Capitalism promotes personal and social ... well, I don't want to sound like a fascist or a red-brown by saying "degeneracy", so I'd better say
degradation. In the sense that William S. Burroughs meant:
“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the
consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and
simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client.”
As we never get tired and repeating, Marx and Engels were no workerists, no Red-Browns who actually thought the alienation, aggression, anger and gullibility of the actually existing working class were
good things. No, the Marxist proletariat
becomes fit to be the ruling class through the revolutionary struggle - or to put it another way, the Revolution can only triumph (in the full sense of the term, the
social revolution, the transformation of everyday life, not just changing the political/economic system) is if we all "become better people". In this particular context, that means learning solidarity, inner discipline, rationality, being able to "fight with a loving heart".
Capitalism doesn't want us to become better people. It wants us to simultaneously become harder, more devoted, more flexible workers; and more amoral, manipulable consumers. This has been true ever since the late 19th century, where the workers' movement forced universal suffrage on the ruling class at the same time industrial capitalism evolved into consumer capitalism, and actually
controlling the opinion of the masses became the vital technology in maintaining bourgeois hegemony.
I don't think it's true that fascism is just capitalism with the masks taken off - fascism is a political pathology which takes hold among the downwardly mobile middle classes, and the bourgeoisie won't let those thugs and clowns into the country club unless they really have to. But consumer capitalism, in continuously degrading mass consciousness - continually encouraging
more selfish individualism,
more amoral thrill-seeking and low-grade sociopathy,
less rational thought and more jumping at whichever exciting meme comes down the pipeline - continually creates a constituency for fascism.
Fascism is
fun, in the same way that conspiracy theory is
fun, the narratives spread by FOX News, RT and the tabloid press are
fun and the nastier forms of internet trolling or fandom are
fun. They are socially sanctioned outlets for antisocial behaviour. I believe it was Walter Benjamin who described fascism as all the
forms of an revolutionary uprising, but the content of who's in power and who's in control not only stay the same, but become embedded. In that sense, fascism is
carnivalesque. It's a reaction to "normal times capitalism" where the masses are totally apathetic and quiescent - but the pendulum swings back, after untold destruction.
On the other hand, democracy (and workers' democracy, even more so) means hard work, going to meetings, and being responsible. Most people - as the world is today - would
prefer a "bread and circuses" life under an entertaining dictator. This is why the legacy of "hippie revolutionaries" who promoted hedonism as a reaction to boring, rational, bureaucratized post-war Keynesian capitalism,
always had a backdoor where fascism gets in.
Honestly, I think some of the Left
like having Trump in power
just so they can get off on hating him. Living under an
emergency/apocalyptic situation is a lot of excitement and
fun. Until it starts having actual impact on your daily life, of course. But Left-wing politics as a lifestyle choice - rather than as a discipline of learning to wield collective working power - is fundamentally
irresponsible and conservative. The real Revolution is joy and freedom - but it's not fun.
