The spectre of capitalist culture haunts even revolutionary organizations. During the French May ’68 uprising, a famous slogan stated: “Kill the cop in your head.” Fascism did not disappear in 1945, it merely was smashed from its molar form towards its molecular form, dispersed among institutions.
The archetype of authority, who monitors behaviour and doles out punishment or bestows praise, is embedded deep in the psyche of the individual. The entirety of society is regimented alongside lines of micro-fascistic mechanisms of power. Radical French political philosopher, Félix Guattari saw it as “The power of the bourgeois State, the power of any kind of bureaucracy, the power of academia, familial power, phallocratic power in male/female relationships, or even the repressive power of the super-ego over the individual” all stand ordered alongside order-giving and order-taking lines.
A particle of Hitler is within us each, threatening to burst forward, to assemble into a machine of genocidal monstrosity.
The State, the courts and the prisons, schools, trade unions, the universities and student unions, at the top of each stands a boss, the head looking down at the membership, the spine of the organisation. The institution is the Law, the sadist, wielding its cruel, cold and calculated power that it has amassed due to the hierarchical nature of its structure. It is herein that the anarchist critique of formal, hierarchical revolutionary organisations is borne out.
In 1934, when the German National Socialists emerged victorious, having crushed all opposition, held its massive Nuremberg rally attended by 700,000 party members, as chronicled in Leni Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda film, Triumph of the Will. Standing atop a majestic podium, Hitler speaks to a crowd of workers, in total domination over them. One by one, they shout out their birthplaces and skills and affirm their solidarity with the regime.
They stand ready to construct the Third Reich, Hitler its head, the people its spine. Will had indeed triumphed, where libidinal energies are concentrated upon a singular despotic investment which then sprawls across society. The swastika is hung from each building, curriculum is re-designed, the camps are being built and the uniforms recast, language altered, war-industry regenerated, draping the nation in pursuit of the Führer-signifier, death-spiraling towards self-annihilation.
This is not so different from the modern Leninist cult, at the head of which stands the Theorist, who substitutes reality for their own words, and establishes anew a despotic investment, albeit this time it is draped in the ghost of Lenin. Modelled on the Bolsheviks top-down structure, an anachronistic Politburo entrenches itself as the central committee, establishing a bureaucratic inertia which festers the solidification of internal party despotism. The more it solidifies, the more paranoid, the more it solidifies again, until it is detached from reality altogether, having dug deeper and deeper holes in support of its own theoretical correctness. When it is victorious, this micro-State asserts itself as a macro-State, replacing Czar Nicholas II with Stalin, replicating the very structures it claimed were its fundamental opposition.
The psychological product of this paranoia machine is the Militant. The self-identification of the individual as a Militant is the moment that despotism begins, when identity entrenches itself in one’s mind, and directs behaviour. It halts differentiation, laser-focusing consciousness on a singular force, stripping it of its freedom and arresting the flow of desire. The enmeshment of the soul with the identity of the Militant as a result of the paranoid environment is especially grave.
The Militant stands under strict orders in the regiment of the Theorist. Standing apart from society as a whole, their allegiance to the organism of the Party reigns supreme. The capitalist class stands at the top of society, looking down at the working class, believing them to be the mechanical force for surplus-value extraction. The Militant occupies a similar position vis-a-vis the working class, believing them to be a mechanical force of revolutionary action. Reality must be molded in the image of the Theory, a process which merely reflects the dogmatism arising from the structure of the Party itself, in which the Militant is molded in the image of the Theorist.
The Militant’s psyche is authoritarian, narrow-minded and dogmatic, soul-crushing and alienated from humanity. Miniature Hitlers and Miniature Lenins, two sides of the same coin, micro-fascisms fighting with each other for dominance. Thus, the trapping of reality within an organization that is coupled to a despot subverts reality itself. A simplistic, naive and authoritarian understanding of social change arises. The Militant seeks to bring to who they designate as “the masses,” the Theory in the form of flyers, newspapers and passionate speeches, but in doing so as the enlightened one, intentionally establishes a dominate-submissive relationship with them in preparation for their role in the authoritarian state they envision.
The French Situationist-influenced OJTR described the relationship in their 1972 pamphlet, “Militancy: highest stage of alienation” thusly, “The militant talks a lot about the masses. His activity is centered on them. He acts to convince them, to make them ‘achieve consciousness.’ And, yet the Militant is separated from “the masses” and their possibilities for revolt. This is because they are separated from their own desires. It is this artificial separation between the Militant and “the masses,” a category to be manipulated and dominated, that forms the authoritarian core of vanguardism.
Geotrauma
Fast forward seismology and you hear the earth scream.
Geotrauma is an ongoing process, whose tension is continually expressed – partially frozen – in biological organization.
—Maya B. Kronic, author, Cute Accelerationism
The structure of the cosmos provides a template for authoritarian forms of organisation. According to the theory of geotraumatics, the Earth’s surface is a memory bank of primal trauma. Catastrophic reordering by meteor showers, leading to extinction events, and shifts in the tectonic plates, which, as a moving spine, mercilessly inscribed its will upon the body of the Earth.
This is mirrored in the human spine, which in turn has centralized all sense-input in the brain, making it the ruler over the body. Life, which was created from the primordial soup, carries this geo-trauma forward within its biological organisation as it emerges in an already-stratified world from which it remembers the hierarchical manner of organising. It creates the impetus to exist within a hierarchy, according to Kronic’s theory. So, the Earth itself, the human body, even our cells, possess a hierarchical structure in which they are trapped, although the desire to break free can exist simultaneously.
Within the human mind there lies the potential, not necessity, for a totalitarian structuring of the mind, and subsequently, the body. For each individual, there is a potential despot embedded within their own corporeal organisation. When human processes behave fascistically, they do so as a subject in decay, one which has attached itself to a despotic signifier, and is in the process of drifting towards self-annihilation.
From the birth of the universe, and the meteor showers which afflicted Earth, creating the tectonic plates and its cruel shifts, to the primordial soup and the shaping of the spinal structure, to the consciousness of the human and its acceptance of despotic will, identity, gender and the super-ego, institutions and micro-fascisms of all sort amass themselves, suddenly there stands Hitler, the brain of the nation, directing the people, its spine.
However, rather than tracing a deterministic line from natural processes to social processes, it is possible to interrupt the development of the fascist psyche by appealing to the power of the subject. Fascism is one of the multitude of contingent ways in which the mind, and the body can be structured. There are also a myriad of subjectivities which refuse fascistic structuring, and subscribe to desires of liberation. To be non-fascistic is to strive to deterritorialize, to strike back against all the machinery which has clawed its way onto the surface of consciousness to secure in its place liberatory desires.