Lu Shaochen: The Neofascist Turn of Neoliberal Capitalism: Roots and Ways Out
I. Neoliberal Capitalism and the Crises and Dilemmas of Contemporary Society
In works such as The Birth of Biopolitics, Michel Foucault pointed out that, unlike classical liberalism, the character of neoliberalism as a form of power has become increasingly evident. "The problem of neoliberalism is... how to exercise political power in its entirety according to the principles of a market economy." The objective neoliberalism concerns itself with is the "privatization of social policy." By rendering market power absolute and fundamentalist, neoliberalism destroys social bonds and public consciousness; it weakens the concepts of awareness of the "other," responsibility, and moral obligation. It dissolves sympathy and warmth between people, rendering individuals indifferent to the suffering of others, or even mutually hostile and guarded. In the view of Henry Giroux, neoliberalism destroys the "ways of making a living and the love of neighbors" and "hollows out the core of democracy, undermining its legitimacy," devaluing all knowledge and virtue outside of mere survival skills. Ludwig von Mises, a representative figure of neoliberalism, labeled any socialist proposal that would guide, limit, or constrain the absolute status of market competition and financialization as "destructionism" [1], slandering it by claiming "Socialism is not helping to build or to create; it is helping to destroy. Destruction is its essence."
Once the political and value propositions of neoliberalism become state and social policy, they transform into dominant neoliberal capitalism, comprehensively squeezing the space and possibilities for social interaction, public action, and state governance. By eroding social bonds and moral boundaries, symptoms of "poverty of the spirit"—relative to an ethics and politics of responsibility and commitment—have permeated the entire society. Except for recognizing equality of opportunity, neoliberal capitalism completely rejects any program for substantive equality; its rise sowed the seeds of polarization and unbalanced development. Neoliberal capitalism maintains that oligopolies, and the resulting hereditary capitalism and neo-feudalism, do not violate the principle of free competition but are expressions or results of competition itself—that is, "a massive increase in the degree of socio-economic inequality, a marked deepening of the degree of exploitation of the world's poorest countries and peoples, a catastrophic global environment, a volatile global economy, and unprecedented opportunities for the wealthy to enrich themselves."
Neoliberal capitalism has thoroughly inverted the relationship between production and consumption; specifically, the explicit proposition of neoliberal capitalism is the comprehensive control and dominance of production by consumers as money-holders. Mises explicitly argued that only production dominated by consumers is "democratic" production, and from this, he developed a logic of production centered on credit, debt-based consumption, and the wealthy. It must be pointed out here that Marx’s identification in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 of the essence of capitalist industry as a "eunuch" [2] subservient to the money-holding "consumer" was not yet profound enough. It was only when writing Capital that Marx further elaborated that commodity fetishism contains not merely the reification of social relations, but that within these reified relations there simultaneously exist unequal relations of power and subordination—namely, the subordinate relationship of production to exchange, and exchange to capital valorization. The actual situation of the inversion in neoliberal capitalism is far more serious than what it proclaims, or even what Marx observed in the 1844 Manuscripts. For instance, the financialization and securitization of neoliberal capitalism have turned the economy into a form of "fictitious valorization" [3] that is detached from production and relies purely on the power of capital. As Jodi Dean has pointed out: "With the closing of the process of real subsumption [4], capitalism today is making itself worse. The monopolistic concentration of digital capitalism, increasing inequality, and the subservience of government to the market are leading to the birth of a kind of neo-feudalism. In this society, accumulation is realized through rent, debt, and power... the valorization process has expanded far beyond the factory into complex, speculative, and unstable closed loops, increasingly dependent on surveillance, coercion, and violence... This does not mean there are no longer capitalist production and relations of exploitation, but rather that other aspects of capitalist production—such as expropriation, dominance, and coercion—have become so powerful that it is no longer meaningful for organized free and equal subjects to confront one another in the labor market."
If the Protestant ethic and classical liberalism still emphasized the time and efficiency of material production, neoliberalism emphasizes absolute data, information, and algorithms. In works such as Psychopolitics, the Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han points out: "Neoliberalism, as another form—namely a variant of capitalism—is not primarily concerned with biology, the physique, or the body; it discovered that the psyche is actually the productive force." "To increase productivity, it is no longer necessary to overcome physical resistance; rather, one must optimize the processes of the psyche and the mind"—that is, using all means to obtain money as the vehicle for exercising power. Therefore, the victory of neoliberalism manifests as the victory of monetarism and the logic of financialization based upon it. This causes the objectification of the "essential powers of the self" [5]—traditionally traced through labor—to face severe challenges; the driving force and positive mindset for actively constructing and creating the world have suffered a serious setback.
The arrival of the era of neoliberal capitalism is also reflected in the transformation of state governance and political principles. If Hegel once envisioned the separation of the state and civil society—where the state lays down general conditions for the normal functioning of civil society, and civil society is the "system of needs"—the sovereignty theory of neoliberal capitalism explicitly transforms the political activities of the state into governance activities centered on money-holders. Niklas Olsen, in The Sovereign Consumer: A New Intellectual History of Neoliberalism, provides a deep analysis and critique of this: neoliberal consumption is no longer the "satisfaction of needs" described by Hegel, but the satisfaction of desire. Consumption has become a pleasure in the exercise of power through money, dominating the direction and content of material production, and subsequently influencing the operation of the state and politics. Through the assumption that only the consumer is an independent and free subject, the democracy of neoliberal capitalist state governance and political operation has further transformed into a "democracy of money." The sovereignty of money and capital has become an important principle of the political paradigm in the era of neoliberal capitalism. Perry Anderson and others have thus posited that state sovereignty in the neoliberal capitalist era is fragmented, or even thoroughly capitalized. The space for social solidarity, which could still be fulfilled by the (non-fully marketized) welfare state, has been lost. This has led to a major frustration in people's willingness to participate in social integration, public politics, and democracy; or rather, the positive substance of democratic politics has been hollowed out. Axel Honneth believes that this lack of socio-political life is the root of modern spiritual distress; in the "abyss of failed sociality," the pain people feel "finds no resonance in the expressions of public space."
In other words, neoliberal capitalism swallows the space for state governance by making the state revolve entirely around the market, especially large corporations in financial markets. Neoliberalism regards the free financial market as the organizational and governing principle and orientation of the state... the state is supervised by the financial market rather than the financial market being supervised by the state. Unlike traditional fascism and Keynesianism, which packaged the state as the protector of the "losers," neoliberal capitalism tries its best to describe the state as a totalitarian, corrupt, and morally degenerate entity, believing that government is not the solution to the problem, but is the problem itself. That is to say, except for maintaining international financial circulation, the government that governs least is the best government; it seems the only "just and legitimate" government is one that maintains the status of financial hegemony.
Sheldon S. Wolin, in his book Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, regards this neoliberal capitalist principle—which treats the market and corporations as the supreme standards—as "inverted totalitarianism": the state can only obey and execute the logic of large financial corporations, and the supreme power of the sovereign has been transferred to globally influential corporations. James K. Galbraith, in The Predator State, points out even more directly how, under the control of large corporations, the era of neoliberal capitalism has transitioned from a welfare state system to a neoliberal state system that preys on ordinary people. This ultimately leads to a negative correlation between economic growth and employment rates or labor income, continuously producing large numbers of unemployed and precariously employed people, even affecting the middle class. In the era of neoliberal capitalism, a significant portion of the middle class or white-collar intellectuals—who originally relied on diligence and hard work to change their destiny—have been reduced to the new "losers."
The massive numbers of unemployed, the helpless, and those who see no meaning in diligence or hard work, have caused the basic mental state of "burnout" and "impotence" created by neoliberal capitalism to escalate into dissatisfaction and hatred toward the self and others. People's psychological longing for solidarity and a sense of belonging has transformed into the identity politics of racism, gender, ethnicity, or nationalism. There are various judgments in academia regarding the connection between neoliberal capitalism and neo-fascism. Some scholars believe that neoliberal capitalism, as a form of financial totalitarianism, is itself a new type of fascism. Ronald W. Cox, in "Capitalism and Neofascism," specifically notes that if one considers how neoliberal capitalism has used the state for decades to prevent, attack, and slander the claims of democracy, socialism, and common prosperity—all to maintain the status of neoliberal capitalist "accumulation by dispossession" and the market's categorical imperative—then neoliberal capitalism is itself already neo-fascism. Other scholars believe that neoliberal capitalism, on one hand, directs hatred and dissatisfaction toward foreign countries or ethnic groups by searching for scapegoats, while on the other hand, it transforms crises into bailouts for financialized enterprises, thereby either obscuring or further intensifying a neo-fascist crisis of polarization and mutual hatred. As John Bellamy Foster has pointed out: "The greatest inequality in history, combined with the deteriorating economic and social situation for the majority of the population, etc., has caused widespread dissatisfaction, and this dissatisfaction remains largely unable to find full expression. Capital’s response to this unstable situation is to try to mobilize a large number of reactionary lower-middle-class people against the upper-middle class and the working class (especially through racist attacks on immigrants) and to make the state an enemy external to the market. David Harvey recently called this strategy an 'alliance' developing between neoliberalism and neo-fascism." William I. Robinson argues: "Whether in the typical form of the 20th century or the possible variants of 21st-century neo-fascism, fascism is a specific response to the crisis of capitalism."
In the analysis of Western leftist scholars, classical fascism is a political form in which capital is completely subordinate to the bourgeois nation-state, leading to the disappearance of civil society and the suspension of democratic freedoms. Against a backdrop of precarious living conditions for the common people, it possesses a powerful capacity for social mobilization; it is the result of a combination of irrationalist sentiment and manipulative rationalism, manifesting as military dictatorship, concentration camps, and the violent repression of various paramilitary forces (the SS). Neo-fascism differs from this because neoliberal transnational capital has already hijacked and held the nation-state hostage. As Prabhat Patnaik argues: "Neoliberal economic policies are the product of the regime of hegemony of international finance capital; they embody the preferences of international finance capital. In a world of globalized and internationalized capital, where the state remains a nation-state, these preferences are imposed on every nation-state, for otherwise capital would flow out of that country, thereby causing a serious financial crisis... As a nation-state, it must follow the preferences of globalized finance, or else there would be a flight of funds from that economy, triggering a financial crisis." Patnaik believes that, unlike traditional fascism which leads to global war, neo-fascism—even if it seizes state power and forms a fascist state—cannot trigger a large-scale world war. Instead, it merely increases national and racial hatred, continuously manufacturing conflicts and contradictions to divert public attention. "Contemporary fascism can neither gain the kind of support that fascism originally obtained (because it could alleviate the crisis), nor can it destroy itself in a massive war as before. For this reason, it is likely to become a more lasting phenomenon." Consequently, Patnaik regards neo-fascism as a "low-intensity fascism," but it is by no means without danger: "as long as neoliberal capitalism continues to exist, the crisis generated by the fascist tendencies it causes will not change; as long as neoliberal capitalism continues to exist, we will be stuck in the predicament of the long-term existence of fascism."
Robinson likewise points out that in the era of globalized neoliberal capitalism—or neoliberal global capitalism—neo-fascism cannot be understood as the project of a single nation-state. This is because the core of neo-fascism is a "triangle consisting of transnational capital, reactionary political forces within the state, and neo-fascist forces within civil society." Since international finance capital has no interest in economic nationalism, it is difficult even for the far-right fascism of one country to replicate the totalizing dominance of traditional fascism. In an interview titled "We Are on the Road to Neo-Fascism," Noam Chomsky points out that because the fundamental characteristic of neoliberalism is unrestrained hyper-globalization, finance capital is not only able to exploit the cheapest labor and provide the worst working conditions, but can also receive bailouts from the nation-state when encountering financial risks, while directing domestic discontent toward those nations and peoples who are themselves victims of neoliberal capitalist exploitation.
II. Western Leftist Scholars’ Exploration of Paths for Transcending and Providing Alternatives to the Current Crisis
Faced with the neo-fascist crisis of neoliberal capitalism, Chomsky believes there is no way forward other than a total resistance against the hegemony of neoliberal capitalism. Similarly, Vivek Chibber, in his book Confronting Capitalism: How the World Works and How to Change It, proposes that confrontation is the best solution to the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and its neo-fascist turn. However, distinct from the path of confrontationism, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have clearly pointed out that the traditional Left easily falls into the "vicious circle of dualism" between "neoliberal power and resistance," whereas what is truly needed is a shift from resistance to the study of alternative models. Moishe Postone also noted: "Regarding capitalism, Marx’s analysis was not directed toward the emergence of 'resistance' but toward the possibility of 'transformation'; he summarized the gap between what is and what ought to be, proposing the possibility of a future society—a possibility that is gradually becoming reality."
In response to the imbalance of global development, the resurgence of conservatism, the rise of nativism, and the ebbing of globalization, Enzo Traverso analyzes various manifestations of neo-fascism in his book The New Faces of Fascism. He argues that the essence of neoliberal capitalism is neo-imperialism, while neo-fascism is a regressive neo-conservatism. He advocates for the reconstruction of global interaction and trade based on new principles of equality and sharing. In his view, it is extremely dangerous to declare "closed borders" and use militarized boundaries to block migrants in an era of "wall-building states," as such actions will further reinforce xenophobia. Although the hyper-globalization of neoliberalism has many problems, humanity cannot retreat to the pre-globalization era, because all the key issues of the 21st century—from the ecological crisis to social inequality and population movement—require global collaborative efforts to find solutions. In his view, internationalism belongs to the Left by origin, and we cannot easily abandon or reject global governance. In the era of globalization, socialism should rediscover the original meaning of the border: the place where humanity meets, rather than a line of separation. Traverso advocates replacing the globalization process dominated by finance with a new internationalism and cosmopolitanism.
Similarly, Kerem Alkin points out in his article "A New Global Threat: Neoliberalized Fascism" that although the completely unrestricted hyper-globalization advocated by neoliberal capitalism is deeply problematic—and the neoliberalized fascism that attacks specific ethnicities and countries is a global threat—this does not mean we need to return to the pre-globalization era. He advocates for a new type of globalization in which nation-states possess a certain degree of strategic autonomy to reconstruct fair, shared, and cooperative global trade and geopolitical relations. This means re-inspiring nation-states to unite and jointly solve the crises facing all of humanity, such as the food crisis, energy crisis, and climate crisis caused by neoliberal capitalist globalization.
Broadly speaking, research by foreign leftists on transcending and finding alternatives to the current crisis has been quite spectacular in recent years. Some scholars focus on how to re-advance the democratic governance of the state and enhance the appeal of socialism, transforming the neoliberal capitalist hyper-globalization—which completely ignores state governance—into a new type of globalization in which nation-states and transnational corporations participate together. Some advocate for a "new developmentalism" that rebalances the relationships between state and market, and society and market. Others emphasize the social responsibility and accountability of enterprises and corporations—specifically promoting "Conscious Capitalism," where businesses deliberately incorporate the long-term interests of everyone affected by corporate decisions into their strategic thinking, rather than a neoliberal capitalism where capital reigns supreme [6]. John Bellamy Foster argues that to transcend absolutist neoliberal capitalism, a "minimum program" [7] for the present should be proposed: improving the income distribution structure, and de-commodifying and de-financializing the spheres of social production (focusing on medical insurance, transportation, housing, etc.) to re-realize social solidarity, fraternity, and mutual understanding, and to restore the values inherent in social ethical life and community.
Hardt and Negri argue that the crisis of neoliberal capitalism stems first from Hegel’s emphasis on formalized mediation; however, money—acting as the formalized mediator of civil society—does not possess a dual function, but only the attributes of power and domination. They advocate for a theory of community based on de-formalization and de-privatization, proposing a biopolitical theory of multiple and complex lines that aids production and creation. Their analysis of immaterial labor and living labor is already very close to Marx’s reflections on transcending capitalist civilization. Regrettably, because Hardt and Negri do not have sufficient confidence in political parties and the state, and are excessively entangled in the direct liberation of oppressed groups, they fail to consider the possibility of realistically achieving liberation through the deployment of types of state governance based on the principles of human development and "active existence" (积极存在). Thus, in regarding state governance as the problem itself, they employ the same logic as neoliberal capitalism, causing the liberation of living labor and the "multitude" to lapse into a kind of quasi-utopian theory. Nevertheless, their views—that only sharing can create stronger productive forces in the age of the knowledge economy, and that the logic of neoliberal privatization hinders the further development of productive forces and destroys human vitality—are undoubtedly worthy of serious attention.
Critique and reconstruction are two sides of a single dynamic process. Foster and others believe that the fundamental reason for the neo-fascist turn in neoliberal capitalism is its absolutist and totalitarian claims. Therefore, transcending neoliberal capitalism lies in surmounting its absolute sovereignty and restoring the rightful place of socialism—which was described by Mises as "destructionism"—thereby restricting neoliberal capitalism, which claims that "free competition has already done everything that needs to be done," to a specific scope. However, Foster only abstractly discusses the space for the self-negation and practice of neoliberal capitalism at a theoretical level; he fails to grasp the concept of state governance and the idea of the liberation of labor in Marxist philosophy from the height of historical materialism. Consequently, such self-negation and practice remain extremely passive.
Unlike the aforementioned scholars who analyze alternatives and critiques of neoliberal capitalism from a political-economic perspective, other leftist scholars attempt to find solutions starting from moral and ethical values. In their view, since the fundamental problem of the neo-fascist turn is neoliberalism’s destruction of the moral imagination (viewing extremely cruel behavior as normal, gaining a sense of superiority by despising the "other" and defeating opponents, practicing the "spectacle of violence," devaluing social worth, and weakening collective responsibility and moral obligations), the urgent task is to reconstruct social morality and civic compassion. Paul Sweezy believed that the way out of the neo-fascist turn of neoliberal capitalism is not classic Soviet-style socialism, but a truly free and democratic socialism and its ethical outlook. He attempted to use a "remedialism" [8] similar to John Rawls’s social-liberal democracy to mediate and repair private ownership, pure market competition, and the possible evil consequences brought by global financialization. This aims to maintain full employment and increase public goods, continuing the policies of the welfare state while implementing policies for equality of opportunity. The problem, however, is that the failure of Keynesianism has proven that simple welfare policies only reduce social vitality. If welfare policies cannot be combined with human subjectivity and promote human development on the basis of Marx’s theory of "disposable time" [9], they cannot counter the neoliberal charge that welfarist and moralist schemes lead to a lack of dynamism. This is a classic problem that Marx already elucidated deeply: historical civilization has a development scheme progressing from "natural communities" to the "illusory community" of capitalism, and finally to the "true community" of the "association of free individuals." The latter ensures that people do not shirk their duties within the association; thus, purely moral and ethical schemes are often nothing more than a utopia. Paul Mason regards the urban community of a "participatory economy" as a scheme for changing neoliberal capitalism and exiting the crisis, because therein the people "can feel their proximity to decision-making and directly enjoy the fruits of those decisions." In his view, the "participatory economy" scheme will gradually dissolve internal conflicts and contradictions. It should be said that Mason’s proposition is not entirely a utopian imagination at the micro-level.
Wendy Brown argues that the most urgent task is to restore the legitimacy of universalist political action, because since neoliberal capitalism achieved hegemony, genuine political action and democratic decision-making have been consistently viewed as enemies of the market and capital. For a long time, the concept of civil liberty has withered, moral and political apathy have spread, and the passion for life has been converted into neo-fascist hatred, accompanied by the belief that there is no alternative to neoliberal capitalism. Therefore, restoring a universalist moral-political culture is the way out of the neo-fascistization of neoliberal capitalism. Timothy Snyder, meanwhile, contends that the rampancy of neoliberal capitalism and neo-fascism is closely related to the "post-truth" claims of postmodernism—that there are no facts and no truths—because if nothing is real, then everything is spectacle. Thus, post-truth culture is the cause of the neoliberal capitalist turn toward neo-fascism. The path to resisting the neo-fascist tendencies of neoliberal capitalism lies in believing in truth.
The aforementioned views and propositions offer certain insights; however, it is regrettable that they all fail to dialectically unify the realization of Marx’s "active human existence" and "active human essence," nor do they tangibly regard the transformation of the national spirit [10] and the state model as the path for the realization of this dialectical-unification scheme. Consequently, these schemes, which ostensibly replace or alleviate the neo-fascist tendencies of neoliberal capitalism, actually "accept the essential principles of Thatcherism"—that is, they share the same ideological premise as neoliberalism: that any intervention or regulation of the market by the state must be despotic, totalitarian, and reliant on violent repression. The contradiction here is precisely what Byung-Chul Han noted: "The subject in the neoliberal economy cannot form a 'we' capable of collective action. The reason is that the increasing 'ego-ization' and atomization of society are shrinking the space for collective action and preventing the formation of counter-forces that might question the capitalist order." In the process of neoliberal capitalism gradually turning toward neo-fascism, individuals bolstered by postmodernism are incapable of imagining another world. On the contrary, people instead grant themselves moral and sacred power through fantasies of extreme racial purity, which makes them not only indifferent to the suffering of others but even leads them to take pleasure in others' pain or in the infliction of it. Regarding this cultural and moral condition, a "politics that can enhance empowerment and promote the prosperity of public liberty without violence" indeed cannot escape the criticisms and accusations of being utopian.
III. Returning to andTranscending Hegel: Political Practice within Historical Necessity
Unlike the "ought" schemes of most Western Leftist moralists or ethicists, Perry Anderson argues that the only way out of and the prerequisite for transcending the neo-fascist tendencies of neoliberal capitalism is a Leninist socialist revolution. However, Leninism only considered the dialectical unity of democracy and centralism within the Party, neglecting the importance of democratic governance at the state and social levels. Robert Tucker, in his book The Marxian Revolutionary Idea, advocates for a non-ethical and social politico-economic path, suggesting it is necessary to seriously examine the "political aspects of Marx’s economic thought." William Clare Roberts is one of the few contemporary Western Leftist scholars who persists in a non-ethical-moralist alternative; in his book Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, he elucidates the importance and necessity of a republican interpretation of Capital.
These studies provide very useful explorations for us to further activate—from the perspective of historical science—Marx’s project of criticizing and transcending Hegel’s dialectics, philosophy of the state, and national cultural spirit. That is, while preserving the active and "civilizing" nature of private property and capital, we must sublate their corrupt and evil aspects by reconstructing the dialectic of the state and civilization, thereby opening up a practical scheme for a new civilization and avoiding the predicament of neo-fascism. Since Machiavelli, the modern Western intellectual world has always regarded individual liberty and republicanism as a contradictory yet inseparable unity of opposites. "The essence of Machiavelli's republicanism can be summarized in two closely related propositions: first, no city-state can achieve greatness if it does not adhere to a free way of life; second, no city-state can adhere to a free way of life if it does not maintain a republican constitution. From this perspective, Machiavelli not only shows he is fully defending traditional republican values, but also that he is fully adopting a traditional method of defense." Thomas Hobbes later similarly attempted to form a balance between the state of nature and the sovereign state of the Leviathan. However, the one who truly and thoroughly completed this work was Hegel, who, in Elements of the Philosophy of Right, constructed a non-moralist scheme unifying state ethics [11] with individual liberty.
For Hegel, the modern state not only guarantees individual personal and property rights but also sublates the "evil" of individual private desire through civil society into persons with legal personality. Alongside objective ethics, Hegel preserved a moral space for the private will. In this ideal design, the individual can not only achieve perfection but also retain space for diversity and difference. But Hegel’s argument, which takes desire and private property as its logical core, already sowed the seeds of the neo-fascistization of neoliberal capitalism. Hegel pointed out: "The particular person, who is his own end, is one principle of civil society; but as the particular person is essentially so related to other particular persons that each establishes himself and finds satisfaction by means of the others, and at the same time purely by means of the form of universality, which is the other principle of civil society." This "form of universality" is the principle of finance capital. When Hegel takes this as the prerequisite for the satisfaction of all needs, he has already eliminated the possibility of any non-monetary or non-commodity exchange space. Hegel believed: "Just as civil society is the battlefield of individual private interests and the war of all against all, so too is it the stage where private interests clash with common particular affairs, and where both together clash with the viewpoints and arrangements of the state." In forming these views, he had already discovered that the "grand bourgeoisie" or the "rabble" [12] developed within civil society—on the premise of the state’s legal form—could potentially seize control of the state during such conflicts, thereby destroying his conception of the dialectical unity between the state and individual private desire.
Hegel’s brilliance actually lies more in his very honest discovery that the expansion of civil society does not truly eliminate particularity; rather, it becomes controlled by particularity. "Particularity by itself is measureless and lacks a standard, and the forms this measurelessness takes are themselves measureless," and "man, through representation and reflection, expands his desires—which are not a closed circle like animal instincts—and leads desire into the infinity of evil." "On the one hand, luxury and excess; on the other, poverty and disease, and moral depravity." In Allen Wood’s view, in a sense, Hegel already anticipated the basic mechanism for the birth of neo-fascism: the continuous production of poverty and the "rabble" by civil society. The existence of this group fundamentally undermines "that sense of self which is the necessary vehicle for the moral self-consciousness and ethical attitudes of the modern individual," thereby producing an "ethically evil state and a morally diminished state" and providing the dynamic source for the emergence of fascism. Wood further pointed out that once the rabble is produced, in spirit, "it is merely an alienated state of mind full of envy and hatred, a cynical denial of all duties and ethical principles, an arrogant refusal to recognize the rights of all people, and a hateful denial of all human dignity and self-respect." These are precisely the fundamental driving forces of neo-fascism.
In Marx’s view, we must transcend the path of moralist critique and evaluate Hegel from the depths of historical materialism. By the same token, we may also need to transcend the path of moralist critique and analyze the neo-fascist turn of neoliberal capitalism from the ontological depths of historical materialism and state governance. In 1845, in his "Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book: The National System of Political Economy," Marx directly criticized List’s vulgar economics and his liberal concept of the nation: "However much the individual bourgeois fights against other bourgeois, as a class the bourgeois have a common interest, and this community of interest, which is directed against the proletariat at home, is directed against the bourgeois of other nations abroad. This is what the bourgeois calls his nationality." Such nationality had its necessity and rationality in its specific era. To transcend the crisis of neoliberal capitalism, however, requires reconstructing a new historical ontological logic—different from bourgeois nationality—based on the fundamental principles of historical materialism. Its fundamental ideas and logic are descended from bourgeois ideas but are essentially different, and it will surely open up new prospects for globalization and world history.
The past several centuries have played out as Marx and Engels pointed out in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. To the great chagrin of Reactionaries, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed... In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible." As the final antagonistic form of human civilizational history, the pure capitalist form inevitably leads to the "subjection of the country to the town," "barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones," "nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois," and "the East on the West."
Returning to Hegel does not only require us to view the importance of Marx’s theories of free and well-rounded development and free time [13] from the perspective of the rationality of world history—that is, the history of human civilizational development and its inevitable trends—but we must also understand that the practical premise of Marx’s theory is state governance and the inheritance and cultivation of the national spirit. This requires us to consciously resist the temptation of neoliberal capitalism’s "globalization by dispossession" and avoid the recurrence of fascist disasters.
After contemplating Hegel’s discourse on the rabble and poverty, Marx summarized the historical materialist theories of "active human essence" (governed by the logic of human material desires) and "active human existence" (governed by the logic of free and well-rounded development), integrating these with the complexity of practice and revolution. The author believes that only under the leadership of a Party and state that understand historical necessity and social development trends—and by inheriting and drawing upon all cultural and intellectual resources that can guide the conversion of "active human essence" into "active human existence"—is there a possibility of avoiding the crises triggered by neoliberal capitalism and its turn toward neo-fascism. This means that researching and elucidating the spiritual characteristics of Chinese civilization—such as benevolence, people-centeredness, honesty, justice, harmony, and "Great Unity" [14]—is of immense historical and practical significance. These spiritual characteristics are commensurate with Marx’s concept of "free time"; they can effectively overcome the situation where laborers are firmly shackled to the chains of labor-time and monetary finance, unable to extricate themselves, and avoid the polarization and unbalanced development caused by neoliberal capitalism.
In this process, what we must bear in mind at all times is the significant role of the state and the political party in leading world history—this was a critical contribution of Hegel’s, yet it was precisely an area that he did not emphasize enough. Ralph Miliband once repeatedly stressed the importance of active state governance in his book Marxism and Politics. This also illustrates the importance of a state more active than the one Hegel described, and an individual freedom and development more expansive than the freedom of pure private property that Hegel extolled, for the sake of opening a new world-historical civilization. From this perspective, limitations exist both in the schemes of contemporary Western left-liberalism—which take ethical conceptions such as "fraternity" and "solidarity" as their core logic—and in the schemes of left-egalitarianism, which promote the formal equality of mutual recognition between genders and ethnic groups. First, these fail to touch upon, and even obscure, the power structure of neoliberalism; they are therefore unable to alleviate the intensifying trend of neo-fascism. Second, because they fail to identify the fundamental flaws of neoliberalism (the destruction or suppression of alienated labor, and especially of labor performed in free time in the sense of the free and comprehensive development of the human being) at the heights of historical materialism, they cannot clarify these flaws at the level of world-historical necessity and the development trends of human civilization. Consequently, in a certain sense, they can only transform into utopian or abstract ethical evocations. However, if the socialist revolution and the Communist Party achieve victory in the revolutionary struggle, then the reflections of the Western Left regarding moral and ethical reconstruction will undoubtedly be worthy of reference and serious attention.
( Author: Lu Shaochen, Center for Contemporary Foreign Marxism Studies at Fudan University, School of Philosophy at Fudan University, and Institute of Ethnic Studies at Fudan University. ) Online Editor: Tongxin Source: Foreign Theoretical Trends, Issue 5, 2023.