14 Capitalism’s Apotheosis in Fascism

Of the 8 pathological dispositions currently manifest in our society, I expect that 3c will be the most insensate and resistant to the arguments of the Framework. The reason for this is simple: the most recent epoch of the interchange of Eros and Thanatos was Capitalism, the 3c Antithesis era. This recency creates institutional residue, and this institutional residue supplies potent arguments in opposition to solve.

I say the most recent epoch, and not the current epoch, because it is apparent that Capitalism, as an animating force of human organization, has already died. To put a finer point on it, the capitalist wave has crested, and Eros now diminishes towards its 4o nadir.

Since the 1960s, our culture has been engaged in a process of thorough reconstitution. The children of the post-war baby boom, reeling from the shock of the holocaust, refused en masse to participate in the structures of 3c society. In the process, they became hippies, generating a critical mass of equanimity and forming the vanguard of 3N cultural synthesis.

A great deal of hand-wringing and misery accompanied the departure of the 1960s, as the hippies found themselves unable to overwhelm the institutions and structures of 3c society in active revolution. Freak Power failed to gain any traction; the Carter administration collapsed; ultimately, Ronald Reagan was elected president, and a wave of neo-Conservatism seemed to plunge society back into business as usual.  The hippie was reduced to a pop-culture archetype, a mode of dress and a slang vernacular disassociated from any particular insight.

However, as I’ll discuss later on in Nonparticipation and Building a Holocaust-Proof Society, revolution is a fundamentally 3c, bourgeois activity; the real legacy of the hippies was to destroy the unquestioned assumptions of Capitalist society. In the process, the hippie counterculture so thoroughly warped the basic premises of our society that it was rendered invisible. This invisibility is a testament to the success of the counterculture as a historical enterprise; but it forms an obstacle to the kind of intentional solve this BlogBook aims to illustrate. It’s all too easy to re-cast the counterculture as a reaction to the bigoted “-isms” of the world, without delving deeper into the questions of time and place which undergirded and necessitated it.

For that reason, this chapter will consist of an overview of Capitalism, the 2n3c mode of social organization. First, we’ll cover the history of Capitalism in a thumbnail sketch, from its origins in the Black Death of the 13th century to its apotheosis in Fascism and subsequent collapse in the 1960s. Next, we’ll dig into the characteristics of capitalist culture, and the bourgeois mores upon which it is founded.

Through this process of retrospection, I hope to make a case which has elsewhere in this BlogBook been taken as a premise: that the 3c pathology is not a universal facet of human nature, but is instead the temporally limited product of a specific historical dialectic. This dialectic has finished, and as such, it is now the responsibility of each individual to purge themselves of this pathology of their own free will.

But first, as has become a tradition for this BlogBook, a note on terminology.

Capitalism vs Corporatism: A Discussion of Terms

Whenever I use the term “Capitalism” in this BlogBook, I’m referring narrowly to the societal superstructures which emerge from mass 3c-inculcation. However, this definition is more or less circular, so I feel that I should lay a few more cards on the table with regard to my terminology.

The term for what I’m calling “Capitalism” is more properly “Corporatism”. Corporatism is a more or less Hegelian term for the organization of society into units of individuals who bear some sort of material affinity, whether they work in the same industry, share a political affiliation, live in the same neighborhood, or what have you. This is the sense in which corporation is meant— business enterprises are subsumed into this term, but so are all organizations which employ a measure of hierarchy and are based around a shared interest.

In the ideal Hegelian society, which in my opinion is an ideal 3c society, these corporations are organized into an informal hierarchy. The political will of the individual— what the individual thinks should be done— is channeled upward through society’s corporations towards the government. The government enacts this political will through laws, which it then enforces on the individual through the mediation of the corporations. This cycle continues forever.

Hegel dresses this concept up very elaborately, and I’ve likely trampled all over numerous aspects of it here; I ask that my more erudite readers keep in mind that this is a transcendental manual, not an academic treatise. Corporatism as I am employing it refers to this, the organization of society into a hierarchical system of sub-units through which political will is channeled upward and downward between the government and the individual. The ultimate expression of Corporatism is Fascism, as “achieved” in Nazi Germany, in which every aspect of society is integrated into a hierarchy of prehensile reactivity embodied in the human form of the Fuhrer.

This is, obviously, distinct from the vernacular notion of Capitalism as “free enterprise”, though it could be argued that Corporatism is an inevitable outgrowth of free enterprise unleavened by Liberal regulations like antitrust laws.

So, if “Corporatism” is a more accurate name for the phenomenon than “Capitalism”, why am I using the latter?

Straightforwardly, because Marx has poisoned the well of our epochal reasoning. “Capitalism” in the vernacular is actually employed in two ways. Sometimes it’s used to refer to free enterprise; sometimes it’s used to refer to the Marxist conception of historical epochs by which dialectics of progress play out. When a nation is referred to as  “capitalist”, the intended definition is the former one; when someone is referring to “Late Stage Capitalism”, the intended definition is the latter.

My system of the Cycles of Thesis and Antithesis fits very nicely with the Marxist construction of history. They’re both lifted more or less whole-cloth from Hegel, and I agree with and have employed Marx’s opposition of the feudal mode of production with the capitalist mode. Attempting to evade Marx’s cultural influence by employing the term “Corporatism” would therefore do more to obscure my point than to clarify it. This chapter, and other chapters touching on “Capitalism”, should be considered of a piece with larger conversations surrounding “Late Stage Capitalism”. That it should not be considered in relation to more scrupulous economic analysis is, hopefully, something that unaware readers will catch on to fairly quickly.

So, wherever in the BlogBook you see the word “Capitalism”, keep in mind that it refers to these three things, in this order of precedence:

1. The societal manifestation of mass 3c-inculcation
2. Hegelian Corporatism
3. The Capitalist epoch of Marxism

With that note out of the way, let’s proceed to our historical overview of Capitalism.

A Historical Overview of Capitalism

This overview is going to be a brief, thumbnail sketch of the events of the last 600 or so years. Insofar as I am not anything, I am not a historian; however, the project of self-understanding is an impossible one without sufficient historical context, and “sufficiency” is therefore the order of the day.

Capitalism was conceived through the historical shock of the Black Death, an unimaginable tragedy which demonstrated conclusively the inability of the Feudal order to cope with the imperatives of human life. A European population which was previously swollen to the point of bursting with starving, stagnant peasantry was slashed by 1/3rd or more within the span of a single generation. Once, acreage was scarce and labor was abundant; feudal endowments were to be guarded jealously and warred for incessantly, each plot of farmland supporting more mouths than primitive feudal agriculture could hope to feed. Now land was free all over, but the villeins required to tend to it were hard to come by. The result was an enormous increase in the bargaining power of the peasantry. Over the succeeding centuries, rights were wrung from the clenched fists of the nobility by degrees. A new yeomanry in the countryside and a new burgherate in the towns lost their loyalty to the landed aristocracy; the horror of the Black Death broke their faith in the 3o bargain by which the nobility “of the sword” traded wealth and power for death and danger. A crucial vanguard of the peasantry began to assume by degrees responsibility for their own safety. With land free for the working, suddenly the sweat of one’s brow yielded dividends unimaginable to previous generations; gradually and obscurely, the 3c pathology was born.

The first casualty of the loss of 3o saturation was the aristocracy. Canny dynasties of kings and queens from William the Conqueror through Ferdinand and Isabella to the Sun King Louis XIV realized that by embodying the state, they could win the increasingly 3c yeomanry and burgherate away from their more local feudal overlords. The operation of their repressed drive towards freedom meant that 3cs, where they existed, greatly preferred the distant authority of a king embedded in a structure they believed in (the nation) to the more watchful, closer eye of their personal suzerain.

The Catholic Church, having been born in distant antiquity as the proselytizing organ of 2n Christianity, failed utterly to adapt to these changes and was outmoded by them. The Protestant Reformation wracked it with 3c logic from within— man accountable to the transsubstantial directly, rather than through the intervention of fallible personal superiors— and the great absolutist monarchs pulled it apart from without. What of Catholicism survived the reformation lumbered on in two opposed parts, an increasingly absurd feudal tradition and an increasingly insubstantial, Jesuitical compromise with modernity. Christianity had grown comfortably from its roots as a technique of 2n self-therapy into an apparatus of the 3o order, but it would not survive the 3c epoch, which like every antithesis era burned the supernatural away with the light of Apollonian rationality.

The inevitable logic of the cycle of Thesis and Antithesis developed towards the vernal equinox, the point in the rising tide of spring Eros at which the forces of 3o and 3c were evenly opposed; the latter, naturally, overcame the former. This manifested in revolution, the perennial mode of bourgeois politics. First, fitfully, in England in the 17th century; then in France and America in the 18th, then throughout Europe in the 19th century. In each case, resistant aristocrats were overcome by a tide of violence as 3c urbanites vented their repressed Thanatos drives, and by excess and hysteria the bourgeoisie gained supremacy over the organs of state; whether the actual aristocrats were killed in the purges or were integrated into the new order was thoroughly secondary to their subordination to bourgeois values.

Alongside the rising tide of 3c, bourgeois values, came industrialization; I hold that the latter is the product of the former, but this is an incredibly tangled argument which I will revisit in a later piece. For now, it’s only necessary to understand that each reinforced the other. Standardization and mechanization made practical wage labor and the monetization of the economy; the monetization of the economy made conformity through hard work and consistency a vehicle to personal success; an ethos of hard work and consistency enabled further exploitation of wage labor and the generation of more money. Industrialization needed workers— the truculent peasants of the 11th century or the put-upon slaves of the 3rd could hardly have achieved the attentiveness and ardor required to manage 14 hour shifts in the textile mills of the first industrial revolution in Britain. Prior to computerization, a machine without a working man to operate it was so much scrap metal, and a thousand Hero of Alexandrias could come and go without moving the needle of industrial progress.

What followed revolution, at least in France, Britain, and America, was a curious aside, a strange stopping-point in the cycle of Thesis and Antithesis^[1]. This phenomenon was the invention of the housewife, and the attendant genderization of 3rd level pathological dispositions. Starting in the 19th century, a massive, grassroots program of systematic neglect created a body of 3o women intended, through pathological compatibility, to serve as ideal wives to 3c workers. Space in society’s interior was carved out for these women; the result was Liberalism, an incomplete simulacrum of 3n equanimity achieved through the coordination of pathologically complimentary married couples as the foundational unit of society.

I understand that this is a tendentious claim, and I’ll revisit it at great length in a future chapter. For the purposes of this historical overview, just keep in mind that Liberalism arose in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, emerging first and most completely in the United States. It acted as an extra-cyclical throttle on the rise of the Capitalist Antithesis, and staved off the Fascist apotheosis throughout the 19th century^[2].

However, the logic of the Capitalist nation-state was inescapable; a 3c society could only extend itself over a particular people within contiguous geographic boundaries, and thus war was inevitable. The first World War was waged between the most Liberal industrialized (Britain, France, the US) powers and the least Liberal (Germany) with the more backward nations of the world cast as spoilers and tools (the colonies, Russia). The result was the defeat of Germany and its allies, an overdetermined consequence of the advantages of a de-facto 3N state on the one hand, and America’s enormous physical resources on the latter.

The advent of total war broke down the fragile gender detente which gave rise to Liberal values; Germany, by coincidence or consequence, was both the least Liberal state, and the most put-upon economy of the First World War. Men were needed for the front; consequently, women were needed for the factory. A generation of German women were inculcated to participate in industrial society— against the designs and hopes of those in charge, they were raised 3c. Within Germany, the interior periphery which sustained Liberalism and dissolved hysteria spirals through institutionalized non-participation collapsed.

The result was Fascism, the apotheosis and ultimate instantiation of Capitalism. A critical mass of German society was inculcated 3c, and as a result all of society was bound through corporations into a hierarchy embodied at its apex by the Fuhrer, Adolf Hitler. For the first time in history a society was able to fully self-regulate at the pace enabled by dynamics of 3c negotiation. The results were massive mobilization, the bending of every aspect of society towards the aim of world domination; and untrammeled hysteria, the horrible consequence of which was the holocaust.

The hierarchy of submission and domination undergirding Capitalist society, like any pyramid scheme, requires the constant influx of new steps at its base. This was doubly important in Germany, where the supply of housewives  greatly diminished in the interim between the two wars, depriving the working men of Germany of the unimpeachable underlings which kept their fellows in other countries quiescent^[3]. As such, war was inevitable. The internal persecutions embodied in the holocaust were matched by the external persecutions embodied in conquest.

Germany was defeated in World War 2, again due to the advantages granted to more Liberal America and England; France was quickly knocked out this time around, perhaps due to the collapse of their own Liberalism in the face of the strictures of the first World War. Russia, in the interwar period, had faced its own bourgeois revolution and rapidly swelled into a competing Fascism; this supplied it with the will, the second time around, to oppose Germany on more equal footing.

In the aftermath of the war, the developed world reeled from the knowledge of what transpired in Germany during the holocaust. The holocaust, as a representative instantiation of the madness of fascism, dealt a killing blow to the public’s faith in Capitalism in the West, and among the elites of the USSR. The result was the counterculture of the 1960s, and the more limited de-Stalinization of Russia.

I discuss the operation of counterculture upon 3c hegemony in more detail in Non-Participation and Building a Holocaust Proof Society. In terms of history, all that needs to be said is that the counterculture cast enormous numbers of 3c individuals in Western countries into solve; they expressed the ramifications of this solve to others through the production of art and culture. Though the hippies and their increasingly fragmented subcultural descendents never succeeded in achieving discrete, political victories, this apparent failure was in fact an inevitable and necessary consequence of the differences between Erotic 3c and Neutral 3N. Through the upbringing of a critical mass of 3N individuals in the four generations since the 1960s, and through the importation of glaring, overt solve into our cultural consciousness, Fascism was dealt a death blow which will almost certainly prevent it from overtaking the United States, Russia, or any other major developed nations again. Our culture has been rendered anti-Fascist, so fundamentally and invisibly that those of us born after the collapse of the 3c consensus often struggle to discern it.

Hopefully this brief overview of the dialectical progress of Capitalism will serve you sufficiently as a schema for organizing your relationship to history as you attempt to rid yourself of your own dispositions, whichever they may be. Next, we’ll continue this conversation by exploring Capitalist society as it actually exists, wherever it arises, through a discussion of its common principles and limitations.