Why Neoliberalism Needs Neofascists Prabhat Patnaik https://janataweekly.org/why-neoliberalism-needs-neofascists/ August 29, 2021
As the old prop of trickle-down economics lost its credibility, a new prop was needed to sustain the neoliberal regime politically. The solution came in the form of an alliance between globally integrated corporate capital and local neofascist elements.
This dynamic has played out in countries around the world, from the rise of Narendra Modi in India and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump in the United States.
the distinctive features of the new fascism. Neofascist groups exist in all modern societies, but typically only as fringe elements. They take center stage in periods of crisis only with the backing of corporate capital, which provides access to massive financial resources and control over the corporate-owned media and other means of opinion-making.
A characteristic strategy of neofascism, like its classical predecessors, is to demonize the “other,” whether Muslims in India or racial and sexual minorities in the United States and Brazil...
Such vilification can take multiple forms: it might make no mention of economic crisis at all, concentrating instead on the majority community’s need to get back its “self-respect” that has been allegedly damaged by the minority in the past. Or it might hold the minority responsible for economic woes, quite apart from its alleged role in damaging the majority community’s self-respect. Non-fascist governments are accused of “pandering” to this minority by playing the politics of “appeasement.”
In addition to its attacks on the “other,” neofascism also echoes classical fascism in attacking any and all its critics. It calls them “anti-national” by equating criticism of the government with treachery to the nation.
Classical fascism revived employment through government armaments expenditure financed significantly by borrowing—that is, by running a large fiscal deficit.
Contemporary neofascism, by contrast, is incapable of ending mass unemployment. It is not just that such a goal requires larger government expenditures, already an object of scorn among neoliberals; those expenditures must be financed by taxing capitalists or by a fiscal deficit—both ruled out under neoliberalism.