Fascism in the Era of Postmodernism

What are Putin's convictions? None, but the absence of any feeling of responsibility to the governed

Boris Kagarlitsky

The ideological peculiarity of the conflict that’s broken out between Russia and Ukraine is that both sides declare their opponents to be fascists. Putin and his propaganda refer to the activities of many extreme right-wing nationalist groups in Ukraine, some of which are indeed integrated into the state’s security forces. The cult of Ukrainian nationalist Stepan Bandera, who collaborated with the Nazis, is also referred to in the neighboring country, even though Putin himself consistently calls Ivan Ilyin, who held the same pro-fascist views, his favorite philosopher. Left-wing activists and groups are subjected to similar repression in both states, and nationalist rhetoric, with a fair amount of overt racism, is spilling over the Internet channels of the warring parties. In turn, the Ukrainian authorities, documenting the war crimes committed by the occupying forces, emphasize that their treatment of civilians was typical of the Nazi occupiers in 1941-44.

In the puppet Donetsk People’s Republic, the order for participation in the denazification of Ukraine is awarded to the commander of a local paramilitary unit, who appeared at the ceremony in a uniform with Nazi stripes. Nostalgic torchlit processions with portraits of Stepan Bandera and other collaborators, shown on Russian television to prove the need to fight “Ukro-nazism,” are shown simultaneously with joyful depictions of similar events in Russia itself, where the symbolism of the so-called “special operation” and numerous ceremonies, reveals a clear and conscious reliance on the aesthetics of the Third Reich. Propaganda materials are unambiguously written in the style of Hitler’s Volkische Beobachter of 1939-45 and use the same arguments and terms. 

The use of nationalist rhetoric in Russia and Ukraine was an important factor in the cultural preparation for the bloodbath that shook both states. However, there was no ideological consistency here or there. Right-wing militant groups in Ukraine were sponsored by the Jewish oligarch Kolomoisky, but they also sponsored the victorious presidential campaign of Vladimir Zelensky, with whom the hopes of turning the state toward a more democratic and equitable development were initially associated. It is noteworthy that these hopes have been dashed, and it will take a long time to overcome the splits in the country, despite the consolidation caused by the opposition to the Russian occupation. 

However, if the need to confront an external threat objectively, despite the ideological efforts of right-wing nationalists, contributes to the rallying of Ukrainian society, at least at the household level, in Russia the opposite trend is observed. No matter how much the television shouts about consolidation, there is a growing split in society, caused in part by the authorities’ eclectic attempts to combine nostalgia for the Soviet past (which included the ideology of friendship between peoples) with the hateful rhetoric of total annihilation.

Kremlin propaganda unequivocally declares that the very existence of Ukrainian statehood and Ukrainian identity poses an existential threat to Russia, and therefore must be destroyed. Everything Ukrainian is declared fascist by definition, and all people who recognize such an identity are fascists subject to physical extermination. Firstly, it is stipulated that only Russians have the right to decide who exactly is a “Nazi” (and therefore must be physically destroyed), but on the other hand, the right to speak on behalf of “Russians” belongs only to authorized propagandists and government officials, while all other compatriots have no voice, and if they decide to object in any form, they are declared “traitors,” “foreign agents,” “non-Russians” or “Nazi accomplices.” It is significant, therefore, that the idea of ​​true “Russianness” here completely coincides with the ideas about the German Aryan identity adopted in the Third Reich.

The paradox is that the fascist-ization of public discourse takes place under the slogan of anti-fascism. At the same time, on the level of political culture, the Russian authorities emphasize their adherence to “traditional values” and even archaic values, trying to revive the ancient traditions of Tsarism and Byzantism, but at the same time officials are not afraid to refer to the great achievements of the USSR. Waving the red Soviet flag as a symbol of “the great victory of 1945,” they continue to tear down Soviet monuments and expel the remnants of the communist legacy from the education system, while turning their nostalgia for the territorial unity and power of the collapsed Union into a justification for their claims to the lands of neighboring post-Soviet states. 

There is, however, an iron logic to this inconsistency. Eclectic and aggressive postmodernism prevails. No matter what they say about the Soviet or imperial legacy, Russia’s ruling elite was formed by three decades of neoliberal and globalized capitalism. Their sources of income were linked to world markets for raw materials, and their total lack of interest in the social development, science, culture, or industry of their own country explains the disastrous results of their military adventure in the very first weeks after the outbreak of hostilities. It was not an attempt to build a well-functioning and rational institution of totalitarianism. On the contrary, corruption and window-dressing triumphed, along with the transformation of the state’s media-propaganda machine into a lucrative industry generating huge fortunes for the top figures involved in this production, displacing any real work, including preparing the army and navy for war.

Putin is precisely and exclusively a man of the 21st century, the era of postmodernism (when a coherent worldview is replaced by a haphazard pasting together of ideas, scraps of concepts and randomly assembled images). He is a pragmatist who has no firm principles other than confidence in his and the elites’ total irresponsibility to the people under their control (something unacceptable and impossible for 17th-century monarchs), the product of the social and cultural degradation of late Soviet society combined with the degradation of late capitalism. And in this sense Russia is not only not a tragic exception, but on the contrary, it is moving in the general direction of the ideological evolution of contemporary bourgeois society.

The classical fascism of the 1920s-40s was not just an ideology, but a complex system in which the eclectic combination of elitist and egalitarian slogans, anti-communism and criticism of bourgeois democracy served the goal of the totalitarian-corporate reorganization of capitalism within the framework of the nation-state. It was closely linked to the crisis reconstruction of the national industry under the aegis of big capital, integrated with an orderly bureaucracy based on government regulation of the economy. Such a complex fascist or Nazi project becomes impossible in the 21st century, since the classical industrial system on the basis of which it arose no longer exists, while the neoliberal market order has long ago become the fundamental mechanism of elite reproduction, not only in business, but also in state administration. The cultural logic of late capitalism suggests not integration but fragmentation of society. This fragmentation is, however, in direct contradiction with the traditions of civil society and institutional-organized pluralism based on the horizontal solidarity of classes and social groups that opposed the state to big capital. This is why certain elements of fascist ideology and practice can be used in a variety of contexts, albeit with invariably reactionary aims, in full accordance with the aesthetics of postmodernism, which was generated by the same social processes.

Elements of fascism can be observed even in old and still solid liberal democracies, from Austria to France, where right-wing populism, although not simply a modern form of fascism, easily uses ideological tools from its arsenal. This is all the more evident in societies like Ukraine, where a weak state is combined with a fierce struggle of oligarchic groups capable of forming a power resource on their own, or in Russia, and where the authoritarian power of the resource oligarchy is trying to overcome its crisis on the basis of totalitarian ideology and practice. 

Yet the fact that both neoliberalism and postmodernism logically arrive at peculiar forms of post fascism is evidence that this era is ending. Using totalitarian ideology and rhetoric, the system is unable to build a workable totalitarian machine that corresponds to these principles, either in the sphere of governance or in the sphere of production and exchange. Therefore, the current military confrontation is only a symptom of a crisis from which it will be necessary to seek a way out by recreating mechanisms of democratic solidarity.