Fascism in power in the 1930s brought the world to genocidal war. But memories have faded, as has the stigma attached to the far-right – and that’s dangerous… Democracy under capitalism has always been heavily curtailed by corporate interests and plutocrats who have enjoyed far greater power than the average voter. When capitalism falls into crisis, its profound flaws generate popular fury. The question is who harnesses this
Democracy is dying across the globe. This may sound alarmist and generate a follow-up question: what does that actually mean? Will there be no elections? Will the opposition be criminalised? If these are the metrics, then Vladimir Putin’s Russia remains a democracy. Six political parties are represented in the State Duma, its federal parliament, and there are more than 20 registered political parties. Well, as you probably understand, Russia is no democracy: indeed, this is a nation veering past authoritarianism and into totalitarianism, with more Russians being persecuted for political activity than since the days of Joseph Stalin.
Faith in democracy is unquestionably on the decline. A new study finds that a fifth of Britons under 45 believe that the best system for running a country effectively is “a strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with elections” compared with 8% of their older counterparts. That mirrors other findings across the world. A study by Cambridge researchers in 2020 examined attitudes in 160 countries and found that younger generations “have become steadily more disillusioned with democracy”. And according to the Pew Research Center, nearly two-thirds of citizens in 12 high-income nations were dissatisfied with democracy in 2024, up from just under half in 2017….
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On Post-Fascism: How citizenship is becoming an exclusive privilege by G. M. Tamás
Alexandre Koyré: The Political Function of the Modern Lie (1943)
Michael Walzer Liberalism and the art of separation
Dr Strangelove: how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. Stanley Kubrick, 1963
Hegemony Changes Everything: Antonio Gramsci’s theories of how the rich stay rich
Ten Theses on the Proliferation of Egocrats (1977)
Gáspár Tamás; prophet of post-fascism
History and revolution in Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle
Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility: Lord Acton
Society of the Spectacle / इमेज – Image: A Poem on Deaths in the Age of Covid
The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology: Webinar delivered on October 16, 2020)
After the truth-shower 