Understanding Fascism Today: Nationalism, Group Psychology, and the Return of the Old

Abstract

This essay attempts to grasp the implications of thinking the Freudian concept of the return of the repressed alongside the Marxian concept of the return of primitive accumulation. By examining the ambivalence of the totemism that results from trauma and then juxtaposing this incipient nationalism with the process of primitive accumulation, the essay attempts to show the inadequacies of traditional understandings of fascism. It not only becomes untenable to reduce fascism to the juridical and political phenomena of a single nation state, it also becomes impossible to deny just how much contemporary liberalism is complicit in the intensification of the fascist social condition. When one accordingly compares the racist and sexist features of the colonial period to those of the postwar period and present historical moment, one is forced to conclude that we are living in the midst of the latest instantiation of an old process.