Stop Being Such a Fascist!

An Analysis of Felix Guattari's Totalitarian Chemistry on "Why Everyone Wants to be a Fascist"

Selected excerpts from video above:

...There are many ways that these problems can be explored. He suggests that the modern origins can be traced to "the repression against the Communards of 1871", explaining that modern forms have evolved different ways of seizing collective desire based on local relations and transformations to production. Their history is inseparable from their social transversality. Effectively, the machines that fascism has deployed in the past are continuing to proliferate into new forms - he describes it as a "totalitarian chemistry" that proliferates across social and individual structures, even including guilt and neurosis. As the social division of labor evolves, it has necessitated larger and larger organizations of productive groupings, but this has resulted in increasing molecularization of the human element "of industry, of the economy, of education, of information, etc.".

Again, its important to understand that to Guattari, individuals do not communicate directly to other people but rather participate in a "a transhuman chain of organs is formed and enters into conjunction with semiotic chains and an intersection of material flows." This molecularization exploded to such a point that they are "capable of liberating the atomic energy of desire". As a result, both totalitarian modes of capitalist and socialist systems have "to continually perfect and miniuraturize their repressive machines".

Guattari thus concludes that in order to understand the machines that compose totalitarian powers, one has to focus on the micropolitical struggle. Without this focus, abstractions and generalizations form and one finds themselves back in the realm of totalitarianism, and repression regains its power. Guattari is basically interested in a theory that does not alienate the source of desire from its power. So, in order to fight back against this, one has to continually focus on the molecular because totalitarianism constantly is adapting to new social transformations and producing new generalizations.

As an example, Hitler as a unique individual here was not necessarily special but his form repeated itself through "dreams, deliriums, in the contorted behavior of policemen, and even on the leather jackets of some gangs who, without knowing anything about Nazism, reproduce the icons of Hitlerism." Even in the modern day, Hitlerism runs rampant, such as being embedded in popular conspiracy theories shared frequently online.

Guattari is concerned that analyzing fascism through social/ historical/ political/ psychoanalytic generalizations is not enough because fascism is crystalizing, or otherwise finding itself emerging through these processes in more and more microscopic formulations in all walks of life. "By pretending that the individual has a negligible role in history, they would like to make us believe that we can do nothing but stand with hands tied in the face of the hysterical gesticulations or paranoiac manipulations of local tyrants and bureaucrats of every kind. A micropolitics of desire means that henceforth we will refuse to allow any fascist formula to slip by, on whatever scale it may manifest itself, including within the scale of the family or even within the scale of our own personal economy."...

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...Anyways, narratives persisting through society, especially through mass media, reinforce the idea at this time that fascism was a problem that came and went, and was defeated by a rosy image of the united forces of capitalism and socialism, which is a repainting of history that hides the reality that the bourgoisie tolerated fascism until it was a threat to itself. Guattari points out that while there was a group of bourgoisie who were external to fascism, critical of its instability and ability to stir desire in the masses, that international capitalism was willing to tolerate its presence until there were other means to control class struggle. The union was not to "save democracy" but to respond to a catastrophic political failure whose runaway libidinal spiral was so dangerous that "the planet was seized by a crisis that seemed like the end of the world".

He says that the reason why leftist alternatives in Italy and Germany failed was because they offered no alternative to this release of desire. In comparison, oftentimes the answer given is that fascist states are able to produce more immediate answers to political crisises in the short term, in contrast "with the powerlessness of the socio-democratic governments of the Weimar Republic". What these explanations fail to understand is the fact that fascism, through its ability to release the desire of the masses, was a huge threat to capitalism, even a bigger threat than the October revolution. The threat came from the fact that fascism triggered a mass "death instinct" in the masses. Basically, by reterritorializing onto a fascist leader, state and society, the masses removed themselves from a reality that they hated - they'd literally rather have a society that destroys itself than be forced into dominant meanings.

But through this process, fascism recaptures this desire back into a new set of dominant meanings through its theatre of hysteria, which results in its own internal instability. Guattari states that fascist meanings emerge from a "composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one". Nazi Germany was so obsessed with death that it was obsessed even with its own death - to the point that it continued to fight in the war for years after it effectively had been lost. In comparison, Stalinism was much more stable.

Capitalism, in comparison to fascism, tries to molecularize and alienate workers while tapping into their "potentiality for desire". It installs its program on all social stratifications in such a way that it entirely codes the individual's perspective of the world. Capitalism tries to avoid large scale social movements and regulates itself through the state, and tries to contain breakout conflicts by confining issues to economic and localized territories.

Stalinism in comparison placed the power of the party over the military/police ect. (in contrast to fascism, where they are relatively on the same level), overcoding the machines of power and placing the masses under control, including the international proletariat. The failure of Stalinism is a result of its inability to adapt to the "molecularization of the work force" - in other words, capitalism's ability to encroach more and more into more tight spaces. Essentially, over time, various failures in the party to control this repression allowed the other social machines to gain more power over time, destabilizing the power in the party. This forced the political question back down to the subject of the particular, which allowed capitalism to integrate into communist parties through its molecularization. This destabilized Stalinism and caused it to effectively collapse. Even though at the time of the writing it still existed in smaller organizations like parties and unions, it operates on the older socio-democratic model and doesn't account for revolutionary releases of desire like May 1968.

With the collapse of Stalinism as competition, the capitalist system needs to develop new forms of totalitarianism. It needs to deal with new problems like racism, sexual repression, the oppression of the mentally and physically disabled, prisons, immigration ect., and to deal with these problems it will repress everything that can't be contained into economic objectives. Guattari explains that fascism is trying to root itself in any structure that is trying to adapt desire for the profit economy.

To wrap it up, Guattari writes the following, which I think should just be preserved in its entireity for its importance:

"We must abandon, once and for all, the quick and easy formula: "Fascism will not make it again." Fascism has already "made it," and it continues to "make it." It passes through the tightest mesh; it is in constant evolution, to the extent that it shares in a micropolitical economy of desire itself inseparable from the evolution of the productive forces. Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone's desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst of fascist repressions. A military machine as such crystallizes a fascist desire, no matter what the political regime may be. Trotsky's army, Mao's army, and Castro's army have been no exceptions: which in no way detracts from their respective merits.

 
Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire."