The spectacle of politics lives on as the spectacle of its decomposition. Disbelief goes nicely with the filthy landscape. The National Front, that politi­cal negation of politics, that negation of politics on the terrain of politics, logically occupies the "center" of this chessboard of smoking ruins. The human passengers, spellbound, are watching their shipwreck like a first-rate show. They are so enthralled that they don't feel the water that's already bathing their legs. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.8
This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live enveloped in a fog of com­mentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that don't trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations. And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world. There's nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can be said about him, he's already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he's proud of it. Even the creators of South Park are throwing in the towel: "It's very complicated now that satire has become reality. We really tried to laugh about what is going on but it wasn't possible to maintain the rhythm. What was happening was much funnier that what could be imagined. So we decided to let it go, to let them do their comedy, and we'll do ours." We live in a world that has established itself beyond any justification. Here, criticism doesn't work, any more than satire does. Neither one has any impact. To limit oneself to denouncing discriminations, oppressions, and injustices, and expect to harvest the fruits of that is to get one's epochs wrong. Leftists who think they can make something happen by lifting the lever of bad conscience are sadly mistaken. They can go and scratch their scabs in public and air their grievances hoping to arouse sympathy as much as they like; they'll only give rise to contempt and the desire to destroy them. "Victim" has become an insult in every part of the world. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.9
There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now. It's no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public personalities who "do communication," it's every self-entrepreneur that this society wants to turn us into who prac­tices the art of "public relations." Having become an instrument of communication, language is no longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies. Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to dis­ tort things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become universal. One doesn't shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses "offer jobs." The surveillance cameras are "video-protection devices." The executioners complain that they're being persecuted. The trai­tors profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand, and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counter­ point, the perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of others. In all quarters it's only a question of preserving or extending one's interests. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.9-10
Official politics has become so manifestly a repugnant sphere of decep­tion that the only events still happening in that sphere reduce down to a paradoxical expression of hatred of politics. If Donald Trump is truly a figure of hatred it's because he is first and foremost a figure of the hatred of politics. And it's this hatred that carried him to power. The Invisible Committee, Now, p.60
An essential aspect of fascism is its birth in the streets, its use of disorder to impose order, its mobilisation of the old middle classes crazed by their own decline, and its regeneration, from without, of a state unable to deal with the crisis of capitalism. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
Dictatorship is not a weapon of capital (as if capital could replace it with other, less brutal weapons): dictatorship is one of its tendencies, a tendency realised whenever it is deemed necessary. A “return” to parliamentary democracy, as it occurred in Germany after 1945, indicates that dictatorship is useless for integrating the masses into the state (at least until the next time). The problem is therefore not that democracy ensures a more pliant domination than dictatorship: anyone would prefer being exploited in the Swedish mode to being abducted by the henchmen of Pinochet. But does one have the choice? Even the gentle democracy of Scandinavia would be turned into a dictatorship if circumstances demanded it. The state can only have one function, which it fulfils democratically or dictatorially. The fact that the former is less harsh does not mean that it is possible to reorient the state to dispense with the latter. Capitalism’s forms depend no more on the preferences of wage workers than they do on the intentions of the bourgeoisie. Weimar capitulated to Hitler with open arms. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
Fascism is unique in giving counter-revolution a mass base and in mimicking revolution. Fascism turns the call to “transform the imperialist war into civil war” against the workers’ movement, and it appears as a reaction of demobilised veterans returning to civilian life, where they are nothing, only held together by collective violence, and bent on destroying everything they imagine to be a cause of their dispossession: subversives, enemies of the nation, etc. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
The rise of fascism in the start of the 20th century
It is significant that fascism first defined itself as a form of organisation and not as a programme. The word referred both to a symbol of state power (fasces, or bundles, borne before high officials in Ancient Rome), and to a will to get people together in bundles (groups). Fascism’s only programme is to organise, to forcibly make the components of society converge. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
Fascism’s goal was the authoritarian restoration of the state, in order to create a new state structure capable (in contrast to democracy, Mussolini said) of limiting big capital and of controlling the commodity logic which was eroding values, social ties and work. For decades, the bourgeoisie had denied the reality of social contradictions. Fascism, on the contrary, proclaimed them with violence, denying their existence between classes and transposing them to the struggle between nations, denouncing Italy’s fate as a “proletarian nation”. Mussolini was archaic in so far as he upheld traditional values ruined by capital, and modern in so far as he claimed to defend the social rights of the people. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
On August 1st, the Alliance of Labour, which included the railway workers’ union, the CGL and the anarchist USI, called a general strike. Despite broad success, the Alliance officially called off the strike on the 3rd. In numerous cities, however, it continued in insurrectionary form, which was finally contained only by a combined effort of the police and the military, supported by naval cannon, and, of course, reinforced by the fascists. Who defeated this proletarian energy? The general strike was broken by the state and the fasci, but it was also smothered by democracy, and its failure opened the way to a fascist solution to the crisis. What followed was less a coup d’état than a transfer of power with the support of a whole array of forces. The “March on Rome” of the Duce (who actually took the train) was less a showdown than a bit of theatre: the fascists went through the motions of assaulting the state, the state went through the motions of defending itself, and Mussolini took power. His ultimatum of October 24 (“We Want To Become the State!”) was not a threat of civil war, but a signal to the ruling class that the National Fascist Party represented the only force capable of restoring state authority, and of assuring the political unity of the country. The army could still have contained the fascist groups gathered in Rome, which were badly equipped and notoriously inferior on the military level, and the state could have withstood the seditious pressure. But the game was not being played on the military level. Under the influence of Badoglio in particular (the commander-in-chief in 1919-21) legitimate authority caved in. The king refused to proclaim a state of emergency, and on the 30th he asked the Duce to form a new government. The liberals — the same people anti-fascism counts on to stop fascism — joined the government. With the exception of the socialists and the communists, all parties sought a rapprochement with the PNF and voted for Mussolini: the parliament, with only 35 fascist MPs, supported Mussolini’s investiture 306-116. Giolitti himself, the great liberal icon of the time, an authoritarian reformer who had been head of state many times before the war, and then again in 1920-21, whom fashionable thought still fancies in retrospect as the sole politician capable of opposing Mussolini, supported him up to 1924. Democracy not only surrendered its powers to the dictator, but ratified them. We might add that in the following months, several unions, including those of the railway workers and the sailors, declared themselves “national”, patriotic, and therefore not hostile to the regime: repression did not spare them. Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
In order to found the bourgeois mode of production, it was not necessary for all workers to be given equality under the sign of “the citizen”. Historically, “citizen” only names a specific category to which both property owners and certain proletarians are able to belong. As capitalist juridical relations disavow class through the reconstitution of the difference between citizen and other, the historical conditions under which the bourgeois mode of production was itself constituted were various forms of unfreedom. For this reason we have citizen and other as mapping onto: male (white)/ non-(white) male. For instance, under the conditions of slavery in North America, the classification of white was necessary to maintain the property of masters over slaves. Women were also classified as other, but for different reasons, as we shall see. […] Endnotes, The Logic of Gender, Endnotes #3 (2013), https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/the-logic-of-gender