Okay we all know that already. I’m not reinventing the wheel.
But I think I am realizing why fascism does certain things and it is rooted in the fact that as capitalism hollows everything out and destroys the society that hosts it the capitalism disjunctions the social fabrics, breaking the social reproduction, and ultimately destabilizing or undoing all the unpaid labors that make society work - the humming substructure that capitalism grafted super structurally into.
So that’s why fascism always obsesses over birth rates and trad shit. It’s them scrabbling to unfuck society from all the ways capitalism fucked society. It’s their mad-hatted dash to pick up the pieces of the delicate shit their bosses broke
I’m phone posting in a mall and it smells like cheap cologne and Starbucks. I’m in the nest of the beast and I’m stewing on shit.
But I think I finally get it and can articulate why someone once said fascism is the immune system of capitalism, fascism is the fever. And it stuck to me. And I think this is how I make sense of it. Christmas shopping the Saturday before the holiday like a big dumb dope who didn’t plan ahead.
But hey I’m having fun, edibles rule.
Nah, today nobody actually has a memory of feudalism to return to, the past they're hearkening back to is just slightly earlier in the history of capitalism. As far as I know, this was broadly true of post-ww1 Germany too. For the most part, any "memory" of feudal life was received wisdom and cultural memory.
And fascists, being enabled by capitalists, cannot confront that it is capitalism that has caused the decline they exist in response to. So it's like trying to return a marble to a "resting" position halfway down a slope. Each attempt only makes them more frustrated, more likely to lash out violently.
What is fascism but a nostalgia for a past that never existed? They're trying to return to a fairy tale.
I really like that marble analogy