Okay we all know that already. I’m not reinventing the wheel.
But I think I am realizing why fascism does certain things and it is rooted in the fact that as capitalism hollows everything out and destroys the society that hosts it the capitalism disjunctions the social fabrics, breaking the social reproduction, and ultimately destabilizing or undoing all the unpaid labors that make society work - the humming substructure that capitalism grafted super structurally into.
So that’s why fascism always obsesses over birth rates and trad shit. It’s them scrabbling to unfuck society from all the ways capitalism fucked society. It’s their mad-hatted dash to pick up the pieces of the delicate shit their bosses broke
I’m phone posting in a mall and it smells like cheap cologne and Starbucks. I’m in the nest of the beast and I’m stewing on shit.
But I think I finally get it and can articulate why someone once said fascism is the immune system of capitalism, fascism is the fever. And it stuck to me. And I think this is how I make sense of it. Christmas shopping the Saturday before the holiday like a big dumb dope who didn’t plan ahead.
But hey I’m having fun, edibles rule.
There’s a paradoxical nature to this, as is typical with fascism. The “retvrn to tradition” shit is definitely a response to the erosion of social cohesion and reproduction that capitalism creates. But ultimately, fascism only ever serves to reinforce capital’s grip on society and the political economy, thus it sabotages its own goals of restoring social bonds.
I think there’s a variety of reasons this happens; some fascists are entirely cynical and are just looking to get the plebs to blame anything but the capitalist class. Some fascists crouch the social restoration in terms of purging “undesirables” and don’t understand where social bonds actually come from. Some just reflexively defend anything with “traditional” vibes and that ends up including the capitalist class.