Venezuelan extreme-right politician María Corina Machado among supporters. Photo: AFP.
By Ernesto Cazal – Aug 22, 2024
To speak of fascism in Venezuela since the public rise of Commander Chávez, one must refer to the discursive and behavioral traits that have historically been associated with the coup strategies and shock tactics used by the sectors attempting regime change since 2002.
Fascism in Venezuela is associated with the use of mercenary, criminal violence of color revolutions as a method of political destabilization, the extermination of the Other as a state of psychosocial tension, disregard towards Venezuelan institutions as a zero-sum game, the imperial demand for military intervention, the hyper-religious sentiment in favor of the neoliberal capitalist system, the adoption of a pro-US and pro-Western geopolitical and civilizational stance.
All these factors can be identified in the discourse and praxis of a significant part of the Venezuelan opposition leadership and of a certain, albeit minuscule, social base of its followers, especially those who have led the coup attempts of 2014, 2017, 2019, and 2024. In all of them, María Corina Machado has played a stellar role.
Fascism past and present
Thus, just as “every era has its fascism,” as stated by the Italian writer Primo Levi, a Jewish survivor of the Auschwitz Monowitz concentration camp, each national or regional experience has its own fascism as well. Geopolitics, social conditions, historical times, and the technologies of the moment all have an influence, sculpting with specific features the fascism of one region or another.
With the expansionist totalitarianism of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, the ideological and moral parameters were established for a political field that had industrialized racial crime based on the feelings of rage, revenge, and resentment accumulated for decades by the European peoples. The Third Reich also drew inspiration from a juridical-governmental structure from the Jim Crow racial laws in the United States and the geopolitical role of the British Raj in India. Subsequently, fascism became a symbol of political incorrectness, deserving of banishment and proscription, whose origins, Western colonialist barbarism, as the Martinican poet Aimé Césaire would say, are kept in analytical opacity to be used as rhetorical wildcards and accommodating labels from the liberal flank.
However, over the decades, and with particular impetus since the French May 1968, the term “fascist” became generalized to characterize the aggressive totalitarianism of the technologies of liberal power. The social changes produced by the economic transition from Fordism to post-Fordism during the second half of the 20th century were being analyzed from that perspective by Guy Debord, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, to name the most influential French philosophers and theorists of that time, who stated that the society of consumption and spectacle had triumphed in an increasingly complex and interconnected world.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, in his analytical columns in Corriere della Sera during the 1970s, outlined a real-time critique of the hedonistic consumerism that was taking hold in Italy, a process led by a transnational power which he did not hesitate to describe as “a fatal form of fascism” because its pragmatism has only one end: “the reorganization and brutally totalitarian homologation of the world.”
In this same line of research, the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos identified a category of fascism, “social fascism,” that integrates the totalitarianism of the market and the economic devices of neoliberalism with the social consequences (misery and exclusion) in liberal democratic systems. In short, it is a social and civilizational regime with different forms of sociability aiming at the same goal: “the complete surrender of democracy to the accumulation needs of capitalism.”
This vision emphasizes that fascism is no longer characteristic of a State—a la Mussolini—but of certain forms in which a society develops. However, Sousa Santos has already updated his analysis, emphasizing that State institutions play a crucial role, either by omission or by coercion: “The fascism of our time has the following faces: social neo-Darwinism, politicization of religion, traditional extreme right, judicial warfare (lawfare), extreme individualism. Any of them is compatible with democracy as long as the latter is not much more than a game of appearances.”
The history and evolution of the hackneyed term in question is much more complex than this article can cover. However, it must be emphasized that the fascism of the past is not the same as the fascism of today, although they share common roots as a spawn of capitalist modernity and a totalitarian device. The Portuguese scholar writes, “What is the fascism of our time? I define fascism as the sociopolitical condition of concentration of capital, which, without democratic control, legitimizes total indifference to the humanity of the other. Fascism, therefore, is a phenomenon proper to capitalist societies.”
In addition, fascism must be understood today as a social practice, ideologically contradictory, without defined postulates, and permeated throughout the psychosomatic field of global society.
But fascism is also born at the limits—or at the heart—of liberalism, where the primacy of the capitalist market has absolute sovereignty.
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The new right-wing tendencies and Venezuela
With this approach, we can understand the rise of new right-wing currents, some of them heirs of historical fascism and others of extreme right-wing or libertarian tendencies that were marginalized by the liberal order during the 20th century.
The right-wing ideologies of the 21st century have been able to find significant societal niches in all corners of the world. They have adapted to the present times and have achieved state power in several countries in America, Europe, and Asia. It is striking that among them, there are convergences but also programmatic, ideological, and discursive discordances. They are not a homogeneous movement.
In the United States, for example, libertarians and conservative liberals have control over Trumpism, while neoconservatives and liberal hawks have control over the Republican and Democratic parties. Other groups, such as the neo-reactionaries, have no place in the ideological mainstream in the North. Still, their capital invested in Washington, D.C., such as that of Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley guru, founder of PayPal, and one of the most important political and technological investors, ensures influential spaces in the White House and the US Congress.
Jair Bolsonaro, insignia of a traditional Brazilian extreme right with ideological seasoning drawn from the late Olavo de Carvalho, and Javier Milei, self-described liberal and libertarian, constitute another example of how the right-wing currents of this century fight for political spaces with a populist language and style, with a preference for the “cultural battle:” sexuality and gender, individual vs. society, freedom vs. “communism,” etc. over—although not exclusive of—racial, national and ethnic issues. They also use new technologies in favor of their propaganda.
They arise in a context where the fascist animosity of the Italian futurists, virile aggressiveness and technological speed is no longer exacerbated, but in an era marked by the economic and consequent psychic depression of the great majorities on the planet as well as by the anger and social resentment resulting from a totalitarian liberal and global system that has placed at the center of its interests the circulation, purchase, and sale of goods and capitalist accumulation. At the same time, the human being was displaced to the leftovers of these dynamics.
Contemporary fascism is enriched by this and leverages its aggressiveness through the different parties and movements of the current extreme right that recognizes it as a social practice.
María Corina Machado’s inclination for Milei’s ways speaks of her ideological affiliation, even though they come from different classes and schools. She integrates the ideas of economic liberalism—privatization of public goods, laissez-faire capitalism, and the passive or diminished participation of the State in society with the right-wing populist will to destroy all opposition to capitalism. These are defining features of their personalities as they swing between contemporary fascism, of which they make little or no mention, and the neoclassical liberalism they claim to admire.
Nevertheless, the strongest expressions of fascism are found in societies where the liberal order prevails, such as North America and Europe, or in political groups that identify ideologically with liberalism and vindicate violence as a tool of social extermination, as the Venezuelan extreme right has done in the times of Chavismo.
Just as it is also true that the new rightists respond to the social destabilization of late capitalism, their origin is systemic discontent. However, they are tendencies that do not propose alternatives but reforms to capitalist hegemony. They propose a form of government or governmental transformation according to ideological interests—the libertarians a minimal and deregulating State, the neo-reactionaries a State-company governed by a CEO. Still, they never propose the overthrow of the prevailing civilizational model.
Machado’s fascism navigates in these ideological waters that combine the liberal cult and the destructive use of political violence so that the spoiled daughter of Corina Parisca Pérez may try to ride on chaos and destabilization towards Miraflores. Is it viable for fascist practices to be installed by the Venezuelan government and the State in a country that has historically rejected and challenged them? It is worth asking, even if the answer is obvious.
Translation: Orinoco Tribune
OT/SC/SF
