state, seen by Macciocchi as a “mystic marriage under the sign of Death (war) and Birth (cradles).”13 Material conditions for women worsened under fascism, but their attachment to the regime was unfailing. Everyday life was shadowed by death. Mussolini spoke of “coffins and cradles” and exalted women as the eternal guardians of life and death. Psychoanalysis could account for the elements of fascist myth that excite our deepest psychological drives.

Even psychoanalysis had to be slightly stretched to account for the myth of female sexuality at the centre of the fascist unconscious. The coupling and comingling of life and death in the fascist unconscious was, for Macciocchi, powerfully shaped by the concrete institutions of the Church and the Family. Fascism was not a break with tradition, but its hollow veneration and instrumental activation. “The ‘emotional’ plague of fascism is spread through an epidemic of familialism” that demands women surrender their “to him who bears the whip.”14 Fascism is a specific conquest of the streets, but it is born in the family apparatus. Despite her differences with Althusser (“some professor, from his Parisian chair”), Macciocchi also repurposes his most significant concepts, writing: “the ideas that dominate the pillars of the ideological State apparatus, thanks to the joint forces of capitalism and fascism, pivot on familialism, anti-feminism, patriarchy.”15 These ideas are the “ritual practices” through which women “voluntarily accept the ‘royal attributes’ of femininity and maternity.”16 They are reinforced, for example, by “the four papal encyclicals which have ... been promulgated against women and their work, with a view to demanding from them nothing other than procreation, and as a consequence allowing them no divorce, no contraceptive pills, no abortion, and so on.”17 The point is that institutions and their ideologies build the “character armour” of femininity upon which fascism depends. Reich’s idea of “character armour” was itself a Freudian reconstruction of the Marxist idea ofCharaktermaske and referred to the hardened layers of subjectivity that formed in defence against pain and displeasure, which are endemic to capitalist patriarchy.18 Fascism spoke to women through the “character armour” of femininity. It allowed them to mistake that armour for power.

Andrea Dworkin was not a Marxist, nor did she believe that feminism could be fastened to Marxism. Macciocchi had criticised an “infantile ultra-Left” that believed the workers’ revolution would solve the problem of sexual oppression. And she challenged the Left not simply for its emphasis on production at the expense of reproduction, but for a fascism in reverse that seeks to purify from politics the struggles over reproduction. But Macciocchi had believed in the happy marriage of Marxism and feminism. Dworkin is a child of their divorce. Part of the polemic in Right-Wing Women is that it was unfortunately the Right – andnot the Left – that had been taking the concerns of women seriously, even if only white, middle-class, heterosexual Christian women were included in that category and what it offered was the false “security” of the household and a subordinate place within it.19 Psychoanalysis did not offer her much, either. Its normative subject was male and its formative site was the patriarchal family. More importantly, for Dworkin, the sexual conflicts that produce the personalities of men and women are not that deep, as suggested by the Freudian idea of the unconscious. All that sex and death is, in fact, right there on the surface.

Like Macciocchi, Dworkin saw conservative religious institutions and ideologies as a key point of contact between traditional conservatism and an activated Far Right. She profiled conservative women of Southern Baptist and Catholic origins, showing how each sought to convince women of the price they must pay for the privileges of male protection. Some of these women believed deeply in male supremacy. Others were more strategic in their counsel. None more than Schlafly herself, “possessed by Machiavelli, not Jesus” and singular among women of the Right for her cunning and force.20 Here is Dworkin on Schlafly, worth quoting and at length:

Unlike most other right-wing women, Schlafly, in her written and spoken work, does not acknowledge experiencing any of the difficulties that tear women apart. In the opinion of many, her ruthlessness as an organizer is best demonstrated by her demagogic propaganda against the Equal Rights Amendment, though she also waxes eloquent against reproductive freedom, the women’s movement, big government, and the Panama Canal Treaty. Her roots, and perhaps her heart such as it is, are in the Old Right, but she remained unknown to any significant public until she mounted her crusade against the Equal Rights Amendment. It is likely that her ambition is to use women as a constituency to effect entry into the upper echelon of right-wing male leadership. She may yet discover that she is a woman (as feminists understand the meaning of the word) as her male colleagues refuse to let her escape the ghetto of female issues and enter the big time. At any rate, she seems to be able to manipulate the fears of women without experiencing them. If this is indeed the case, this talent would give her an invaluable, cold-blooded detachment as a strategist determined to convert women into antifeminist activists. It is precisely because women have been trained to respect and follow those who use them that Schlafly inspires awe and devotion in women who are afraid that they will be deprived of the form, shelter, safety, rules, and love that the Right promises and on which they believe survival depends.21

Schlafly is depicted here as a dog-whisperer to “domesticated females” (again, Dworkin’s term). She is able to use women’s fears precisely because domesticated women are trained to follow those who use them. What she offers women is the promise of a world in which they remain safe and protected. It was a promise predicated on the “Machiavellian” view that it was “a man’s world”, and that it was the task of women to secure a place for themselves within it. For Dworkin, this promise contained the indirect admission of a world that is a hostile warzone for women. What Macciocchi called the “character armour” of femininity, Dworkin saw as the survival instinct. There was nothing irrational about it.

Dworkin, too, is a complicated figure. Her crusade against pornography now looks to be a complete disaster for the feminist movement and arguably its most consequential political defeat of the past 50 years. Her writing has been rightly criticised for its neglect of the powers and privileges that give white women a significant stake in white supremacy. While it is true that she does not deal with the role of white women in white supremacy, it is also her basic point in Right-wing Women that some women have a significant stake in male supremacy. She recognizes that “female antifeminism” takes shape in opposition to the interests of Black women, lesbian women, trans women, poor women, all sorts of women for whom the protections of the patriarchal family are unavailable. The question, for Dworkin, was not why some women will fight for their servitude as if it is their salvation. The question was whether feminism had something to offer women beyond a negotiated settlement with male supremacy.

Taken together, Macciocchi and Dworkin return sex to the centre of our current debates about fascism and the Right. By its own self-representation, fascism purports to be a genuine alternative to the Left and the Right, a “post-ideological” project to restore to the nation its unity and greatness. The truth, and what Macciocchi and Dworkin see so clearly, is that the Far Right activates conservative institutions (the church, the military, the family) and affirms bourgeois values (“survival of fittest”) to advance an authoritarian agenda. Beyond this, both women treat sex as a primary vector of fascisation.

            Fascisation is reflected not only in the electoral success of right-wing parties, but also in the normalisation of extraordinary violence and everyday cruelty, the dramatic increase in economic inequality, the repressive desublimation of collective resentment and rage, the assault on participatory democracy at every level, and the strengthening of a racial regime of state terror. In the United States, specifically, fascisation is reflected in the lethal combination of imperialist war and nationalist agitation, in the decisive role of anti-democratic institutions (the electoral college, the filibuster, the Courts, the US Senate itself) in determining who holds power, in the outsized political influence of Christian nationalism and Catholic orthodoxy, in the wide discretionary powers given to highly militarized police forces, in the unregulated power of social media companies to profit by selling our “data” and spreading misinformation, in the mobilisation of an extra-parliamentary militia movement, in regular mass shootings in schools, places of worship, night clubs, cafes, newspaper rooms, yoga studios, and shopping malls. The United States has been a hothouse of gun violence and police terror for all of its history, but these are now the defining features of American culture. The largest arms-dealer on the planet, with control of nearly 40% of the global market share, the United States government and economy is greased by the violence that it exports around the world. These are not “post-ideological” developments, but instead point to the escalation and intensification of a protracted ideological project. This project is shaped by the real and perceived loss of power, what Wendy Brown has described as an aggrieved white male supremacism that is “wounded without being destroyed” and thus reliant upon women in a new way.22

3.

What does all of this have to do with Ashli Babbitt? And what do Macciocchi and Dworkin have to do with Babbitt, one of the guys, whose access to historically-male institutions was predicated on the ambiguous achievements of the feminist movement, whose descent into Q-anon conspiracism began with her hatred of powerful women like Clinton and Pelosi, whose petit-bourgeois political protest assumed an explicitly gendered pitch?We shake hands like men – this is a fantasy of agency and power, a fantasy of participation in the social-sexual contract, a fantasy of access to homosocial intimacy and its secrets, a fantasy of brotherhood and belonging. It is a trans fantasy that cannot avow itself as such, but also strangely admits its failure.Like men. Like the men who surrounded Babbitt at the Capitol, the men who helped her up and through the broken glass, and the men who swarmed around her after she fell to the ground. Who were these men anyway? Was not Babbittmore than a man in her death?

The martyrdom of Ashli Babbitt underscores Macciocchi’s argument about a “death drive” at the root of fascism and its peculiar expressions in women. It confirms Dworkin’s hunch that the new right-wing women would be the product of the feminist movement that they oppose. The concept and critique of femonationalism is important, but insufficient to the complexities of this situation. From a different direction, Moira Weigel coins the term “Authoritarian Personality 2.0” for those parts of the Right that have made a home online and among the powerful players in Silicon Valley.23 Weigel shows how these players, shaped by Big Tech and responsive to the material conditions of platform capitalism, have absorbed elements of the 1960s counterculture and its ideas about freedom. “AP 2.0” is not a program for the mobilisation of the masses, as fascism once was. It is the algorithmic identification and agitation of niche consumer markets. Weigel, a brilliant media historian, is alert to the gender dynamics that surface everywhere online and how media technologies have shaped our gendered lives offline. But she leaves the sexual politics of “AP 2.0” largely untouched.

Macciocchi warned that the failure to take “female antifeminism” seriously meant that the Left lacked the political clarity and feminist commitment necessary to defeat it. Dworkin worried that the Right was speaking to the concerns of (some) women, while the Left was distancing itself from the feminist movement.24 The current conjuncture, marked by mass death and disease, the affective efflorescence around new media, the re-domestication of women’s work, and the new familialism of the neoliberal period, will produce its own forms of “female antifeminism” across the political spectrum. Those schooled in the feminist tradition will hear the “resonance machine” that produces the Bruenigs and Barretts, along with the Babbitts. With the continent braced for the possible election of Marine Le Pen, the daughter of fascism in France, and this after President Macron’s own minister of higher education, Frédérique Vidal, declared “gender theory” part of an “Islamo-Leftist” threat to the Republic, we are poised to revisit these questions yet again. And we are primed to rediscover that a genuine antifascism, in theory and practice, requires a militant feminist politics.

Robyn Marasco is associate professor of political science at Hunter College and The Graduate Center at the City University of New York, the author of The Highway of Despair: Critical Theory after Hegel (Columbia, 2015), guest editor of a special issue ofSouth Atlantic Quarterly on “The Authoritarian Personality” and guest coeditor, with Banu Bargu, of a special issue ofRethinking Marxism on “The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser.”

• 1. Appropriation is everywhere on the Right today, from the attack on “woke capitalism” to the bad-faith defense of free speech to the practice of popular protest. “Whose streets? Our streets!” – what was once a rallying cry of the Black Lives Matter movement has been appropriated by the Right, now heard at the “Unite the Right” march in Charlottesville, pro-police demonstrations in St. Louis, and at the Capitol riots. The “mash-up” and mimetic quality of right-wing discourse (and aesthetics) is an important part of its power today.
• 2. Macchiochi’s La Donna “Nera”: Consenso Femminile e fascismo is out of print in the Italian edition. The book was never translated into English. A condensed version of her essay, “Les femmes et la traversée du fascisme” was published in Tel Quel in 1976, which was translated and published in the English-language journal, Feminist Review. The feminist historian, Jane Caplan, wrote a helpful introduction to Macciocchi’s essay and argument, which focuses on her simultaneous critique of “ultra-Leftism” and “ultra-feminism”. See Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, “La sexualité féminine dans l'idéologie fasciste,” Tel Quel, No. 66 (1976) 26–42 and “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” Feminist Review, No. 1 (1979) 67-82. See also Jane Caplan, “Introduction to ‘Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology’,” Feminist Review, No. 1 (1979) 59-66.
• 3. She writes: “I speak on behalf of those who have killed female anti-feminism, which has been artificially fed by male power, and which makes one woman the enemy for another. I speak on behalf of ‘extreme women’ – those who are thought too intelligent, too active, too militant, too generous, too courageous, and so on.” Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” 81. Thinking about Ashli Babbitt, herself killed by a plain-clothed police officer, this seemed an inappropriate epigraph to the present reflections.
• 4. Andrea Dworkin, Right-Wing Women: The Politics of Domesticated Females (New York: Perigee Books, 1983).
• 5. Macciocchi does discuss Hitler and German fascism, but much of her analysis focuses on the Italian case, with reference to more recent examples in Pinochet’s Chile.
• 6. See Holloway Sparks, “Mama Grizzlies and Guardians of the Republic: The Democratic and Intersectional Politics of Anger in the Tea Party Movement,” New Political Science, Vol. 37, No. 1, (August 2014) 1-23.
• 7. Theodor Adorno et al, The Authoritarian Personality (London: Verso, 2019).
• 8. Ugo Palheta, “Fascism, Fascisation, Antifascism,” Historical Materialism, January 7, 2021, https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/blog/fascism-fascisation-antifascism.
• 9. Ibid.
• 10. Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, Letters from Inside the Communist Party to Louis Althusser (London: New Left Books, 1973).
• 11. Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” 68.
• 12. Reich developed the idea of “character armor” as a synthesis of Marx and Freud. The history of the concept is too extensive to reconstruct here, though it is worth noting that the early Frankfurt School pursues a different integration of Marx and Freud around the concept of the Charaktermaske. For an illuminating debate around these themes, see Kyle Baasch, “The Theater of Economic Categories: Rediscovering Capital in the late 1960s,” Radical Philosophy, 2.08 (2020) and the critical response from Asad Haider (forthcoming).
• 13. Macciocchi, “Female Sexuality in Fascist Ideology,” 72.
• 14. Ibid., 73.
• 15. Ibid., 79.
• 16. Ibid., 77.
• 17. Ibid., 74.
• 18. Reich ‘s idea of “character armour” has a significant bodily dimension and should not be interpreted exclusively or even primarily as a theory of personality. See Wilhelm Reich, Character Analysis, trans. Vincent R. Carfagno (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1972).
• 19. While beyond the scope of my reading here, it is worth noting that Dworkin’s Jewishness was important to her own sense of identity and to her theory of male oppression and woman-hating. In 2000, Dworkin published Scapegoat: The Jews, Israel, and Women’s Liberation, which draws parallels between antisemitism and misogyny, defends Zionism, and defends a feminist vision of a “homeland” for women. It seems, to me, that Zionism offers a lot of what the younger Dworkin saw in the politics of right-wing women: a place where the Jewish people can be safe. At least in certain contexts, Dworkin renounced the dubious kind of “safety” that the Right promises and pursues.
• 20. Dworkin, Right-Wing Women, 26.
• 21. Ibid., 26-7.
• 22. Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 180.
• 23. Moira Weigel, “Algorithmic Personalization and the Authoritarian Personality 2.0” (forthcoming in a special issue of Polity on The Authoritarian Personality).
• 24. The right-wing radio personality, Rush Limbaugh, popularized the term “feminazi” and hurled at women like Dworkin, yet another instance of projection and disavowal on the Right.

Andrés Cabrera1

“A crisis occurs, sometimes lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurable structural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), and that, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve and defend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them, within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and persistent efforts (since no social formation will ever admit that it has been superseded) form the terrain of the ‘conjunctural’, and it is upon this terrain that the forces of opposition organise. These forces seek to demonstrate that the necessary and sufficient conditions already exist to make possible, and hence imperative, the accomplishment of certain historical tasks.”

Antonio Gramsci, ‘Analysis of Situations. Relations of Force’ (1933-34)

The ‘mega-election’ held on 15-16 May was one of the most seminal electoral events in Chile since the plebiscite of 1988, in which the Chilean people set the stage for the return to democracy in 1990 after 17 years under Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship.2

In general terms, the electoral results primarily meant a resounding defeat of the right-wing parties currently in office as a result of their performance in the context of a crisis of hegemony exacerbated by the pandemic situation. It also represents a drubbing for the centre-left, especially its centrist parties. At the same time, the election saw a significant advance for left-wing and independent candidates, with many of the latter coming from social movements and local organisations.

If the political event of October 2019 showed the radical rupture between the working classes and both the right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera and the political and economic establishment, the ‘mega election’ of May 2021 appears to confirm the complete undoing of Chile’s political party system inherited from the end of the dictatorship period in the late 1980s.

In view of this context, the article seeks to examine the specificity of the ‘mega-electoral juncture’, tracing both the changes produced by the ongoing crisis of hegemony and the behaviour of political and social forces that compete for dominant positions of power in the state.

More specifically, these notes will focus firstly on the ‘relations of force’ deployed by political actors in Chile since the ‘October explosion’ in 2019 onwards.3 In light of this chronological account, I will then analyse the electoral results of the elections of 15-16 May, especially the results of the Constitutional Convention election. Finally, I will outline some possible political scenarios for the Chilean crisis in the next few months.

            Given that politics is always a contingent and dynamic matter, especially when a period of ‘organic crisis’ emerges, it is important for the purposes of this article to look back on the sequence of political and social events triggered in Chile from the ‘October explosion’ 2019 to the ‘mega-election’ of May 2021.

In general terms, this turbulent period can be punctuated in terms of the following six critical junctures. First, the event of October 2019 and the beginning of the exercise of the state’s emergency powers. Second, the agreement of the main political parties in November 2019 to hold a plebiscite on a new constitution to replace the one instituted on 11 September 1980. Third, the arrival of the pandemic in March 2020 and its ensuing impact on both the health of the population and the economy. Fourth, the overwhelming victory of the ‘Approve’ option in the plebiscite on 25 October 2020. Fifth, the rupture between the right-wing government and Congress as a consequence of legislative disputes around the pension system. Sixth, the complete implosion of Chile’s party system, as demonstrated by the ‘mega-election’ of May 2021, especially if we consider the results of the elections for the Constitutional Convention. Both the electoral defeat of the right-wing parties and the electoral advance of left and independent forces are further expressions of the crisis.

Of course, these processes are not causal in any simple sense. On the contrary, they are plagued by multiple and unexpected contingencies – a sort of ‘interregnum’, in which ‘morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass’. These crucial aspects of the Chilean political context will be discussed in greater detail in what follows.

From the October explosion of 2019 to the mega-election of May 2021

In early October 2019, the Chilean right-wing government of Sebastián Piñera increased metro fares in the capital city, Santiago. Within hours of the government announcing the measures, high school students launched a campaign against the fare rise, calling on users to jump the barriers of metro stations. As in other contemporary Chilean historical contexts, the role played by the student movement and the government’s response were decisive aspects in shaping the crisis.

On 18 October, Piñera’s government invoked the state security law to quell the protests against the fare hike, which rapidly grew in terms of both the number of students involved and popular support. Simultaneously, the government confirmed that the new public transport prices would be maintained. Within hours, social unrest spread throughout Santiago, giving rise to political violence, lootings and riots. Even the metro network, one of the most representative symbols of Chilean modernisation, suffered extensive damage. The overwhelming majority of stations were affected by arson and vandalisation.4

The police response and the exercise of the state’s emergency powers to guarantee public order under the dictatorial constitution of 1980 were deployed against the masses. Chile’s president declared a state of emergency in Santiago and other regions of the country for the first time since the dictatorship (1973-1990). As a result, the army returned to the streets for the first time in three decades. Despite this, social unrest broke out everywhere in the country.

Certainly, no one could imagine that the most elementary political decision taken by a committee of experts on the prices of public transport would become the main issue leading to the emergence of the Estallido de Octubre [‘October explosion’], that is to say, Chile’s most remarkable politicalevent in almost five decades.

Chile had been widely celebrated by the international economic establishment as a model of successful neoliberal modernisation accompanied by a stable democratic system.5 This myth was even peddled by Piñera just a few days before the October uprising, when he stated that Chile was an “oasis of stability” compared to its neighbouring Latin American countries.6 The emergence and consequences of the ‘October explosion’ not only discredited these optimistic interpretations but also revealed the magnitude of the crisis.

In the initial aftermath of the 'October explosion', there were not only massive protests throughout the country against Piñera’s government, but also multiple outbreaks of street fighting, numerous cultural and artistic responses, and police and military repression, with more than a dozen dead and hundreds of people suffering eye trauma from projectiles shot by the security forces.7 There was also a resurgence of historic demands that had grown over the course of the past decade, especially since the uprising of 2011 led by the university student movement. One of them, the demand for a new Constitution, had an early impact on public opinion.

By that point, Piñera and his government had lost the legitimacy to find an institutional solution. Therefore, on 15 November, the bulk of the political forces in Congress was left to find a consensus on the main official proposal to try to bring to a close the mass mobilisations and overcome the crisis triggered almost a month before.

The arrangement, titled ‘Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution’, proposed a plebiscite for April 2020 to decide whether the Constitution created in 1980 under the military dictatorship should be maintained (‘Reject’) or, on the contrary, be replaced by a new one (‘Approve’). Among the most important points of the agreement were the provisions regarding a second ballot in the plebiscite to define what type of body should draw up the new constitution and the requirement that the constitutional rules must be approved by two-thirds of incumbent members.

The latter was the most problematic issue in the negotiations because right-wing forces could block any substantial transformation if they won only a third of the seats in the Convention. This caused disagreements on strategy among the left-wing parties with representation in Congress. For instance, the Communist Party decided not to participate in the negotiations and the Frente Amplio, a new left-wing coalition created in 2017 from the uprising of 2011,8 split internally.

The agreement represented an advance for transformative and progressive forces, one which would be confirmed in the subsequent elections. However, it did not bring about the end of the popular movements.

A little over a month before the plebiscite (originally set for 26 April), the pandemic arrived in Chile. At that moment, the constitutional process had been recognised by the vast majority of political and social forces as the main institutional mechanism to try to resolve, or at least appease, the underlying crisis of hegemony already revealed in Chile by the political event of October 2019, even for those political parties who had initially rejected the ‘Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution’.

In the course of the legislative dispute, three remarkable demands from the feminist movement, indigenous groups and independent sectors were integrated into the constitutional electoral proceedings: gender parity between men and women, reserved seats for the indigenous peoples, and fewer barriers to the participation of independents. This guaranteed that the constitution would be written by an equal number of men and women (with a minimum ratio of 45%-55%), would include a significant participation of the indigenous peoples (17 out of 155 seats), and would involve more independent candidates not affiliated to any political party. As we will see later, these political reforms would be decisive for understanding the composition of the Constitutional Convention after the 15-16 May election.

Despite these favourable amendments, the right-wing government was able to push through authoritarian measures. A few weeks after the arrival of the pandemic, Piñera proceeded to implement the second form of the state of exception (‘catastrophe’), which remains in force at the time of writing. With both a constant strict lockdown and a permanent curfew, the masses were pressured to leave the streets.9

At the same time, an important segment of the population, those who work in informal jobs, were forced to continue working despite the spread of the virus because they needed to provide for their families. Consistent with the logic of a neoliberal ‘subsidiary state’10 and the ideology of a right-wing government, Piñera injected public funding focusing on the lower classes and rejected the introduction of a universal basic income equivalent to the cost of living in Chile.11

Between March and October 2020, the government was able to resist and manage the first wave of the pandemic (with a peak in June) but suffered internal political turbulence as a result. Proof of this was the fourth and fifth change of Piñera's cabinet in less than two months (June-July).

As the plebiscite of October approached, it was relatively clear that the ‘Approve’ option would obtain a comfortable victory. This led to the fragmentation of the right, in which some parties and leaders tactically opted to change sides and advocated approval of a new constitution. By contrast, the broad spectrum of opposition forces, from the traditional centre-left parties to left-wing organisations and social movements, all lined up behind the banner of ‘Approve’.

On 25 October 2019, the ‘Approve’ option received an overwhelming majority with 78% of the votes. The preference for the Constitutional Convention (‘the second ballot’) received a similar percentage (79%), confirming that the new constitution would be written by a specially established body.12

Thus, transformative political forces won a resounding electoral victory, confirming that the yearnings for change that had inspired the ‘October explosion’ could translate into electoral breakthroughs. The Constitution of 1980 had been defeated at the polls and a new one would be drafted by the Constitutional Convention. But what the distribution of power within this constitutional body would be still needed to be confirmed.

Beyond the electoral battlefield, the progress of certain pieces of legislation through Congress worsened the crisis of hegemony and governance in Chile, especially in the twelve months following April 2020.

The main issue that exacerbated the political conflict in Congress related to the pension system based on individual capitalization. The so-called Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones (AFP) are a core structural element of the Chilean financial system designed and implemented during the dictatorship regime in 1980 along with other neoliberal reforms.

Since 2016, the Chilean pension system has been widely criticized by citizens who have demanded both ‘the end of the AFP system’ and ‘decent pensions’.13 Naturally, after the 'October explosion' of 2019 and the arrival of Covid-19, public discontent with the pension system has increased. The AFP system is broken in terms of social legitimacy.

With a right-wing government that has consistently defended the application of austerity policies and the impoverishment of the lower and middle classes, political resistance was inevitable. This came in the form of a proposal by deputies to allow the population to withdraw 10% from their pension savings. From a political perspective, this measure has effectively been the worst and most desperate policy since the start of the pandemic given the impact on the future of pensions.14

Sebastián Piñera and his government opposed the withdrawals in their three legislative procedures. The first (June 2020), second (December 2020) and third (May 2021) withdrawals of 10% were thus approved and enabled by Congress. Most of the deputies that supported the government opposed the President’s strategy and voted in favour of the withdrawals. In Chile’s extreme presidential system, the government had never lost an absolute majority in Congress since the return to democracy in 1990.

The last hope harboured by Piñera and his government to try to regain popularity and reverse what could be a historic defeat for the right in the mega-election was the rapid and efficient vaccination process against the Covid-19 pandemic. This hope was strengthened when Chile became the world leader in terms of Covid-19 vaccination rates in February 2021.15 However, the government’s wishful thinking was not borne out in reality. Chile proved that a high vaccination rate does not in fact guarantee an immediate decrease in the infection rate and deaths associated with Covid-19.16 The arrival of the second wave of the pandemic in Chile subsequently meant that the ‘mega-election’ was postponed from 24-25 April to 15-16 May.

The mega-election of May: collapse of the party system and electoral victory of the left-wing and independent forces

As part of a crowded timetable of electoral events between 2020 and 2022, the ‘mega-election’ of May combined three different elections on the same date: those for mayors and councillors, governors, and delegates to the Constitutional Convention.

Before election day, there was a clear consensus that the latter vote would dominate the three-way electoral confrontation because it would define the relative weight that traditional and newer political forces will have within the Constitutional Convention that will begin to draft a new constitution in late June 2021.

The decisive electoral battle to participate in the Constitutional Convention had overshadowed the analysis of the other two electoral contests that took place at the municipal and regional levels. The reason for this was that the Convention election represented the later stage of the constitutional process originally triggered by the social uprising that emerged in October 2019. However, once the results were known, it was clear that the 'mega-election' as a whole demonstrated a complete collapse of Chile’s political party system inherited from the end of the dictatorship period in the late 1980s.

As mentioned in my introduction, the electoral results of 15-16 May meant a resounding defeat of the right-wing forces currently in office as a result of their performance in the context of a crisis of hegemony, which was exacerbated by the pandemic situation. The elections also saw a severe drubbing for the centre-left, especially of its centrist parties, but at the same time a significant advance for left-wing and independent candidates, with many of the latter coming from social movements and local organisations.

Although right-wing political parties recognised before the ‘mega-election’ that the complete discrediting of Sebastián Piñera would negatively impact their vote, in no case did they expect to obtain less than a third of the votes. This was a decisive aspect for the right-wing coalition Vamos por Chile, especially in the election of delegates to the Constitutional Convention. Due to the 2/3 rule established in the agreement of November 2019, the right-wing parties would have been able to block any substantial transformation if they had obtained at least a third of the seats in the Convention (52 out of 155 delegates).

However, the right-wing recorded its poorest electoral performance since the return to democracy, obtaining only 37 seats in the Constitutional Convention and only 20% of the total votes. This fell far short of the numbers required to control the discussion within the Constitutional Convention (34%) and was much closer to the percentage received by the ‘Reject’ option in the plebiscite of October 2020 (21%).

Although the election of Convention delegates is unprecedented in the country, it is possible to compare these results with the parliamentary election in November 2017 as the D'Hondt method was used in both cases (except for the 17 seats reserved for indigenous peoples in the Constitutional Convention). On that occasion, the right-wing list won 72 seats, accumulating 38% of the vote. By contrast, in the ‘mega-election’ of May 2021, this coalition lost 35 seats and 18% of the vote, respectively.

Likewise, the political parties of the traditional centre-left were also severely defeated in the ‘mega-election’, especially in the election for the Constitutional Convention, in which the Lista del Apruebo obtained 25 seats and only 14% of the votes. In the parliamentary election in 2017, the centre-left parties gained 57 seats and 34% of the vote. Compared with the May 2021 election, they lost 32 seats and 20% of the vote. Here, the most dramatic fall was represented by thePartido Demócrata Cristiano, which went from having 14 seats in the Chamber of Deputies to only 2 in the Constitutional Convention. The results for thePartido Por la Democracia (from 8 to 3) and thePartido Radical (from 8 to 1) reflect a similar trend. The only centre-left party that was able to maintain its position was thePartido Socialista, which reached 15 seats in the Constitutional Convention, losing only 4 seats in comparison with the 2017 election .

On the other hand, the left-wing coalition called Apruebo Dignidad, which unites thePartido Comunista and theFrente Amplio, consolidated its political position as the second strongest group within the Constitutional Convention and overcame the centre-left. This list obtained 28 seats and 18% of the vote. At the same time, thePartido Comunista and theFrente Amplio achieved important victories in the municipal and regional elections. The most emblematic victory for the communists was in the Santiago municipality, where the candidate Irací Hassler, a 30-year-old feminist political economist, defeated the right-wing incumbent, Felipe Alessandri. ThePartido Comunista had never won this post before.

The big winners of the Constitutional Convention election were the independent candidates. This heterogeneous group gained 48 seats, in which 3 main lists led the votes: La Lista del Pueblo (27 seats and 16% of the vote),Independientes No Neutrales (11 seats and 7% of the votes) andSocial Movements and other independent lists (10 seats and 14% of the votes). Although independent from the political parties, they are mostly situated on the centre-left and the radical left. At the same time, most of this group have actively participated in the street protests that have emerged in Chile during the last decade from feminist, environmental, and local political movements, among others, and particularly from the ‘October explosion’. These independent candidates succeeded by feeding anti-establishment and reformist sentiments, on the one hand, and taking advantage of the approval of the independent lists by Congress, on the other.

A further notable aspect is the victory achieved by the candidates who competed for a place in the 17 seats reserved for 10 indigenous peoples. In total, they received 5% of the votes for the Constitutional Convention. Their inclusion will facilitate a discussion of some historical demands of these peoples within the Convention such as territorial autonomy and plurinationality.

Finally, it is important to mention that the gender parity reform has made it possible to elect a gender-balanced Constitutional Convention (77 women and 78 men) for the first time.

What next?

As in other historical and political contexts in which a crisis of hegemony becomes apparent, the collapse of the party system runs in parallel with a trend towards the fragmentation of political forces vying for positions of power. Proof of this is the distribution of power that the traditional and emerging political forces have assumed in the Constitutional Convention that will begin in Chile in a matter of weeks.

Although the left-wing and independent forces dominate the Convention, no single bloc alone has the 2/3 majority to impose its ideas and political programmes. Therefore, the transformative forces must make all possible efforts to reach mutual agreements in order to create a constitution that encourages people to participate and engage in political discussion, on the one hand, and moving on from the extreme neoliberalism reproduced in Chile, on the other. 

The first two challenges that will test the capacity of the transformative forces for agreement will be the elections for the posts of president and vice-president and the creation of standing rules for the functioning of the Constitutional Convention. The work of the Convention is expected to take 9-12 months. At that point, the Chilean people will be asked to ratify or reject the newly drafted constitution in a new plebiscite.

In parallel to the work of the Constitutional Convention, the political parties are already preparing for the next electoral battle for the presidency and Congress in November 2021. In fact, just three days after the ‘mega-election’, the political forces had to register their candidacies to participate in the presidential primaries that will be held on July 18. Only the right-wing and left-wing coalitions presented their candidates by the deadline, whereas the centre-left was unable to do so.

Currently, these two coalitions are best placed to win the presidency, which will be crucial in terms of obstructing or promoting the progress made by the Constitutional Convention. In fact, the left has not had a better chance of winning the presidency since the victory of Salvador Allende in 1970. Securing the presidency will depend on left-wing leaderships and the transformative forces within the Convention performing well in the coming months.

Image: "Plaza de la Dignidad" bypslachevsky is licensed underCC BY-NC-SA 2.0

References

Barlett, John 2021, ‘Chile emerges as global leader in Covid inoculations with “pragmatic strategy”’. The Guardian, February 28. Available at:https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/feb/28/chile-covid-inoculations-vaccines-strategy

Cristi, Renato 2017. ‘The Genealogy of Jaime Guzmán’s Subsidiary State’ in Hayek: A Collaborative Biography. Archival Insights into the Evolution of Economics. Part IX: The Divine Right of the 'Free' Market, edited by Robert Leeson. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Dardot, Pierre; Guéguen, Haud; Laval, Christian and Sauvêtre, Pierre 2021, Le choix de la guerre civil. Une autre historie du néolibéralisme. Quebec: Lux Éditeur.

Harvey, David 2005, Brief history of neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

INDH 2019, ‘Situación de los Derechos Humanos en Chile en el Contexto de la Crisis Social’, Instituto Nacional de Derechos Humanos. Available at:https://bibliotecadigital.indh.cl/handle/123456789/1701

Klein, Naomi 2007, The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: The Penguin Press.

McDonald, Brent; Tovar, Miguel and De La Cruz, Armando 2019. ‘“It’s Mutilation”. The Police in Chile Are Blinding Protesters’. The New York Times, November 10. Available at:https://www.nytimes.com/video/world/americas/100000006795557/chile-protesters-shot-eye.html

Mander, Benedict and Statt, Michael 2021. ‘Chile’s lauded vaccine rollout fails to save it from Covid surge’. Financial Times, April 8. Available at:https://www.ft.com/content/89992bc9-051a-42b5-8be0-60edad4165cb

Mayol, Alberto and Cabrera, Andrés 2017, Frente Amplio en el momento cero. Santiago: Catalonia.

Taylor, Marcus 2006, From Pinochet to the ‘Third Way’: Neoliberalism and Social Transformation in Chile. London: Pluto Press.

- 2002, ‘Success for Whom? An Historical-Materialist Critique of Neoliberalism in Chile’. Historical Materialism,10.2: 45–75.

UNHR 2019, ´Report of the Mission to Chile. 30 October – 22 November 2019’. Office the High Commissioner, United Nations Human Rights. Available at:https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Countries/CL/Report_Chile_2019_EN.pdf

Vargas, Roberto 2019, ‘La implosión de la ciudad neoliberal’, Pléyade, Número especial / Diciembre. Available at:https://www.revistapleyade.cl/la-implosion-de-la-ciudad-neoliberal/

• 1. Director of Fundación Crea. PhD researcher in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London.
• 2. The vote was held on 5 October 1988. The ‘No’ option (rejecting the proposed candidate, Augusto Pinochet) won 55 percent of the votes. The ‘Yes’ option received 44 percent.
• 3. Here I am not seeking to offer a comprehensive interpretation of the historical causes that would explain the political event of October 2019. To explore the full complexity of this entire cycle, we would need to examine the structural changes deriving from the military coup d'état against the socialist government of Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, and the subsequent paradigmatic transition from ‘the Chilean road to socialism’ to ‘the Chilean highway to neoliberalism’. Here, it will suffice to mention that over the last decade, the Chilean context ‘has reached maturity’ in at least four key ‘structural’ and ‘superstructural’ dimensions: the neoliberal model (economic), the constitutional order (juridical), the ‘bi-coalitional’ consensus (political), and social subjectivity (ideological).
• 4. These events have also been characterised as ‘the implosion of the neoliberal city’. See Vargas 2019.
• 5. For analyses of the Chilean neoliberal ‘experiment’, see: Taylor 2002; 2006, Harvey 2005, Klein 2007; Dardot, Guéguen, Laval and Sauvêtre 2021.
• 6. The recent protests in Colombia, which emerged at the end of April 2021 and were directed against increased taxes and the health care reform proposed by the right-wing government of Iván Duque, are just another symptom of the contradictions that Latin American countries are experiencing, before and after the arrival of the pandemic.
• 7. Two important reports that describe the human rights situation in the context of the crisis are UNHR 2019 and INDH 2019; see also the documentary video report focusing on people blinded by the police in McDonald, Tovar and De La Cruz 2019.
• 8. Mayol and Cabrera 2017.
• 9. The last mass political demonstration was held by the feminist movement on 8 March 2020, in the context of International Women's Day.
• 10. Cristi 2017.
• 11. The unemployment rate reached close to 20% in mid-2020 as a result of the economic fallout of the pandemic. A year later, a World Bank report would also indicate that 2.3 million middle-class people were on the verge of poverty.
• 12. It is important to highlight that turnout in the election was only 51%, and that the participation rate would fall again (to 43%) in the mega-election of May 2021. Since the return to democracy in 1988, the rate of participation had steadily decreased, reaching a low of 34% in the municipal elections of 2016.
• 13. Some studies have indicated that around 80% of the elderly population that receives a pension from this system earns less than the minimum wage, therefore a large number of these individuals are actually below the poverty line.
• 14. To put it in other terms, social security savings are largely solving the economic difficulties of the middle and lower classes. Considering the entire cycle, it is interesting to speculate about what proportion of this withdrawal of money from the pension system was ultimately destined for banks as Chilean families used pension funds to repay loans and debts. The situation could be said to reflect the Žižekian interpretation of cynicism as a form of ideology at this juncture: all workers who have accumulated funds in their accounts (the author included) know perfectly well that withdrawals constitute dire public policy because they will directly impact their future pensions. Nevertheless, workers say: “I want my money, right now!” This popular demand has now passed all the institutional and political hurdles, confirming its social legitimacy.
• 15. Barlett 2021.
• 16. Mander and Stott 2021.

An Epistemological Introduction

By Darko Suvin 

Why did the heathens tremble and the peoples imagine inanities?

• Psalm 2

The catastrophe is that things just go on as before.

• Walter Benjamin, Central Park

When no hope is left, one has to follow one’s principles.

• Old miner in Brassed Off (dir. Mark Herman, 1996)

0. Categories

For a forthcoming book of mine dealing with science fiction (SF) and utopia/nism, I opted for an approach that I call political epistemology. It attempts to fuse a reflection on how we understand what we think we understand (which in humanities or arts one calls texts, whether musical, pictorial or verbal…) with an emancipatory political stance that leads to focussing on contradictions and splits in meaning and the body politic.

Looking at the essay-chapters of that book of mine (still seeking a publisher), Disputing the Deluge, I wondered what makes them part of the same argument, that is, how do the various parts and levels of a longer text feed back into and reinforce one other? Inevitably, through categories illuminating and, one hopes, largely justifying the whole. (Once and for all, I do not mean that categories must be explicitly presented as a system anywhere in such a text, though many texts that owe allegiance to scholarship or systematised knowledge may do so.) Categories are, up to a point and perhaps obliquely, always present in a text. But their being teased out and understood by a reader also ought to illuminate the main nodes of the text, making it richer and clearer. These nodes are mostly, as Jameson put it, ‘formal peculiarities of … narratives’,1 with all the rich thickness of artistic cognition, which then may, in a preface or conclusion (or indeed a loyal review), be thinned down to the ideational or notional skeleton indispensable for an overview. How does one pick the categories needed for understanding? They must not be too many – to my mind, using more than circa five main categories confuses the memory of reader and writer alike – and it would be economical if they reinforced one other. The rest is situational wisdom, what the Germans call Fingerspitzengefühl, an intuitive flair for the situation in the text (on the author’s side) and of the book (on the reader’s side).

I shall, here, concentrate on a few categories needed for understanding or cognition, which, in my case – since I explicitly claim that the ideal horizon and cases of SF and utopia/nism are cognitive – means that I wish to understand cognition or cognise understanding. I trust this can be done without falling into a vicious epistemic circle. However, it needs to remain an abbreviated overview for who’s fleshing out, I must regretfully often refer to other works of mine (based upon insights by many other people).

1. Knowledge, frames, structures of Feeling

1.1 What do I understand by ‘knowledge’ or ‘understanding’? And what is the function of us intellectuals as their bearers? Let us start from our dire class situation, where most of us live by our work, that is to say are objectively a part of the working people against whom a more and more stringent class war from above is being waged by our rulers, capitalists and their henchmen. Today, we live in a perverted ‘knowledge society’ where brainwashing images and words have polluted the very structure of our perception and experiencing. Useful knowledge and perniciously fake knowledge are closely intertwined, and any realistic understanding must include a detoxification and deprogramming of hegemonic understandings. Knowledge as use-value for living is being evicted by knowledge as exchange-value for profits, with its logical end in ‘smart bombs’ for mass killings, or ‘smart’ online work that may serve as a stopgap but finally increases alienation as against sociability. This is why I cannot see how a civil life can survive without first establishing a great deal about how we know what we believe we know. In other words, there is no way around focusing on some knots within our understanding, formalised as a political epistemology.

        I adopt the definition of epistemology as the theory of human knowledge, preoccupied with the latter’s possibilities and limits, with the analysis of propositional and metaphoric (and thus logical and affective) cognitive systems, and in particular with the critique of language and other sign systems as concrete consciousness.2 Epistemology speaks to ‘how do we know what we (think we) know’ not in terms of individualist psychology but of the collective conditions that make knowledge possible. It stages, on a theoretical level, an encounter of knowledge, art, science, and liberatory politics which started out together in practice, and, at its best, mediates between theory and a return to practice: who, and in whose interests, decides the meaning of terms and what they enable or disable?

            Now, any epistemic tool defines its object-types and its subject-wielders as something and to (for) something: it allows an access to the world of signifying and finally of significant potential actions. We must realise, as both Lenin and feminists did, that epistemology does not function without our asking the political question ‘In whose interest?’. Interests and values decisively shape all perception: it was Marx's great insight that no theory or method can be understood without the practice of social groups to which it corresponds. Thus, our answers can be found only in a feedback loop with potential action. As Vico argued, whatever we cannot intervene into, we cannot understand; it follows thatthe epistemological and the political intertwine.

            To advance in this lush jungle of opinions and prejudices, I need to begin with two foci: on categories and on structures of feeling. Categories first.

1.2 I see categories as frames. Understanding and action proceed by means of groupings into kinds of things: a pine is a tree, a plant, and so on. All seeing is seeing-as (Wittgenstein), in categories. The always-already existing frames are cultural mega-presuppositions, latent in all the resulting positions. How am I going to see or understandX without them? As a rule, there is a set of concentrically embedded frames that determine thisX. My operative frame is SF and/or the horizon of formulatingutopia. A given story is inside such a framing. Outside of it, it is not readable. You can register, but not read with understanding, an opening line likeThey landed in the light of the blue sun if you don’t know the presuppositions it carries. This line, if you’ve never read SF, makes no sense. But what does it mean when framed? Easy: we are in another solar system, and not in ours where the sun is yellow; and the inhabitants of the planet can be anything the author pleases, except that they are always analogies of our hopes and fears, utopian or anti-utopian. The opening feeds into what the theoreticians call a reading protocol for this kind of story. How do you understand it? By reading a lot of this stuff with interest! If you are a fan, you won’t wonder. But if you’re not? After five sentences like this, you’ll get lost because you don’t know which category – to begin with, which literary genre – you are in. Surrealist or nonsense poem, weird disturbance of sight, an experiment by malevolent Lovecraftian gods?

However, this operative frame can only come into being because it grows out of a matryoshka-style embedding into wider frames. The widest one, for our purposes, would be ‘human collective understanding/s of common reality’ and a middle one ‘imaginative literature’ or ‘fiction’. The widest one can be briefly summarised, freely following Lakoff and the Eleanor Rosch school, as ‘Thought is embodied, imaginative, and a gestalt’. First, human understanding begins with perception, bodily movement, and situated physical and social experience. Second, ‘those concepts which are not directly grounded in experience employ metaphor, metonymy, and mental imagery’. Third, the concepts (I would prefer to call thempropositions) are not atomistic but have an overall structure in dynamic feedback between particular and general imaginative structures. This view of understanding implies an axiomatic commitment to the existence of a common world, which necessarily places constraints on human imagination, as well as to the existence of a shared though constantly changing knowledge of that world.3 As Putnam provocatively put it, meaning is not in the mind – but in mind’s interaction with world.4

Thus, categories are our indispensable cognitive tool. Of course, when seeing X, different people will not only see it in slightly different ways and use slightly different categories to understand the seen, but there can be outright illusions, frauds, and mass hysterias (example: UFO sightings in USA; or today, Trumpism and other forms of fascism 2.0 as bearers of mass salvation). Furthermore, some categories are graded and with fuzzy boundaries (example: a tall person) and others may have clear boundaries (example: bird) but also a graded spread, so that some members are better or worse examples of the category.5 But this model of seeing is linguistically unavoidable, in good part automatic and unconscious, and ideologically fortified as the norm.6 True, categorising can be, like almost everything, abused for purposes of pedantry and/or dogmatism. However, it is potentially a deeply philosophical cognitive pursuit: it determines the Possible World of a text.

1.3 Yet one more tool is needed to explain deep ideological and epistemological oppositions between large human groups when it comes to categorising: class interests and their divergence. A crass example is under all our eyes: in a pandemic such as the current Covid-19 one, a very large majority of people wants their superordinated community (here the state) to take as an absolute priority their survival; a small minority, as a rule, less than 5%, takes as an absolute priority their profits – and using national chauvinism and other demagogic illusions, they can enlist maybe 30% of people to follow them, as Hitler and Trump did. The reigningdoxa or common sense can be built up into huge and apparently seamless systems of fake categories, of which the most important in late capitalism is the social Darwinism coursing from Rockefeller Sr. to Trump.7 A wonderful example is the brief 1984 kerfuffle in the US press that Lakoff reports,8 based on the report by Robert Half Inc. – described in Google as the world’s biggest accounting firm, with a revenue of 6 billion US$ in 2019 – that US office employees steal on average 4 hours 22 minutes per week from their employers by malingering. When you compare this with Marx’s labour theory of value, by which almostall profits from capital originally come from appropriating a major part of the workers’ labour-power (that is, unpaid working hours in comparison to what they actually produce), the divergent class interests become quite clear. The categories collide.

        The richest way to understand them is to use Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’ or structures of experience, as I have often attempted in my work.9 According to this theory, all artistic works – and more fuzzily, one could infer, all our systems of understanding – embody an overriding epistemological framework that rests on a ‘structure of feeling’ or of experience, differentiated by period, generation, and in cases of acute social tension by class groupings, making for hegemonic, nostalgic, and oppositional horizons as well as for different ‘semantic figures’, that is, forms and conventions.10

2. On the collective understanding of shaping words

Let me, therefore, advance from the outermost frame of any collective understandings of common reality as just argued – always bearing in mind there can be competing collectives – and restrict political epistemology here to the already daunting domain of understanding or cognition in words (language).If Disputing the Deluge, in seeking out what we need for collective and personal salvation, arrived finally at the need of a fusion between an organised plebeian political upsurge and depth utopian energies, it would seem useful to propose here some initial, necessarily laconic theses ona method for radical utopian cognition. They are an amendable initial view and stance. They re-produce – that is, both repeat and advance from – some of my writings of the last quarter century.

It follows from my brief discussion of Williams that cognition is not only open-ended but also codetermined by the social subject and societal interests looking for it: its horizons are multiple. Not only is this legitimate, it is unavoidable and all-pervasive. The object of any praxis can only be ‘seen as’ that particular kind of object from a subject-driven standpoint and bearing that is personal but also collective. If you want to be Master of your Company, you have to treat profit-making concepts as raw material on the same footing as profit-making labourers and iron ore. Bourgeois civilisation’s main way of coping with the unknown is aberrant, Nietzsche once argued, because it transmutes nature into concepts with the aim of mastering it: that is, it turns nature only into concepts and furthermore makes a more or less closed system out of those concepts. It is not that the means get out of hand but that the mastery – the wrong end – requires appositely wrong means. The problem lies not in the Sorcerer’s Apprentice but in the Master Wizard.

2.1.Premise

In both our presuppositions and our positions, a double cognitive movement is necessary: destruction (deconstruction) of old ways of thinking, focussing on useless interpretation of key terms; construction of dialectically flexible, usable meanings for such terms, having a constant denotative core along with a pulsating (expanding and shrinking) periphery of connotations. The rhythm and direction of the pulsations is historically contingent and situational, it too is subject to phronesis (practical wisdom) rather thantheoria.

        Our tools as essayists are, no doubt, notional; they are regulative ideas. However, I shall argue in 2.2 below that, in all richer cases, they rest on ametaphor (in the widest sense of a trope). They are all initially located in the imagination, but ‘imagination becomes reality when it enters the belief of masses’ (Marx, slightly tweaked).

              All understanding carries its own delight, of a piece with its end to make life easier and more pleasant. Cognition – artistic, scientific or any other – is a joy and pleasure, it fuses logic and emotions. It is always an imaginative synergy between Pascal’s ésprit géometrique, the intuitive ésprit de finesse, and last not least (in what today seems a somewhat archaic metaphor), the ésprit du coeur or emotional wisdom. If emotions are tools for understanding the world,11 they can be right or wrong, clear or muddied, just like any propositional or notional system: another highly important but usable and misusable tool or faculty.

A first axiom: the survival of Homo sapiens sapiens has precedence over the profit principle.

2.2. Cognitive acts in words

First, cognitive acts in words (often called ‘discourse’ in French theory) are not closed or walled off – simply a combination of discrete linguistic units – but rely on an interplay of identification (what is presented as being in singular: Peter, this table, the fall of Rome) andpredication (a quality, a class of things or a type of relation) in any sentence or proposition: who or what relates how toX. Was the fall of Rome to supposed barbarians, which we take to have ended the slave-owning system, a terrible crash or a refreshing renewal, a palingenesis? For whom was it either or both?

               Second, when dealing with sentences, Frege’s Sinn und Bedeutung12 are best translated as sense and meaning, avoiding the huge minefield of competing uses of “reference”: sense operates  through relationships within the sentence language correlating the identification function and the predicative function, while meaning refers to the Possible World of the text, where ‘language is directed beyond itself’.13A text’s propositions and metaphors always arise ingiven situations, and Sartre would add within our freedom to understand situations,14within an imagined community; in all poetry or narration they imply, shape, and in turn presuppose a Possible World on the analogy of what we imagine is ‘our world’, and only within it do they have a meaning

        Third, cognitive acts in words are sometimes seen as divided into two distinct sub-ensembles: propositional and metaphoric. But this seems to me outdated semantics, based on linguistics à la Benveniste, for meaning encompasses very much also all connotations, implications, affects, echoes, and analogies of the so-called propositional content. There isno ‘said as such’15 – unless, perhaps, for specific narrow purposes, as in much specialised philosophy. Conversely, every true metaphor is a dialectical contradiction: in each metaphor kinship appears where ordinary vision or ruling common sense sees none, in what stricter philosophers like to dub a ‘category mistake’.16 This ought to induce us to use categories prudently.

        Between the beginning and the end of any unit of cognition-in-words the reader may understand something, in the best cases a novum – a new event or existent – by induction from experience. His take on the world in which he acts or is being acted upon is modified by the experience of other possibilities, of Possible Worlds.

        A second axiom: human nature abhors meaninglessness.

2.3. On dialectical totalities

Pre-industrial totality was ideally stable; it could accommodate slight or at any rate non-structural, changes in the fashion of Tomasi di Lampedusa’s slogan in TheLeopard (Il Gattopardo): ‘everything changes [in politics] in order to remain the same [in economics]’. Such totality was then perverted by Gentile and Mussolini into the ideology of ‘totalitarianism’, meaning total organisation of society by the state from above, fusing the politics and economics; Nazism brought this to perfection, while Stalinism largely came to follow a kindred idea, equally bloody if more productive in technologically backward societies. Both were centrally aspiring to a kind of divine perfection, perhaps relevant to times before the Industrial revolution and its new normality of disconcerting change within one lifetime, beginning with the Napoleonic wars: not to speak about the following revolutions in technology and cognition, in perfectly evil feedback with bigger wars. Shocked by all these politics, Arendt and the liberaldoxa of postmodernism not only rightly refused them but also threw the baby out with the bathwater, logically ending in ‘weak thought’ (pensiero debole).

        It is much more economical to wash and grow the baby: that is, to retain the concept of strategic, flexible, and imperfect totalities.17 ‘Strategic’ means shaped by deep and cognitively argued macro-situational necessities; ‘flexible’ means changeable in extension and intension; ‘imperfect’ means not only unfinished but, in principle, unfinishable dualities and multiplicities. No image or notion is graspable except as such a (provisional!) historical totality. Thomas More’s great insight, philosophical and literary, was to formalise such a totality in his Book 2 of Utopia as a happy and virtuous country and counter-universe organised in politico-economical categories, not simply a moral fable about a piecemeal problem as were his Polylerites, Achorii, and Macarenses in Book 1,18 estranged into abstract generality rather than into sociopolitical analytics.

        ‘Total’, in this discussion, does not mean all-exhaustive, nor that everything is to be planned from above and violently enforced, as Cold War propaganda insinuated. Many major SF and utopian writings are open-ended totalities. Indeed, every poem, story or book is an invitation to the readers’ cognitive participation and re-membering. Any totality has inbuilt contradictions which make for changes, glacially slow or explosively sudden. The art of planning, of being ready for the unforeseeable future, is to find the dominant contradiction.19

A third axiom: strategic, flexible, and imperfect totalities are the only thinkable cognitive acts.

3. Some transitive foci of utopia/nism: around anti-utopia

From a number of categories under which the cognitive investigations of SF and utopia/nism can be grouped, I can here dwell only on freedom vs. destiny, some further aspects of anti-utopia, and our salvational choice: violence vs. care. The first of these three foci leads into some further delving into anti-utopia and the third follows logically as its upshot.

3.1. Freedom and destiny: the arbiter actant

As Marx clarifies in Capital,Volume 3, in the sphere of material production – which is under the sway of necessity – ‘[freedom] can consist only in … the associated producers govern[ing] the human metabolism with nature in a rational way. … The true realm of freedom, the development of human powers as an end in itself, begins beyond it. … The reduction of the working day [in material production] is the basic prerequisite’.20 I speak of freedom in our unhappy epoch where millennial class society is breaking down yet redoubles its tenacious hold in its death throes (to which I shall return under the rubric of repressive intolerance), while the truly free society of the associated producers cannot yet be born. In this most dangerous interregnum of ours, the arts and imagination in general register deeply and durably both the disalienated horizons and the fullness of human alienations. As an extraordinary passage by Simmel has it: ‘the intellect is egalitarian and as it were communist’, for its contents are both generally communicable and, if correct, generally shareable ‘by every  sufficiently educated mind (Geist) … and the potential infinity of disseminating theoretical imaginations has no influence on their meaning, [so that] they exclude private property’.21 Simmel is  probably echoing, with more prudence in more complexly alienated times, Plato’s equally astounding proposition in Meno that any slave is capable of understanding geometry.22 Centrally, disseminated fiction’s contract with the reader is ‘not just egalitarian … [but constitutive of] the story-teller’s art itself. The moral of the very act of fabulation was the equality of the intelligence’.23 Such astriving for freedom through understanding, assumed from Aristotle to Rousseau as a natural human right though often unnaturally suppressed,is here discussed within ‘word art’, literature in the widest sense of all oral and written instances, and taking as its pars pro toto narrative agents, with a focus on theactant as arbiter.

Among the structurally necessary functions of narrative agents, as pioneered by Vladimir Propp and Claude Lévi-Strauss and worked out in many variations from Étienne Souriau to Yuri Lotman, the most important for the narrative horizon and the outcome of events is the actant as Mandator or Arbiter. Usually called Destiny, as the Greek ananke it was a religious (mythical) notion fusing violent power with transcendent necessity, best codified at the outset in the Oedipus myth and plays. But historically hegemonic necessity may change, as already foreshadowed by Sophocles’s Antigone, nostalgically loyal to the old values, and in overtly subversive fashion by Aeschylus’s Prometheus, for the moment – a long historical age of class society – bound. Thus, the opposition of freedom and destiny can be used as one key to the interplay of the posited intra-textual and the presupposed extratextual elements of narration.24 This interplay varies according to the writers’ and readers’ structures of experience and feeling about force relationships in history. In what I call metaphysical genres like horror or heroic fantasy – and ever more so in myth – Destiny is sovereign; in early bourgeois ‘realism’ and SF it is not – characters and its actions, successful or failed, are decisive. This means that the SF plot is typically open or ‘epic’, where the plot of metaphysical genres is typically closed or ‘mythic’.25

            In the Middle Ages, Destiny was subsumed under the equally capricious and numinous monotheistic God.26 But the corrosive hegemony of bourgeois individualism downgraded Destiny and annexed it to the – more or less typical – individual conflict of the Protagonist’s vs. the Antagonist’s wills and forces. This was, in a way, a huge liberation from under an idealised Mycenean (later feudal) Lord (anax, Dominus). Such a liberation was foreshadowed in the best Athenian rebels: from the quite explicit and programmaticalPrometheus Bound to the less monolithic but still exemplaryBacchae. But this latter play already prefigures the downfall of the free aspect of the polis, overwhelmed by the slave-owning empires, whose defeat finally bred Christianity as a realtertium datur: slavery, oppression, and misery on Earth, freedom, equality, and bliss in the heavens. This illusory compromise collapsed with the dominance of merchant capitalism. Modern SF after Verne and Wells, at its best, shared the liberatory aspect of bourgeois realism – nothing is foreordained, it all depends on the situation and the actions within it, mainly by our Protagonist: Ursula Le Guin’s Shevek, or Philip K. Dick’s Hoppy, or the Strugatsky brothers’ explorer hero with many names. At any rate, from the nineteenth century on, the ideological master code of industrial society became History as Destiny and Power, I found in a depth in investigation of SF in the United Kingdom between 1848 and 1885.27 True, an open ending does not, again realistically, lead to necessary success: within the spread of SF horizons between eutopian and dystopian, it may well lead to utter defeat. But the defeat is as a rule causally explicable and contingent rather than destined: it can be undone by other actions and/or other situations, in the same Possible World or other ones.

            What happens to Destiny in these last three or four decades of boundless financialised imperialism, under the new hegemon of existential anti-utopia (registered early on by some of us, most prominently by Jameson)? It is omnipresent and inescapable as its grimmest ancestors were, from Zeus and Yahweh on, it punishes by death and torture as they did, but it has also grown actantially invisible – a hidden yet powerful God, not posed or explicit but presupposed and structurally necessary in order to make readable sense of the stories. In what one should concede is a masterpiece of monolithically successful inculcation by massified means, anti-utopia instils its theology tacitly. It is the system of feral social Darwinism where the strong man fights and the weak man dies, the allegorical ‘Man’ standing both for machismo and for entire human groups and classes.28 As usual, the Nazis’ ‘racial’ theory, flying in the face of the fact that there are no races within the speciesHomo sapiens sapiens, carried this system to its ultimate and clearest extreme; however, in their situation of incomplete hegemony the Arbiter had to be biologised and enforced by both open and hidden mass murder. It is much more economical for globalised capitalism to enforce it by misery plus tacit assumptions that cannot even be noticed by the mass reader or TV consumer, though ongoing structural violence causes tens of millions of premature deaths, while tens of thousands of outright murders whenever rebellion rises are an indispensable complement.

This, as it were, Destiny degrades power struggles between people into total inhumanity, well emblematised in the SF militarists’ predilection for ‘Bugs’ or Bug-Eyed Monsters, that have to be squashed as rats or bacteria (pardon me, viruses) – see Heinlein at his most virulent in Starship Troopers and the movie adaptation by Paul Verhoeven. The old adage ‘hate the sin not the sinner’ is swept into oblivion, physical repression by hunger, untreated pandemics or the bullet is getting to be the order of the day. Going Marcuse one better after the demise of the welfare state, we have to update his 1960s concept of repressive tolerance intorepressive intolerance, sometimes masquerading as repressive quasi-semi-demi-tolerance. If God and communism are dead, everything is allowed, we do not really need all those silly parliamentary masks anyway, Twitter and violence suffice (personifications: Trump, Bolsonaro, and the mini-dictators in size but not cruelty from the East European bosses Orbán and Kaczyński to general el-Sisi and the hereditary Kim).

3.2. Anti-utopia as norm: closed horizon and infiltrating form

US SF, as a whole, was, for four decades, from the New Deal on, sociologically based on an ascending middle class that began rapidly falling behind, falling down in power and confidence, and falling apart; and in particular, on the intellectuals (the apprentice ones from roughly 13 to 25 years, and the adult ones after that age). The closing of the Golden Age of SF and its implied utopianism can be precisely dated to ca. 1974,29 the end of the anti-war and Black protests in the USA and the beginning of an initially slow but soon strengthening Right-wing offensive. US SF was always ideologically ‘two-souled’, and it was further hollowed out both by the Zeitgeist and by a well-funded turn to militarist fiction.30 True, feminist utopias held on significantly longer and were in the 1980s joined by the best cyberpunk, since both had important and active constituencies – US and European feminists, as well as the new media and internet intellectuals of the globalising North. But these two important dissident movements proved too isolated for a successful counter-offensive, especially since SF was getting downgraded into a poor relative of Tolkien, Conan, and horror fantasy.31 This made for a social-Darwinist reduction of history to a point-like eternity where only quantities matter and fashions change, squarely aimed at expunging the indelible ‘amphibiousness’ of a utopia that participates in the present and in the (possible) future.32

            Intellectuals are two-souled, oscillating between the rulers and the ruled, the exploiters and the exploited; this can be registered in US SF, as I’ve discussed elsewhere.33 I saw the opposed poles as being a destructive soul focussed on adolescent fears, technological fixes, violence and war – exactly like today’s Trumpists – and a cognitive soul focussed on salvation, where truth shall make you free (if you recognise and practice it). In other words, the intellectual’s need for freedom and control over one’s own product, in order simply to ply his or her trade, may be oriented either toward a liberatory hybrid between citoyen and comrade, or toward dreams of a new ruling class in their own image. The latter can be well seen in their grasping for alternative yet quite hierarchical power systems, pioneered by the ambiguous Francis Bacon and the more resolutely closed Tommaso Campanella, where the adumbrated worlds are either a rigid lay monastery or a rigid research science set-up.34 Utopias by intellectuals (are there any other ones?) also demonstrate a taste for closing systems, as Roland Barthes found, or more precisely an anti-cognitive ideological aspect, fortunately, in the best cases, recessive rather than dominant.35 All these were easily squelched by commercial capitalism and absolutism, well shown by More’s fate as an epochally significant but failed political heresiarch; and his ‘first new image of the role of the intellectual’ since Augustine of Hippo, the glimpse of humanists as a new ruling class, was definitively downgraded by the industrial grande bourgeoisie36 which created the prevailing image of utopia as synonym of the impossible and ridiculous.

            Enter, at the turn of our twenty-first century, anti-utopia, a subject so new and so important that it will bear revisiting. My thesis is that anti-utopia as horizon and form is a major novelty, related to the fact that its original bearers are not only and not primarily professional intellectuals but professional politicians, the state apparatus of violence and its embedded think-tanks. Anti-utopia is the latest crown for the ruling classes’ repressive tradition, evolving in my generation from welfare-state pseudo-tolerance into intolerance. Intolerant repression was always the material truth of violent power. Lately, it ranges from refusal of money and careers for deviant thinkers, proclaimed unthinkably confused and/or dogmatic (!), to incarceration (probably the case for a great majority of officially assumed ‘terrorists’, if we are to judge from the US criminal justice as applied to the poor, beginning with the visible ‘others’ of women, Blacks, and immigrants). It ends with assassinations, so frequently instanced in US politics by the Kennedys, the leadership of the Black Panthers’, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and many humbler people under the media radar. Anti-utopia is the horizon that holds that all central power and ideological pillars are untouchable, like Yahweh: I am that I am; but it is also the vector of intolerant repression in order to eternalise the ruling system as the best possible one. The ruthless saturation of imaginary space in an eternal present makes anti-utopia’s grip very powerful indeed.

            A revealing light is thrown on the genesis and form of anti-utopia, and on its rise to the age’s doxa or common sense crowding out Destiny, by the new political ontology of the US ruling class – and to a degree all rulers of its allied and even enemy states – after 9/11. In this oligarchic ontology, imagination directly issues into factual states. Whether the US federal government really feared a worldwide ‘Islamist’ insurrection or simply used this as a godsent opportunity to invoke ‘Homeland security’, creating in 2002 the titanic eponymous department, what it also excogitated and engaged upon was the evilnovum of ‘a parallel ... extra-legal universe’.37This was an alternative, largely secret and hidden world obeying new procedures of violent power and creating new spaces for it: on the one hand ‘extraterritorial rendition networks, prison archipelagos, and secret “black site” facilities’, on the other, ‘indefinite detentions, military tribunals, and executive circumventions of national and international law’ permitting planned kidnappings and killings of anybody the central security agencies deemed important enough.38 This parallel world in the interstices of our everyday one ruthlessly jettisoned not only basic principles of international law but the whole of lay theory and practice of humanist-cum-liberal history and culture; that is, it jettisoned the revolutionary citoyen values in favour of a blend of slave-owning empires, colonial subjugation, the Holy Inquisition, and strictest World-War-type secrecy and disinformation. It is the best empirical approximation to Lovecraft’s vague but malignantly powerful Dark Gods.

            Two factors seem to me central here: first, the establishment of what Elaine Scarry calls an alternative universe with different permissibilities – ‘different bases for fact, standards of proof, evidentiary parameters, rights, procedures, penalties, guarantees, and expectations’.39 It fits well the urge of rulers in late capitalism for the state of exception or a de facto martial law, applicable at will and in piecemeal fashion. This was theorised most clearly by the Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, undergoing a revival at those times, and observed also by Judith Butler within a critical Agambenian frame. However, Butler goes one important step further, noting that it is ‘a paralegal universe that goes by the name of law’.40 For the second defining factor of the existential anti-utopia systematically developed from within the nuclei of our ruling classes – and zealously followed by (sad to say) very many intellectuals right down to a tacitly new understanding of dystopia as cynically inevitable – is that this new universe is not openly affirmed, as in its four historical predecessors identified above and their culmination in Nazism; on the contrary, it propositionally and axiologically splits off from the official universe, still ruled by publicly accessible contracts and remaining in force for the docile masses of the ruled (in the more affluent North, at least) insofar as they remain exploitable or otherwise usable. The secret world works by covertly yet systematicallyinfiltrating the overt one, in which it is revealed first by macro-events that cannot be denied (but can be misnamed), such as the mass bombings from Afghanistan and Serbia to Syria or Libya, and then by the occasional courageous whistle-blower, who is made to pay dearly: from Frank Snepp (CIA, 1977) and Mordechai Vanunu (Israeli nuclear weapons, 1986) to John Kiriakou (CIA 2007), Chelsea Manning (US Army, 2010), Edward Snowden (NSA, 2013) and so on.41 Were there space, I would undertake to show that existential anti-utopia is the left hand of darkness, whose right hand is the incessant murderous warfare of late capitalism which has never stopped from 1914 on. It is indeed warfare that in our Capitalocene first clearly grew into the substitute for liberatory politics and the unacknowledged economical pillar of the system.42

            I concluded, in my ‘What Existential Anti-Utopia Means for Us’,43that anti-utopia was a targeted and embattled ideologico-political use of a closed horizon to render unthinkable both the eutopia of a better possible world and dystopia as an awful warning about the tendencies in the writer’s and readers’ present. Anti-utopia stifles not only the right to dissent but primarily the desire for radical novelty – in brief, it dismantles any possibility of plebeian democracy. This was a world-historical novum by which the ideologico-political development of capitalism, that had all along produced fakenovums galore, morphed by the beginning of twenty-first century into this encompassing monster – existential anti-utopia as a super-weapon. One of its pillars was the Cold War misuse of 1984, whose ambiguities, weaknesses, and plain errors44 allowed its use for proving that any alternative to capitalism would be even worse. I think Orwell himself would be horrified by the horizon of a world where all people and human possibilities existed only as adjunct exploitable labour for profit or as mercenary servants.

3.3 Violence vs. care: an ending in creation

I could think of several worthy ways in which to end an article on these concerns, but one stark dichotomy seems most useful: the one between Violence and Care in relationships between people, including their metabolism with nature.45 On the side of Violence is Class Power and Embedded Science, on the side of Care is Liberating Knowledge.46 Violence, as part of the semantic cluster of ‘power in operation’,47 is one keyword of any political epistemology. I have discussed it at some length,48 concluding that power (Macht) is inherent in any interhuman situation or politics, whereas violence (Gewalt) is predicated on the manifold tensions between and inside groups or classes of dominators and dominated. I defined as violence psychophysicallesion of people, usually with irreversible traces, deviating from the hegemonic British sense of ‘opposition to legal power’.49 Economic harm to commodities or other property may well be destructive and punishable, but it constitutes violence only if it leads to wounds, hunger, or similar. Capitalism can only exist by means of a ceaseless and pitiless ‘primordial accumulation’ violently ruining the lives of entire subordinate classes, as exemplarily posited in Marx’s pages on sixteenth-century England and re-actualised byRosa Luxemburg even before the World Wars and other globalisations. The permanent violence needed for the accumulation of capital was consubstantial with militarism. Much the largest amount of violence is to be found in ripe capitalism due to high-technology wars which have in the twentieth century caused at least110 million deaths;50 I would include within the ambit of violence severe psychic lesions, from prolonged stress to terror, which victimises hundreds of millions. While all violence is contemptible, it can be divided into individual, group, and state violence against people, and, as a rule, state violence towers above the group one by a factor of circa 2,000 to 1. Mutually reinforcing causal factors of violence are state violence, omnipresent everyday alienation in work conditions and its repercussions on all human relationships, as well as other forms of ‘structural’ or ‘systemic violence’ – such as extreme poverty leading to death by hunger and/or avoidable diseases, at present threatening more than three billion people.

Are there situations when violence is justified, and if yes, for what ends and in which measure?

First, not all violence, whatever its excuse may be, is permissible: for example, killing civilians in declared or undeclared wars, or any torturing. All violence testifies to a profound sickness of the system and persons generating and using it. Nonetheless, self-defence is recognised by most historical systems. If it aims to counteract and minimise societal violence as a whole and to diminish its causes, this may justify counter-violence. I have come to the conclusion – as finally did Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., and even, it seems, Gandhi – thatcounter-violence is not so hurtful as the want of it. When individual and communal human rights are routinely violated, oppressed people can and should react, first by using their power of disbelief, in order to recognise the disinformation and cultural lies used to keep them in their place, and then by coming together in collective action. For,central to and constitutive of violence is a denial of personal psychophysical integrity and therefore of freedom as a basic human need and right. It amounts to an overt or covert racism that classifies certain types of people as not Us but Them, so that inhumanity in their regard can be masked, denied, and induced as normal. In particular, counter-violence is inescapable in situations involving armed repression by the police, military or private mercenaries. A strict differentiation between justifiable and unjustifiable violence then becomes mandatory; it necessarily centres on state-militarised repression but should also include reactive groups and individuals internalising the institutionalised violence. Even when forced counter-violence is permissible, it is fraught with long-range dangers, so that keeping it to the necessary minimum must remain a permanent objective.

The central argument has been most memorably formulated in the final two articles of the Jacobin Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen of 1793: 

Article 34: The societal body is oppressed when any of its members is oppressed. All members are oppressed when the societal body is oppressed.

Article 35: When government violates the rights of the people, insurrection is the most sacred right and the most indispensable duty of the people and of any part of the people.

In conclusion, I would go further and claim that violence and creation (poiein), are the two opposed poles of power. All creation, the domain of de-alienation, relates to people and values. It does so directly ascare, and indirectly asunderstanding about situations and the causes of events. Taking a cue from Ricoeur’s note that human beings are “designated as a power to exist”,51 I would tabularise the following alternatives:

VARIETIES OF THE POWER TO EXIST