It might seem strange that Walter Benjamin’s final work—written while on the run from Nazis during what Victor Serge called the “midnight of the century”—should be a meditation on historiography. Yet “Theses on the Philosophy of History” is as much about history as it is about political action in the present: how was it that socialists failed to see fascism coming? Or to put it another way, how was it that Walter Benjamin himself ended up on the run, in fascist occupied France, trying to flee on foot through the Pyrenees? Social democrats, Benjamin argued, tended to act as if liberal capitalism was the inevitable and only terminus of history. Socialists did not, as they are sometimes accused of, evacuate all principle and succumb to defeatism: quite the opposite. Their inaction stemmed from an unquestioned belief in their own progress; they believed they would win because history demanded it. Modernity may have violent origins, and yet whatever the temporary setback, the trajectory is inevitably a more just future. To the Finland Station begins with the French Revolution and ends with the takeover of the Winter Palace; the arc of history is long, but it wears a Budenovka. “Nothing has corrupted the German working class so much as the notion that it was swimming with the current,” Benjamin writes. In a letter to Adorno, Benjamin explained that the “survivals of positivism,” “vulgar Marxism,” and “social democratic evolutionism” were not so much questions as an autopsy of the left.
In a similar vein, Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism argues against the inevitable progress of liberalism to suggest that, in seams and steam vents of both capitalism and the human psyche, revanchist and apocalyptic movements and ideologies lurk, always immanent.1Richard Seymour, Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (New York: Verso, 2024). How does one explain, in Seymour’s words, the desire by millions to “gladly…sometimes self-consciously hurt what they are told is their best interest: income, employment, health, and sometimes their lives…for the chance to destroy an enemy?”2Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, 25. That is, how have antivaxxers, Brexiteers, climate deniers, tariff warriors, and incels triumphed, even as each in their turn could be said to reject any commonsense, rational self-interest? Seymour’s analysis of this new era of far-right politics is embedded in the seeming paradox of his own title. The nation-state was once conceived as a modality to construct homogenous consumers and workers, all within the sphere of a centralized metropolitan market. Once imagined as a vehicle for universalist and republican virtue in addition to economic planning the nation emerged, in Seymour’s words, as an “inchoate incubator” for “fascist forces to thrive.” Rather than the progressive vision of Jacobin councils, New Deal programs, or MLK’s “beloved community,” the last few decades have been marked by, across the globe, with the nation’s use as a vehicle for perverse, violent fantasies of libidinal doom.
While Seymour’s book lacks a totalizing theory of neofascism, or as he frames it “disaster nationalism,” his series of short essays on class, gender, sexuality, militarism, and genocide form a kind of collective portrait of the era’s far right. As opposed to Robert Paxton’s analytics of fascism or Enzo Traverso’s morphology of racial forms that constitute the Western nation and its exclusions, Seymour’s disaster nationalism offers a kind of fluid and conjunctural portrait of the “nationalist international.”3Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Penguin, 2005); Enzo Traverso, The New Faces of Fascism: Populism and the Far Right (New York and London: Verso, 2019). The chapters are each bound by an obsession of the new right—on resentment against the cultural elite, reassertion of the cultures of patriarchy, pleasure in violence and militarism. These often libidinal reactionary obsessions gain both their frisson and aura of legitimacy from liberalism’s apparent degeneration over the last several decades from a politics of freedom to a politics of restraint. Tied to liberal aspirations, social democracy could once promote itself as the philosophy of liberty—from want, restriction, and segregation, and for the expanse of the sensorium. Now liberalism is increasingly seen as a politics of austerity and of restraint: Democratic and Labour leaders pride themselves on balanced budgets and discourses of civility and restraint. Fascism, Seymour suggests, appears thus less as a politics of reaction than as a politics of rebellion—true only in so far as social democracy has diminished into a civic neoliberalism.
It should be remembered that fascism was once thought to be impossible. Not only was authoritarianism inimical to the self interest of the working class, a section of whom aligned with Nazis and the Blackshirts, but modernity was supposed to bring with it the progressive unfolding of democracy, human rights, scientific reason, and development. For liberals and democratic socialists, the angel of history was not—pace Benjamin—a captive of a hurricane, with wreckage piling at her feet, but rather, forward facing, the lady liberty leading us to the horizon with armed sansculottes. But it is not only revolutionary élan or liberal positivism that Benjamin objected to. Benjamin, alongside other Jewish critics of Western imaginaries like Theodore Adorno and Rosa Luxemburg, was all too aware that Europe believed itself as immune to the barbarism of the ancient world as a scientist to the dark. Even to Marxists, the increasing concentration of capital and its penetration around the globe was supposed to bring the final confrontation between the proletariat—divested from land and superstition both—with an ever-smaller number of bourgeois lords of finance. History was to be the history of class struggle.
That this concentration of wealth at one pole and increasing poverty and wage alienation at the other did not bring progressive revolutions, but rather mass hypernationalist, corporatist, and racist parties meant something had gone desperately wrong—not only with politics, but the project of civilization itself. Socialists, Benjamin warned, were as caught up in this ideal of progress as were liberals. Of course, Benjamin was not the only Marxist theorist to pose this question after the realization of the impossible—that is, the collapse not only of democracy but the emergence of mass, popular movements for the collective national suicide of World War II. For Gramsci, fascism arose out of a failure to analyze the state and civil society; for the Frankfurt School, the lineages of violence embedded in Enlightenment modalities of mastery and instrumentality; for Aimé Césaire and C. L. R James, the role colonial violence in constructing the idea of European modernity to begin with.
Seymour shares a lineage with all these thinkers in so far as he takes the rise of the far right to be something apart from, and perhaps even other to, what orthodox Marxists and liberals alike assume to be the cold rationality and “cash nexus” of the market. As Seymour states, “we would be foolish to dismiss rightist doom fantasies.”4Seymour, Disaster Nationalism, 6. In this, Seymour also departs with liberal analyses of reactionary voters: fascists are not dupes or idiots; fascism speaks to real needs and desires. As Herbert Marcuse wrote over half a century ago, the “freedom” offered under liberalism is the “domination of alienated labor” and the “love” a patriarchal and isolated family structure: these form a kind of inescapable if often invisible prison even in the best of times.5Herbert Marcuse, “Freedom and Freud’s Theory of Instincts,” in The Essential Marcuse: Selected Writings of Philosopher and Social Critic Herbert Marcuse, ed. Andrew Feenberg and William Leiss (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007). To say “capitalism produces fascism” means, to this tradition of Marxian theory, that the state of unfreedom is inherent to authoritarian institutions of capital, both inside and outside of the home. The drive for libidinal freedom and eros—whether for labor, love, or violence—is a condition of market liberalism: if the left does not offer a channel for freedom, the right will. Ironically, it is the “disaster nationalists” rather than social democrats who can articulate this gap between the rhetoric of market freedom and lived reality.