Putinism

Thus, we can fully agree with political scholar Alexander J. Motyl’s assertion that “the key to understanding what fascism is may therefore be in understanding what fascist rule is.”⁹Alexander J. Motyl, “Putin’s Russia as a Fascist Political System,” Communist and Post- Communist Studies 49, no. 1 (2016): 28. If, as Merleau-Ponty wrote, “revolutions are true as movements and false as regimes,”¹⁰The Merleau-Ponty Reader (Chicago: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 296.  then the opposite can be said with regard to fascism: its true meaning and aims are revealed precisely as a regime of state power while, in the form of an ideology or movement, its characteristics appear to be incomplete and misleading.

Today’s Fascism from Above

Defining fascism as a regime for which ideological characteristics or a prior mass movement are secondary and optional features makes it possible to universalize the phenomenon. For such a universal approach, fascism represents not an irrational deviation from the magisterial rational path of Western civilization (as scholars belonging to the liberal intellectual mainstream tend to believe), but a phenomenon directly derived from the very nature of market society.

This position was most clearly expressed by the sociologist Karl Polanyi, who in his masterpiece, The Great Transformation, saw in fascism an aspiration for the final victory of capitalist logic over any form of self-organization and solidarity in society.¹¹Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).  The aim of fascism, according to Polanyi, was complete social atomization and dissolution of the individual into the machine of production.

Fascism was thus something more profound than a reaction to the danger of revolutionary anticapitalist movements from below. It was inextricably linked to the final establishment of the domination of the economy over society. Its goal was to destroy not only workers parties, but any element of democratic control from below in general.

Polanyi described fascism not as a “movement,” but as a “move,” a consensus among elites in response to economic crisis to constitute an alternative to socialism. But, unlike the well known Comintern thesis, this response, according to Polanyi, came not as a direct reaction to the danger of social revolution, but was deeply rooted in the very nature of industrial society, with its essential contradiction between the capitalist market and democracy. Fascism thus represented a radical resolution of this inherent contradiction (a “double movement,” in Polanyi’s terms) through a redefinition of “human nature” based on a fundamental negation of the unity of humanity.

In his analysis, Polanyi stressed that the “fascist situation…is similar to the revolutionary situation,” and this “move” by the elites becomes possible only “in the complex crisis of the democratic institutions.” Fascism thus develops at a moment of comprehensive economic and political crisis when the contradiction between the interests of society and those of the market becomes so acute that no temporary balance between the two is any longer possible. This is why, for Polanyi, the turn to fascism was a direct consequence of the Great Depression, which he saw as the end of the market “civilization of the nineteenth century.”

Today’s crisis of neoliberal ‘late capitalism’ is creating similar contradictions, as well as a political tendency towards fascism from above as a solution to impose order on a crisis-ridden system. Of course, this tendency is not developing uniformly or simultaneously in all parts of the world. Why? Because global capitalism’s uneven and combined development and its crises do not produce homogenous temporality. For a variety of structural reasons, Russia has become the “weakest link” in this epoch of crisis, driving Putin to abandon managed democracy for fascism.

This transformation of the regime was accompanied by the destruction of all political institutions mediating the direct imposition of the ruler’s will from above. In today’s Russia there is no “political state” in the sense that a court, parliament, or local government possesses any kind of relative autonomy. All institutions carry out orders that come from above.

This complete subordination of all state institutions to the “will of the sovereign” was characteristic of Hitler’s regime in Germany. It is well known that one of Hitler’s first decrees after coming to power was the introduction of a “state of emergency”—that is, “a law which abolishes all other laws,” according to Carl Schmitt’s famous definition—that remained in place until the collapse of Nazism in 1945. The erosion of democratic institutions and elements of a “state of emergency” can now be seen, for example, in regimes such as those of Narendra Modi in India, Recep Erdoğan in Turkey, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary.

However, unlike Putin’s Russia, these express the potential for fascism rather than a transformation that has already taken place. In all these countries there is still partial autonomy of society and political institutions. For the same reason, it is impossible to consider Donald Trump’s four-year term as a fascist regime. Although fascist organizations and extreme reactionary movements have begun to emerge in this period, the US political system itself has not been fundamentally altered.

Atomizing and Depoliticizing Society

To qualify as fascist, such societies even under far right governments would have to undergo qualitative transformation. Hannah Arendt sheds light on the depth of that transformation in The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she came to conclusions close to Polanyi’s, albeit from a different theoretical perspective.¹²Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). She argued that fascism has no direct relation to any previous intellectual tradition and represents not a political but a social phenomenon that expresses the extreme realization of the key tendencies of modernity—the atomization of society and the destruction of all forms of publicness.

For Arendt, the essence of fascist totalitarian society is not the penetration of politics into all social life, but rather the ultimate depoliticization, the disappearance of any notion of “common interest.” This demobilizing role of fascism has been captured perfectly by Walter Benjamin. In the conclusion of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”¹³Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations (London: Fontana, 1968), 214–18.  Benjamin wrote that fascism “aestheticizes politics”—that is, it turns people into fascinated viewers, alienated consumers of politics as a spectacle—while communism, by contrast, “politicizes aesthetics,” turning the cultural spectacle into a place for the direct creative participation of the masses. The fascist spectacle has an exclusively hierarchical character—it is a dictatorial production in which everyone must perform his or her assigned role with the utmost discipline and obedience.

Today in Russia this condition has been symbolized by the “actions of solidarity” orchestrated by the state with the Russian army. These include events like public sector employees and students being lined up in the shape of the letter Z, the ominous emblem of Russian aggression. This spectacle of politics is the exact opposite of mobilization from below in any form, including from the far right. For example, in March of this year, the Russian authorities brutally repressed independently organized anti-Ukrainian demonstrations.

The expression of mass support for the war can and should take place only in strict forms approved from above: patriotic concerts and “flash mobs” organized by the authorities. These ornaments of the masses have the same meaning as they did a century ago, when Siegfried Kracauer wrote about them in his famous essay, “The Mass Ornament”—the disintegration of the individual into separate bodily elements that find themselves incorporated into the process of capitalist production as well as ideological reproduction.¹⁴Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

In other words, we are facing not only the results of the breakdown of society into atoms, but also the breakdown of human beings into parts, incorporated into the political and economic machine and disciplined by its rationality. Market rationality, aimed at splitting (or objectifying, according to Georg Lukács) the human personality, is taken to its logical limit, extending even to the organization of politics and society.

If it is human nature to struggle for dominance over our own kind, then the nature of the state suggests it is a unified body (that is, an “ornament” of fragments of human bodies). It is an “entity” that is in existential struggle with other “entities.” Concepts such as culture and sovereignty, in such a picture of the world, are reduced only to the quality of attributes of this essence of the state.

The Fascist State and Capital

Fascism thus represents a whole new form of the bourgeois state, which directly merges with capital—we might even say that, in fascism, capital finally takes the form of the state. The state apparatus no longer towers over society, balancing between different class interests and acting as an arbiter (a characteristic, for example, of classical “Bonapartism”). Under fascism, capital, to quote Leon Trotsky, “directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state.” The essence of fascism, Trotsky wrote, is “that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat.”¹⁵Leon Trotsky, “How Mussolini Triumphed,” What Next? Vital Questions for the German Proletariat [1932], https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1944/1944-fas.htm#p2.

The German social democrat Franz Neumann, in his famous book, The Behemoth, offered a similar understanding of the fascist state.¹⁶Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism 1933–1944, Reprint (New York: Octagon Books, 1983).  For Neumann, fascism is the direct power of capital, which no longer needs the state as a mediating force. Drawing on Marxist theories of imperialism, Neumann shows that the transition to Nazism was predetermined by the place of German capitalism, deprived of external markets in an era of imperialist redivision of the world.

The main trend in the country became the monopolization of industry and the transformation of the absolute majority into proletarians who could be used both as soldiers and as workers. Neumann argued that, in its final form, capital merged with the state, no longer needing either free commerce or a free labor market. The weaker enterprises were not placed in a relationship of formal equality with the larger ones—they were deemed inefficient by the state, and their property was redistributed among the cartels (Jewish property confiscations were also included in this same logic).

Under fascist rule, property is guaranteed not by law but by administrative act. In other words, private property rights are determined not by a common norm but by a particular decision of the sovereign. Between the political (the state) and the economic (capital), thus, any distinction disappears, and the actual inequality of rights that characterizes capitalism is no longer disguised by a facade of formal legal equality guaranteed by the state.

The full employment proclaimed by Hitler, as Neumann shows, made it possible to deprive workers of any freedom of choice—they had no collective or individual rights, and were obliged to merge into the organic whole of their enterprise. This is how the Nazi formula of “politics over economics” was put into practice, in the sense that capital overcame the need for free markets and competition, turning the state into an instrument of its own expansion. Thus, fascism forges a new relationship between capital and the state.

Of course, the merger does not create homogeneity and identity between the two. Instead, they conform to each other’s logic. The Holocaust, for example, cannot be said to have been in the “interest” of German capital, but it was conducted entirely in accordance with capitalist managerial rationality and represented the capitalist production machine in its extreme monstrous form (something brilliantly explained by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust).

Fascism and its Familiars

It is striking how similar Neumann’s explanation of Hitlerism is to the “authoritarian capitalism” advocated by such intellectual idols of the American alt-right as Nick Land or Curtis Yarvin.¹⁷Nick Land, “The Dark Enlightenment,” https://www.thedarkenlightenment.com/the-dark-enlightenment-by-nick-land/.  “Acceleration” of capitalism, according to these authors, will inevitably lead states to abandon any autonomy of law and democratic legitimacy. The democratic state, with its false formal equality of the strong and the weak, will be replaced by a “Gov-corp,” a corporation hierarchically run by managers who have gained absolute power through natural selection.

Essentially, for Land, this type of state can be achieved not through political struggle and the creation of a mass movement, but rather through the “acceleration” of the capitalist economy, whose development overcomes and destroys all political forms. This authoritarian-libertarian utopia looks paradoxically like an inversion of Putin’s state capitalism, with its unbreakable connection between property rights and political power, and the deeply rooted notion of the “aristocratic” and caste-like nature of state bureaucracy (with the security service at the top of the hierarchical pyramid).

The strange similarity between the worldviews of Putin’s siloviki (members of the state repressive apparatus) and the fans of Land from Silicon Valley can hardly be explained by a common ideological education or reading environment. While they converge in similar conceptions of state, Land quotes Hobbes and Deleuze, while Putin quotes Ilyin or Dostoyevsky. Intellectual references are secondary here, while a form of fascist rationality, internalized from the unconscious ideological practices of neo- liberal capitalism and characteristic of the type of subjectivity it produces, is primary.

Contemporary fascism no longer needs mass reactionary movements. It does not need to use civil war methods to grind down the organized working class and reduce it to an “amorphous state” by means of violence. This work has largely been done over decades since the neoliberal turn in Western countries and “shock-therapy” market reforms in the 1990s in the post-socialist states. All that is needed is a “move” from above, which will finally bury any form of democratic participation and finally give capital a dictatorial form of state. Just like the old fascism, twenty-first century fascism is a trend that emerged during the crisis of global capitalism.

In this respect, it is striking how much Putinism, born out of the conditions of the post-Soviet transformation of Russia, corresponds to these global trends. It is not driven by some particularly national dynamic. In terms of rhetoric, it is difficult to find anything that differs from what is familiar to every voter of Marine Le Pen, supporter of Viktor Orbán, or fan of the Tucker Carlson show on Fox: it is the same aggressive anti-universalism, scaremongering about “minorities,” defenses of the “traditional family” and “spiritual values” against liberalism and cultural Marxism, and exploitation of hatred for abstract “elites.”

Putinism’s only fundamental difference seems to be that it has already transformed the state into a twenty-first century fascist regime. In this sense it serves not as a reminder of the past, but as a warning for the future. But why exactly did post-Soviet Russia suffer this fate and become this frightening example?

Putinism: the Shortest History of “Fascistization”

In the mid-2000s, when Vladimir Putin had just been triumphantly reelected to his second presidential term, the author of this article was already an active participant in the leftist political scene in Moscow. One of the most popular slogans at the numerous demonstrations, which in those long-gone days the authorities still tolerated in the very center of the Russian capital, was “United Russia is a fascist country!”¹⁸“United Russia” is a main party of Putin’s supporters that was formed in 2001. The young socialists and anarchists who repeated this slogan considered this characterization a necessary exaggeration. In the early years of Putin’s rule there were still civil liberties, independent media, opposition candidates in elections, and trade unions with the right to strike.

Nevertheless, a dangerous combination of consolidating personal power, mass depoliticization, and widespread chauvinist and racist views was already quite evident. Putin’s political career and the nature of his popularity have been connected to war from their very beginning. At the end of 1999, when Boris Yeltsin declared Putin his successor, Russian troops were already engaged in a full-scale “counter-terrorist operation” in Chechnya.

Putin’s crushing victory in the presidential election of March 2000 marked the appearance for the first time of what some pro-Kremlin political analysts called the “Putin majority.” The common sentiments of this electoral majority were frustration, fatigue, and fear: frustration with democracy, which was associated with political and social volatility; fatigue over poverty and economic insecurity; and media-fueled fear of the terrorist threat posed by “Islamic radicals,” mixed with hostility toward those “others” from the Caucasus who “fill our cities.”

It is remarkable that this “rally-around-the-flag” mentality, which marked an evolution of Putinism, was not at all targeted at the West. On the contrary, Putin consistently portrayed the military operation in Chechnya as part of the crusade against “international terrorism” launched after 9/11 by George W. Bush. Putin’s domestic policy was amazingly similar to the Western neoconservative project in its basic features: aggressive privatization of the public sector and neoliberal reform of legislation, combined with the strengthening of police control and patriotic rhetoric of “national unity” in the face of external challenges. For example, the first years of Putin’s rule saw the adoption of a new labor code that significantly limited workers’ rights, a new housing code that enabled the privatization of urban space, and a flat tax of 13 percent, which turned Russia into a paradise for big business.

At the same time, skyrocketing oil prices made it possible to increase wages and pensions while maintaining a balanced budget. This is when the foundations were laid for the paradoxical combination of neoliberalism and state capitalism that is characteristic of the whole Putin project.¹⁹Ilya Matveev, “Russia Inc.,” Open Democracy, March 16, 2016. The regime gradually placed profitable companies invested in natural resources under direct or indirect state control, while it subjected the public sector (primarily education and medicine) to endless neoliberal austerity.

Under Putin, the so-called “oligarchs”—that is, the owners of huge enterprises bought on the cheap amidst the privatization of state industry after the end of the Soviet era—have lost the direct political influence they had while Yeltsin was in power. But they have gained enormous opportunities to buy more companies through ongoing privatization and to secure lucrative contracts with the state. The regime buoyed by its phantom “Putin majority” granted these oligarchs a legitimacy they had lost in the 1990s.

During Yeltsin’s rule, the dominant perception among Russians was that the privatization of Soviet enterprises was unfair and criminal. Amidst the country’s economic recovery under Putin, his regime was able to present this plunder as a “turned page,” and warn that any attempt to revise it would inevitably lead to social chaos and the country’s disintegration.

Until the early 2010s, Putinism was based on mass depoliticization, associated with increased consumption, enjoyment of “stability,” and a focus on private life. During this period, it presented itself less as conservative than as “post-political” (in the terminology of Jacques Rancière), as pure management, the effective work of which is contrary to the intrusions of political passions and the slogans of street demagogues. In this atmosphere, in 2008, after Putin’s first two terms ended, the faceless Dmitry Medvedev was elected president at Putin’s suggestion by the same “Putin majority.” What difference does it make what the president’s name is if the management style remains the same?

Global Financial Crisis, Resistance, and the Fascist Turn

Everything changed at the end of 2011, when Putin announced his desire to return to the presidency. This marked the regime’s turn toward an explicitly personalized power. In late 2011 and early 2012, Moscow and other major cities of the country were shaken by many thousands of protesters demonstrating against the apparent falsification of parliamentary elections in favor of Putin’s United Russia party. They denounced the regime as authoritarian. These protests challenged the “post-political,” technocratic model of the regime.²⁰Ilya Budraitskis, “The Weakest Link of Managed Democracy: How the Parliament Gave Birth to Non-Parliamentary Politics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 113, no. 1 (2014): 169–85.

In reaction, Putin began the process of “fascistization.” His electoral campaign in early 2012 was a marked departure from previous ones. The opposition demonstrations were presented as machinations of external and internal enemies seeking to undermine the country’s unity and impose false values on it. Putin presented himself as a defender of the “traditional family,” while homophobia and patriarchy were elevated to the rank of state ideology. “Putin’s majority” was reconstructed as a “silent conservative majority,” bound together by a common Christian faith and loyalty to the Russian nation.

Despite securing reelection and crushing the protests, Putin continued to lose mass support. The democratic demands for equal participation in elections and basic civil liberties put forward by the liberal opposition had the potential to merge with the experience of growing poverty and social inequality. By the early 2010s, Russian economic growth, undermined by the 2008 global crisis, had given way to stagnation and a steady decline in living standards.

In these conditions, Putin saw the Euromaidan uprising in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2014 as a threat. In his view, the change of power in Ukraine through street protests set a dangerous precedent, especially because it attracted an enormous amount of attention from Russian society, due to the two countries’ proximity and shared history. Putin responded to all this aggressively, to ensure Russian dominion in its near-abroad and impose order at home. Thus, the external and internal goals became inseparable.