That there’s a fine line between capitalism and fascism is not a new idea. In 1939, Max Horkheimer wrote that whoever is not ready to talk about capitalism can keep their mouth shut about fascism. Any communist worth their anti-capitalist salt is well aware of this, as anyone who takes the history of fascism seriously shouldn’t be surprised to learn that its appearance can be counted on in times of capitalist crisis when the ruling class resorts to the most openly terroristic measures of capital accumulation to save its own ass from revolutionary overthrow.

Bread and butter Marxism understands fascism as the result of a “contradiction between capitalists” in a time of economic emergency that is resolved when the conservative element of the ruling elite takes wholesale control of the bourgeoisie, defeating the liberal element and its so-called social democratic solution to the crisis in order to get on with its own business of “solving” the crisis with a solution of its own. The fascist solution might be given a comradely sounding name like national “socialism” or a catchy mission statement like making America “great” again, but behind the red lipstick is the most naked, shameless, oppressive, and treacherous pig on the block.[1]

JMP explains how burying this understanding of fascism is part and parcel of capitalist propaganda. The classic liberal narrative of World War 2 goes something like this: democracy vs. fascism, where democracy equals capitalism. Pitting democracy against fascism and conflating capitalism with democracy in this way doesn’t just miss the obvious point that capitalists don’t give a fuck about democracy. It also suggests that everything and everybody that is opposed to capitalism, including most importantly those fascist-bashing commies, are somehow anti-democratic. Countering this propaganda demands that we understand fascism for what it is: an organized counter-revolutionary terrorist attack with its basis in capitalist “democracy.” Only armed with such an understanding will we recognize (before it’s too late) why fascism is immanent in every capitalist country.

But this begs the question: why not just call capitalism fascism and fascism capitalism? After all, what’s so different about the criminal enterprise of Nazi Germany and the colonial empires of the Allied Powers, who were not only carrying out the surveillance and slaughter of colonized peoples in their respective colonies during World War 2, but were openly drafting these peoples as cannon fodder in their supposed fight against fascism? On this point, JMP reminds us of freedom fighters like Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon who saw nothing new in the genocidal toolkit of Nazism that hadn’t already been tried and trusted under colonialism for centuries – only now it was returning to Europe like a boomerang to strike its terroristic blow on its most recent historical victim.

If fascism was being fought in the name of capitalist democracy, and these “democracies” contain within themselves the same contradiction of which fascism was born in Germany and elsewhere, why do we need to distinguish the two? Does one regime need to be declared more genocidal than the other? Should actively colonial states like Canada or Australia be deemed fascist, as social democrats do when they denounce austerity and neoliberalism as such, or is this an uncritical equation of two distinct political phenomena? More importantly, what are the consequences of these equations and distinctions for anti-capitalist and anti-fascist organizing in the here and now, especially in a time of fascism’s re-emergence?

A settler colonial perspective on fascism seems important in order to address these questions in a way that is useful for the purpose of making revolution, especially in places where colonialism and capitalism are both alive and well, which is a lot. While there is no shortage of historical materialist theorizing of fascism as a product of capitalist crisis emerging in an era of imperialism, there seems to be less attention paid to the particular relationship between fascism and settler colonialism. This not only makes for an incomplete historical understanding of fascism, but contributes to a dangerous naturalization of settler colonialism among the anti-capitalist left at the settler centres of global capitalism. Where settler colonial states and their loyal subjects continue to wage war on Indigenous peoples and Indigenous lands in the pursuit of capital accumulation, surely a better definition of fascism is in order. Some theorizing has already been done in this area. This essay isn’t proposing anything new, but rather building on work that has already been done.

Let’s start here: in foregrounding the history (and present) of settler colonialism, we can better understand the relationship between capitalism and fascism, where fascism is a crucial ideology adopted by the capitalist state in order to reassert the dominance of capitalist productive and social relations when the legitimacy of these relations have been called into question. In the settler colonial context, this ideology finds its material base in the historical and ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands, lives, and laws, and its social base in white settler capitalist society, whose members are always willing to step up to the paramilitary plate in the service of political-economic purity. That settler colonial police forces often originated as state-funded settler militias with the directive of suppressing Indigenous sovereignty in newly annexed territories is a telling reminder of the siamese twin that settler colonialism makes out of capitalism and fascism. Sakai’s analysis of early settlerism is insightful here:

In many settler societies, historically the white population not only supported the police, in part they were the police. Unlike in old Europe, where in general the masses of people were kept disarmed and landless, in settler colonies often the entire euro-male culture revolved around common and cheap access to land and rifles and the bodies of the oppressed. Posses or militias or “Committees of Correspondence” or lynch mobs of armed men enforced the local settler dictatorship over Indians, Latinos, Afrikans, Asians, North Afrikans, women, etc. And white men of all classes joined in, to affirm their membership in the most important “class” of all. Settlerism filled the space that fascism normally occupies.

As is still the case today, this settler “class” exemplifies one of fascism’s most common characteristics: class collaboration. Here, the unifying principle of the fascist party – whether race, religion, hockey, or otherwise – serves to superficially unite “the people” in order to obscure the actual class contradictions existing within the population, contradictions that fascism has no plans of resolving. In the settler colonial context, Krul identifies this principle as definitive of settler logic more generally: “an artificial, racialized unity among the settlers themselves”, one that is a “welcome mechanism for externalizing and staving off the inevitable class conflicts” that exist within the settler population. One only has to consider the history of the white working class in settler colonies to appreciate the ways in which such an artificial unity and its labour aristocratic underpinnings has been articulated in decidedly racial and national terms over and against those “other” peoples that white workers perceive as threatening the limited benefits that capitalism has afforded them, albeit benefits extracted on broken backs and stolen lands.[2]

In theorizing fascism from this settler colonial perspective. Krul points out that the imposition and maintenance of capitalism in the “new” world is predicated on an underlying logic of elimination: for capitalism to take hold in (and keep hold of) Indigenous lands and waters, the non-capitalist economies and social relations that flow through these economies must be extinguished. After all, these economies pose a fundamental threat to the reproduction of capital:

The settler state is, in this sense, the most complete and pure outward appearance of the capital-state relationship. When successful, its natural ideology is that of an expansionist, self-confident liberalism; when threatened, its natural ideology is fascism.[3]

In other words: the capitalist balance between carrying out terroristic violence in times of economic threat and celebrating liberal democracy in times of economic dominance defines the historical dynamic between capitalism and fascism, and no where is this more evident than in those social formations where the capitalist economy continues to confront the persistence of non-capitalist relations, expressed through the ongoing resistance and resurgence of Indigenous peoples and other internal colonies that challenge the “security” of the settler state’s economic monopoly over the mode of production. In this sense, settler colonialism is a paradigmatic expression of the fascist contradiction immanent within capitalism itself, from its earliest days to its most recent nights. Fascism, in other words, is not simply a sign of capitalism’s rotting decay in an era of imperialism, but also a sign of capitalism’s rosy dawn in an era of colonialism. The settler state is thus always potentially fascist in form.

On Turtle Island, one has only to recall such recent fascist throwbacks as the Occupation of Wounded Knee, the Native People’s Caravan, the Oka Crisis, the Gustafsen Lake Standoff, or Standing Rock to be reminded of the settler-colonial stakes in preserving the economic order and the terroristic measures of mass militarization (including the mass mobilization of white settler militias) taken when the illegitimacy of settler sovereignty is thrown into stark relief by Red Power.

As Krul points out, “this trend of the capital-state relation to move away from formal liberalism and into a fascist siege mentality is characteristic of a settler state frustrated in its normalization process.” Capitalism and fascism, in other words, are two sides of the same settler colonial coin. Whenever necessary, the former will rear its fascist head to save its ugly ass. The only reason that settler states are not in a permanent “fascist siege mentality” is that they have a few centuries of colonial domination under their blood-soaked belts, having taken significant historical measures to thrust the capitalist mode of production into a position of dominance relative to Indigenous modes of production. That a country like Canada can masquerade as a munificent beacon of multiculturalism and congratulate itself as being the supposed peacekeeping nation of the “developed” world is only possible insofar as its capitalist normalization process is not in a continual state of frustration at “home” on occupied territories.[4]

That this frustration is currently managed by most settler states through a colonial politics of recognition, albeit coupled with much more explicitly exterminative forms of state violence (evidenced, for instance, by the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls), says a great deal about the historical gains of settler colonial capital.[5] That said, the ever-present specter of frustration has by no means been extinguished. To the contrary, settler states are facing growing threats to their legitimacy in an era of particularly powerful Indigenous resurgence that includes a historically unprecedented level of radical solidarity with Indigenous peoples among the anti-capitalist left. This solidarity is not without contradictions in need of resolution. Nevertheless, it’s a threat the settler capitalists had hoped racism would stave off.

Alongside class collaboration, mass militarization, and mass mobilization, another defining feature of fascist rule is criminality. That Hitler proclaimed a permanent “state of emergency” by means of decree less than a month after taking power is revealing in this regard. In the famous words of Eichmann: the words of the Fuehrer had the force of law. The state of emergency declared by Hitler functioned as an extralegal order that effectively suspended the law itself, opening the floodgates for genocide that could be carried out at the Nazi word. In other words, a force of law without law.[6] Against this background, it should serve as no surprise that fascist jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt, who sought to ground this suspension of law in the law itself, defined the state of emergency as a legal doctrine of sovereignty: “the sovereign, who can proclaim a state of emergency, is thereby ensured of remaining anchored in the legal order.”[7]

This definition of state sovereignty as the power to proclaim a state of emergency, which provides the legal landscape to maintain rule by any means necessary, is especially true throughout the history of settler colonialism. After all, settler states require a permanent state of emergency in order to exercise their otherwise illegal claim to territory over and against the pre-existing claims of Indigenous nations.[8] This is just as true for the settler state as it is for privileged settlers: private property law ensures the white land owner that he remains anchored in the legal order when he pulls the trigger on the Indigenous “trespasser.” The settler colonial legal superstructure can thus be understood as a suspension of Indigenous law from without, declared by such criminal decrees as terra nullius, tierras baldías, vacuum domicilium, and the doctrine of discovery.[9] In short, the doctrine of settler state sovereignty is at its core a continual state of emergency that is anchored in nothing but the coercion and cunning (increasingly coded as “consultation”) with which it is enforced.[10] As legal theorist John Borrows has pointed out, “the Court might as well speak of magic crystals being sprinkled on the land as a justification for the diminution of Aboriginal occupation and possession.”[11] Despite being “the crime of a millennium”, settler colonial law is laid down as though it were a law of nature.[12] To rephrase Eichmann: the words of the Crown have the force of law.

The point here is not to proclaim that each and every feature of fascist rule and every doctrine of fascist law is better understood as settler colonial in character.[13] While Nazi Germany sought to establish a settler colonial empire of its own through its attempted military conquest and settlement program in Eastern Europe and the USSR, a project partly inspired by the genocide and occupation of Indigenous America, and while its tactics of racial terrorism on Jews and other peoples bear all kinds of resemblance to the Indigenous holocaust, arguing that fascism is actually settler colonialism or that settler colonialism is actually fascism misses the point, much like the careless equation of capitalism and fascism discussed earlier. The point here is that the historical shitshow of settler colonialism tells us a lot about the role of fascism as a key player on the historical stage of capitalism, instrumental not only to keeping the capitalist show on the road, but to getting this show on the road in the first place.

Even where fascist policies have contradicted the laws of capital accumulation, challenging the vulgar view that fascism is but a tool of big business, settler colonialism shores up a powerful historical precedent that invites a more rigorous Marxist analysis of capitalism’s tendency to both produce and push past its own contradictions. Where Nazi concentration camps consumed both labour power and labour itself in the production process, murdering the very workers responsible for the production of capital, fascist labour policy required the enslavement of a new proletarian class, one constituted primarily by involuntary foreign and slave labourers (many young and women). The demands of this new proletariat were that much greater given that millions of de-proletarianized Aryans had just gained entry into the parasitic class of capitalist oppressors.[14]

Across the pond, a similar dynamic had already been at work for a few hundred years. While colonialism has typically required that the colonized be kept alive as a source of labour power in the colony in order to generate surplus value for the colonial elite in the metropole, settler colonizers come to stay. As such, settler colonialism is not opposed to the outright extermination of Indigenous peoples, provided there is a sufficient labour reserve to fill the gap: Indigenous peoples were massacred by the millions for their land (that productive force par excellence) in tandem with the importation and enslavement of black and other nationally oppressed non-white labour. Sure, most capitalist pigs prefer their workers alive, but not at all costs: when there is free, fresh labour readily available, you can bet they will save on groceries and work the old ones to death.[15] This is especially the case if the First Peoples have a longstanding historical connection (and god forbid a non-capitalist one) to the land where the capitalists are trying to set up shop. After all, deracinating this non-capitalist connection is a prerequisite for their careers in business. To the incipient settler capitalist, killing the Indian and saving the child is a luxury afforded those with the financial security for long-term investment, business better left to the prime minister and his royal mounted paramilitary who can use public funds to wage spiritual terrorism on Indigenous children with the goal of transforming them into loyal settler subjects no different from the white kids in town.

Indeed, the assimilation of mind is a welcome alternative to the extermination of body, so long as Indigenous economies and the ways of being born into these economies are done away with. As Patrick Wolfe writes:

If the human beings can be reclassified on an individual basis so that the fragment of Native society that they represent effectively ceases to present an independent alternative to the settler social monopoly, then all well and good. This is why Colonel Richard Pratt’s famous phrase “Kill the Indian, Save the Man’ is so revealing.”

It’s no wonder a national assimilation policy like the Indian Residential School System in Canada, premised on the theft of Indigenous children from their families, lands, and lifeways to be “trained” in the ways of the white man is such a striking example of settler capitalist logic: at once fascist in its forcible removal of Indigenous children from their homes at gunpoint and liberal-expansionist in its self-congratulation as a “well-intentioned” civilizing project designed to “help” the Natives “adapt” to a “changing” world. It is worth considering the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s recent declaration that this settler colonial enterprise constituted cultural genocide. While the term might unintentionally suggest that what went on at the schools was not real genocide, it’s actually an extremely revealing description of settler rule in a period of “expansionist self-confident liberalism”, whereby relative stability in the capital-state relation (thanks to a surplus of stolen land) makes the fascist alternative of extermination both unnecessary and undesirable from the perspective of the Canadian capitalist class. That Residential Schools not only sought to separate Indigenous children from their land base and the social relations of production pertaining there (seeking to supplant these relations with distinctively capitalist ones), but were also notorious as child labour camps for the production of industrial capital – many bore the official name Indian Industrial Schools and were modeled after the British reformatory and industrial schools for children of the urban poor – goes to show just how indispensable settler colonial fascism is to the original accumulation and ongoing reproduction of capital in Indigenous territory. Hammerquist’s comparison to Nazi concentration camps is telling here:

The implications are barbaric and genocidal and genocide was what occurred. But this was not the genocidal aspect of continuing primitive accumulation that is a part of “normal” capitalist development. That type of genocide is directed mainly against pre-capitalist populations and against the social formations that obstruct the creation of a modern working class and the development of a reservoir of surplus labor. The German policy was the genocidal obliteration of already developed sections of the European working classes and the deliberate disruption of the social reproduction of labor in those sectors—all in the interests of a racialist demand for “living space”.

In this sense, cultural genocide is actually a fuller expression of fascism’s supposed goal of “solving” the capitalist crisis, since it seeks to do away with Indigenous ways of being on and with the land, ways of being that pose a fundamental problem for capital accumulation.[16] That such a project is still openly defended and celebrated by members of the executive committee of the Canadian bourgeoisie is a striking reminder of how deeply setter colonial consciousness permeates the everyday political arena.[17]

So the settler colonizer knows where to draw the line between elimination for accumulation’s sake and elimination for elimination’s sake. While he won’t refuse a fascist throwback to the “good old days” of yesteryear (tight times call for terroristic measures, after all), he also won’t enlist the support of his loyal settler proud boys without conducting a cost benefit analysis. Hiring supremacist shock troops to do the dirty work of burying dissidents whose fight for freedom makes for bad business could also make for bad press. Provided the resources are there, enlisting the local Indian agent to kick down doors and the local child welfare agent to knock on doors, all in the name of “protecting” and “serving” Indigenous peoples, is a much more business-savvy means of rounding up the next generation of would-be anti-capitalists. That way, when another child is taken, everyday settlers can blame the “cracks” in an ultimately “well-intentioned” system. Meanwhile, the parasites who make a living off this system can wiggle their toes in the Caribbean sand, on holiday from the drudgery of daily life back at home on Native land.

The historical affair of capitalism and fascism is no bedtime story. Since the settler state has no legitimate claim to the territory on which it is criminally imposed, it does not hesitate to use any and all means necessary to fabricate this legitimacy, including first and foremost the suppression of threats that expose the settler state and its ruling elite for what it really is: a state-sponsored terrorist attack on Indigenous lives and Indigenous lands, all in the name of staying in business.

But it is a story that needs to be told, demanding to be heard by those who have perished under its poison and by those who continue to fight against it:

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that “the state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm.[18]

Until we realize that settler colonialism is based on this rule – a permanent state of emergency rooted in the denial of Indigenous sovereignty and the destruction of Indigenous economy – we will continue to conceive of it as a historical norm, despite the fact that there is nothing natural about it. The stakes of attaining to such a conception of history are simple: settler fascism or Indigenous freedom. It is the task of those who realize this to bring about a real state of emergency.

Settler colonialism reveals plain and simple why fascism has proven so crucial to keeping capitalism in the driver’s seat for so long. Anyone serious about getting rid of this driver and onto a better road must come to terms with the fact that denouncing fascism without fighting for Indigenous freedom is a remarkable farce, no different from the anti-fascist capitalist who “raises his voice against barbarism in a country where precisely the same property relations prevail, but where the butchers wash their hands before weighing the meat.” Condemning white supremacists at the dinner table without defending Indigenous peoples in the streets is a mockery of liberation, no different from the settler politician who claims there is no place for fascism on these lands while continuing to claim these lands as his own. To Indigenous peoples, this kind of contradiction amounts to an impossible choice between a democratically disguised capitalism and a naked fascist capitalism. In both cases, they are told to step aside while Euro the Hero continues to set the economic agenda and where “the fundamental warfare remains in place.”[19]

Indigenous resistance proves that capitalism cannot be the beginning of history, just as it proves that capitalism cannot be the end of history. And unless you’re ready to talk about this, let alone take part in it, you can keep your mouth shut about fascism.

Title photo courtesy of here.

Notes

[1] A slight paraphrase of Brecht from his essay on Writing the Truth, available here.

[2] For an extended materialist account of this history, see Sakai’s Settlers.

[3] Krul. For a more recent analysis of this relationship as it pertains to the contradictions of anti-austerity organizing, see here.

[4] Capitalist management of this contradiction at the level of settler state economic policy is revealing. The increasing role of Canadian imperialism, for instance, serves to shore up enormous amounts of international capital extracted from Third World lands and labour to the Canadian settler state and its capitalist confidants. In the absence of these imperialist superprofits sucked from the storm centers of global capitalism, the Canadian state would likely have to adopt an even more aggressive policy of capital accumulation at “home” in the Fourth World, accelerating the theft and extraction of Indigenous lands and resources. By the same token, Glen Coulthard points out the existence of a geopolitical rationale which frames the exploitation of domestic resources at home as an “ethical response to hostile geopolitics” abroad, whereby Indigenous dispossession is accelerated in order to avoid obstacles to capital accumulation in Third World “conflict zones.” From the perspective of the settler capitalist class, the question is how to do so without generating unmanageable resistance from Indigenous nations refusing the theft of their lands and waters. To the revolutionary, the point should be obvious: international solidarity between Indigenous peoples of the Fourth World and proletarians (Indigenous and otherwise) of the Third World is the settler capitalist’s worst nightmare. For recent analyses of Canadian imperialism, see Klassen, Butler, and Shipley.

[5] An obvious exception to this rule, as Krul points out, is the settler state of Israel, whose recent arrival on the historical stage of settler colonialism resembles the “rosy dawn” era of other settler states, where fascist rule and primitive accumulation reigned supreme.

[6] Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.

[7] Ibid.

[8] For a much more in-depth analysis of the state of emergency and its theoretical corollary, “the state of exception” as it pertains to the relationship between Indigenous and settler state sovereignty, see Mark Rifkin’s “Indigenizing Agamben” (2009) and Scott Lauria Morgensen’s “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism” (2011).

[9] In this case of Canada, the criminal assertion of Crown sovereignty over Indigenous lands and peoples is enshrined in Section 91 of the British North America Act of 1867, which claims wholesale control over “Indians and lands reserved for Indians.”

[10] In his essay “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism”, Scott Lauria Morgensen argues that theorizing the state of exception or emergency as finding its foremost expression in Nazi Germany (Agamben calls concentration camps the state of exception par excellence) in fact contributes to the naturalization of settler colonialism. The central characteristic of settler colonial rule, after all, is one of political exception, whereby the survival of the settler state requires the ongoing elimination of Indigenous peoples’ competing claim to sovereignty. That Morgensen extends his claim of settler colonial influence on fascist rule to include 21st century counterterrorist strategy should remind us that any serious attempt to theorize contemporary expressions of right wing-extremism must turn to the much longer history of settler colonialism, a history in which these expressions find their material conditions of historical emergence. A recent application of this decolonized historical materialism can be found in Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Loaded, which traces the settler colonial roots of the Second Amendment (City Lights Publishing, 2018).

[11] Borrows, Recovering Canada: the Resurgence of Indigenous Law.

[12] Manuel, Reconciliation Manifesto.

[13] An insightful response to Krul’s analysis of Nazi settler colonialism considers this reduction in more detail here.

[14] For a more detailed history of this labour policy, see Sakai.

[15] The convict leasing system introduced immediately following the formal abolition of slavery in the United States is a prime example of such logic: settler fascist policing ensured an enormous reservoir of expendable black labour for plantation owners and corporations such as the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, a convenient alternative for capitalists who were worried about the costs of reproducing their labour power.

[16] As Amilcar Cabral put it, the purpose of colonial violence is “above all, to take up arms to destroy, or at least neutralize and to paralyze their cultural life. For as long as part of that people have a cultural life, foreign domination cannot be assured of its perpetuation.”

[17] This ideology of self-confident liberalism is further expressed by settler states’ cherished political projects of multiculturalism, which conveniently sever the political recognition of cultural difference from more radical demands for economic restitution (such as the return of Indigenous lands). That the ideology of multiculturalism has achieved widespread currency in settler colonial states like Canada and Australia is telling in this regard, whereby affording Indigenous peoples piecemeal cultural recognition in place of their political sovereignty conceals the state’s illegitimate claim to Indigenous territories in the first place. For more detailed analyses of cultural recognition politics and multiculturalism in the settler colonial context, see Bannerji, Coulthard, Povinelli, and Hale.

[18] Walter Benjamin, 8th thesis on the Philosophy of History.

[19] For a thoroughgoing anti-colonial analysis of the historical and contemporary shortcomings of fascist theory and anti-fascist practice, see Ena͞emaehkiw Wākecānāpaew Kesīqnaeh’s essay “Fascism and Anti-Fascism: A Decolonial Perspective.”