Political conservatism transformed into fascist radicalism

Fascism, transformed into radical right-wing conservatism, expressed in violence as a political praxis, is the reserve army of neoliberal capitalism to return current societies to the living conditions of a supremacist “racial order” in the relations of domination-dominated between social classes of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In this conception, the countries of the periphery are transformed into “extractive economies,” predators of the ecology of life, of the habitats where people produce their daily lives. They are economies that assemble parts produced in other latitudes or import finished products or products manufactured abroad. This extractive-assembly condition makes any possibility of sustainable endogenous development impossible.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, radical right-wing conservatism has its historical antecedents in the foundations of the United States, which has been synthesized in an expression emptied of content by the financial-media power: “Manifest Destiny,” but which Henry Kissinger expressed in his 1992 book Diplomacy: “The singularities that the United States has attributed to itself throughout its history have given rise to two contradictory attitudes toward foreign policy. The first is that the best way for the United States to serve its values ​​is by perfecting the democracy of its own country, thus acting as a beacon for the rest of humanity; the second, that the values ​​of the nation impose on it the obligation to defend them throughout the world, as if it were a crusade. Torn between nostalgia for a pristine past and the yearning for a perfect future, American thought has oscillated between isolationism and commitment, although since the end of the Second World War the realities of interdependence have predominated.”

That is to say, the metaphysical idea of ​​US “democracy” is the ideological “spearhead” to ravage, destroy, invade, blockade, sanction, impose unilateral coercive measures, confiscate property and intervene in other countries that show a sovereign desire to get off its geopolitical radar, on the one hand, and, on the other, its “values” are expressed in: 1.) blocking any possibility of development for the peoples of the Great South whose potential wealth is the strategic energy, mining, natural and water resources, and 2.) in a system of “global surveillance” that has its concretions in the national security agencies, the CIA being the best known, and in the deployment of military bases throughout the planet. There are approximately 950 military bases installed in the sovereign territories of more than 150 countries of the world system of capitalist modernity/coloniality.

This radical right-wing conservatism is opposed to all the historic labour conquests of the working class: the 40-hour workweek, followed by reductions to 36 and 30 hours a week respectively, the weekly day off, meal and travel time, paid holidays, the extra month in December, labour regulations (laws), pre- and post-natal leave with full pay, the right of working women to breastfeeding hours, retirement, the right to public health, public housing, quality public education, the benefits of social benefits, to receive a salary while on sick leave, the playful expression of recreation, sports, as well as the rights of “Mother Earth”, etc. Today, the constant struggles of workers have turned these labour conquests into Human Rights enshrined in some constitutions.

Now, what drives global fascism to dismantle those minimum living conditions of the working class that allow them to provide themselves with a certain sense of a “dignified life”? In our Latin American neighbourhood we can see the realities of Ecuador, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Uruguay, Paraguay, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and many other peoples, between the political executions of neoliberal far-right governments, sponsors of fascism and tributaries of the policies and interests of the USA and the achievements of progressive governments.

Let's look at Ecuador under the Citizen Revolution and under the successive neoliberal governments of Lenin Moreno, Guillermo Lasso and Daniel Noboa: from being the safest country with the best socioeconomic indicators, it became the most violent country on this continent and competing with Argentina in the increase of extreme poverty, exponential precariousness of living conditions and yet today in the electoral process to elect a president, the victory of Luis González, candidate of the Citizen Revolution, is not very clear.

The people vote for their oppressors, for their executioners in everyday life, for the authors of their impoverishment. Today Ecuador is a country without a State, thrown into the arms of the only policy that the fascist extreme right is capable of implementing: the privatization of everything public, including life itself. To sustain it, the common being must resort to the private market.

All the achievements mentioned above, among others, remain on the global agenda of radical right-wing conservatism as “unresolved issues”, issues with which they have never agreed because these achievements of workers are part of a political philosophy of humanism related to “equality”, “justice” and “freedom”: improving the living conditions of workers means greater levels and areas of expression of freedom. “Freedom” is not possible if a people is mired in poverty in all its structural expressions, including that of thought.

Here we see a radical difference between socialist humanism and fascism and/or radical conservatism of the extreme right: the latter is based on a “single thought”, there are no divergences or disruptive inflections that contradict it. There is no dialectic in it, much less criticism; there is only an ideological-moral timelessness that denies global transformations and their effects on cultural diversity in the ecology of life. Only homogeneity and historical mechanism. On the other hand, the nature of the thought of socialist humanism is dialectical criticism and geohistorical diversity; its vitality lies in the permanent redefinition of the conceptual apparatus and its transcendence in a shared historical horizon: the humanization of daily life.

We cannot “un-memorize” our historical struggles, which are represented by each of the labor and social conquests and achievements. All of them were “snatched” from the global economic elites related to the production, appropriation and accumulation of surplus value in the constant struggle. This surplus value is created by the labor force, and appropriated and accumulated by the economic-financial elites of big capital on a planetary scale, always refusing to favor and improve the social and material conditions of a dignified life for working families.

All of these achievements were the result of historic struggles that left hundreds of thousands dead and martyred in the streets, factories, and companies around the world. All of them were achievements led by communist, socialist, and progressive movements; in short, all of them were labor achievements of popular power organized in guilds and unions. All of them have been labor achievements denied, rejected, violated in their non-fulfillment by radical right-wing conservatism, that is, by racism.

Now, radical right-wing conservatism knows very well that violence as a political praxis carried out by a single group in a single country is destined for political and social failure. Far-right radicalism requires corporate and geopolitical alliances: fascist organizations with the same ideological profile and similar praxis “united” in acts of violence. It also requires financial, media and military alliances to sustain the current hegemonic world system of modernity/coloniality, expressed in everyday life located in the development of neoliberal capitalist economic-social formations of production, appropriation and accumulation of surplus value.

In the best Gramsci style, but in a regressive sense, the right is also building its own historical bloc. The “Lima Group” was a failed attempt at this unifying purpose of extreme right-wing radicalism, which includes the former presidents of Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Spain, Brazil, Peru, Panama, Costa Rica, etc. The alliances of extreme right-wing radical conservatism revolve around the United States and the European Union, adding countries with extreme right-wing governments such as Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Peru, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Guatemala, and some “socialist governments.”

The alliances of international fascism are changing the traditional ways of “doing politics” within the republic: violence, very consistent with its predatory and destabilizing intention of the nation-state and the conditions of possibilities to establish social consensus between the various political organizations in relation to the major issues that affect the peoples made precarious by extractive economies and fascist governments. The current international legal and political order, even in its formalities, ends up being a straitjacket for the groups of radical right-wing conservatism.

Radical conservatism of the extreme right is anti-consensus as long as it involves “dialogue” to “give way” to positions that deny life. Its theme is not life, that of peoples, but surplus value. It does not seek alliances with political organizations, beyond their ideological-political creeds, whose political practices are oriented towards weakening the institutionality of the national State and its legal system in order to reduce it to the minimum possible.

When a radical right-wing organization comes to political power, its first actions are aimed at dismantling the institutions of the nation state and its entire political apparatus: abolishing the legal framework, constitutional reform, deregulation of labor, reduction of the state (elimination of attached entities) and of bureaucracy (massive layoffs), eliminating all social investment, privatization of everything public: health, education; pensions and retirements pass into the domain of the private sector, each worker contracts his or her health insurance with the private sector and his or her retirement with private retirement fund agencies; likewise, all benefits associated with the worker's family are reduced.

Fascist organizations do not advocate a “society of equals” but rather racialization, a legacy of the colonial “racial order.” Fascism advocates building “social walls” that explicitly expose the differences and inequalities between social classes and guarantee their consolidation. Radical right-wing conservatism does not seek to establish consensus; the first consensus is respect for the institutionality of the national State. The radical right-wing seeks to demolish everything and to do so they believe they can count on the national armed forces, not because they consider them heirs of the Liberation Army but because they consider them the guardians of their “social walls” and of the racial order that is born and maintained with the institutionalized violence of a fascist State, no longer as a guarantor of citizens’ rights, but as a guardian of the privileges of the political and economic castes of the elites of radical right-wing conservatism.

Fascism is the permanent violence exercised by organisations derived from radical right-wing conservatism that seize the state in order to demolish it. The violence of fascism makes any notion of militancy and its praxis disappear; it makes any notion of life and human life disappear. The radical right that has become fascism only has fanatics.