This piece derives in part from an article I wrote in October 2011, titled Recurring Dreams: the red heart of fascism. In that article, I tried to analyze two different types of debt (the money-debt and the life-debt) in the light of the history of Western capitalism and of the current financial crisis. Also, I drew a number of comparisons between the current European/American situation and the one experienced during the inter-war period by those countries defeated in WWI. I attempted to warn of a recurrence of the breeding times of fascism/nazism, in which people’s exasperation for the devastating effects of a debt crisis risks turning into the desire for a higher authority to take absolute control and impose a new order. Finally, I warned of the ‘red’ – that is, left-wing, social – core of the early 20th century versions of fascism and nazism, and I identified similar desires in vast strata of today’s left.
Since I wrote that text, however, things have changed. With the rise of unelected, technocratic governments in Italy and Greece, with the deepening of the crisis and the enforcement of even more austerity measures, with the waves of occupations and repression in countless countries, and, most notably, with the umpteenth split in the left, the set of dangers and opportunities, I believe, has changed. To the risk of fascism, still present in the hearts of many, especially on the populist fringes, I would like to add that of authoritarian social capitalism. To the opportunity of revolutionary politics, I would like to add that of prefigurative-politics and of anarchist reformism.
