I do not want to focus too much on the definitions of social phenomena because I find it more interesting to look at the structures (synchronic and diachronic) and contexts (at various scales) underpinning them. It is – I believe – analytically more productive to compare those, instead of sticking to what a categorical label (which is always, to an extent, arbitrarily attributed) does or does not include. Moreover, the word “fascism”, having become so morally laden in its century old history, is almost impossible to use it without falling into excessive generalizations (both moral and historical). With this in mind, my tendency towards what might or might not be classified as “fascism”, hinges on one simple principle: I use it either when referring to the movement founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919, or when the category is used “emically” by my research participants to describe themselves.

Consistently with the above, I’d like to focus on some systemic aspects I have been concentrating on in my recent work on populism and conspiracy theory within the Italian 5 Stars Movement (5SM), and put that into relation with insights from previous research. I do not at all intend to suggest that 5SM is a phenomenon of the fascist type, albeit one might notice, historically, a few overlapping tendencies. Rather, I look at the 5SM as a political grouping that was, at its origin, populist. Fascism, too, is an historically specific form of populism. But not every populism is fascist.

My main areas of interest in political anthropology have been concerned with: 1) The ideological innovations of Spontaneismo Armato: a radical and partly clandestine neo-fascist galaxy of small armed groups, active in Italy in the late 1970’s, and deeply engaged in the political violence of those years, (Loperfido 2018, 2022). 2) The constitutive processes, and subsequent collapse, of a specific socio-economic ideology of autarchy/self-reliance in Veneto, Italy. The latter was organized around an organicist understanding of the social relations of production which had also framed the sub-nationalist discourses of Lega Nord, another populist protest party, that had seen the light in Veneto and Lombardia in the late 1960s and early 1970s (Loperfido and Pusceddu, 2019, Loperfido 2020). 3) The above mentioned 5SM, with particular reference to the articulation of its early populistic functioning, and the fantasies of conspiracy against the people, very widespread in the early stages of the party formation (2005-2016). With Victor Turner, I analyze this articulation in terms of the anti-structural logics of charisma/enthusiasm, that informed the party’s constitutive process within the complex political economy of the long crisis unleashed by the financial breakdown of 2009.

All three of these political phenomena have been associated with fascism by variously distributed detractors in the media and at times in scientific discourses. Personally, I only dealt with Spontaneismo in terms of “Neo-fascism”, for the reasons listed above. However, one can notice that the three political formations shared a few ideological features with historical fascism.

Some of these features are:

1) All three – at least in their constitutional phase – claimed to represent various expressions of a third way between left and right, socialism and liberalism.

2) They all, likewise, claim(ed) to represent some form of revolt against the bourgeois world, while leaving unchallenged the system of property, market relations, and capital accumulation more generally.

3) They all were charismatic in nature, vitalistic and transgressive. One could say enthusiastic in the Durkheimian sense, or – more appropriately – anti-structural in a Turnerian perspective.

4) They all opposed action to theory and reason, giving to the former the moral edge over the latter. This created, in all four cases, a strongly anti-intellectual orientation, with attacks on rationalism, and to bourgeois idealist notions of foundational identity.

5) They all produced forms of organicist ideologies which were, more or less explicitly, obscuring class differences, and thus attempting to deny and repress class conflict.

Reflecting on similar ideological configurations, Susana Narotzky makes an important statement when saying that:

“most ‘third-way’ attempts at producing alternative social models have been of the ‘organic’ type, from the social doctrine of the church at the turn of the twentieth century through republican solidarism and fascism, to present-day third-way and social-capital proponents. They are similar in that they all aim at maintaining capitalist market-led relations of production while solving the ‘social question’, that is, the social unrest created by the necessary differentiation those very relations produce. They differ in the means employed to reach these common objectives and therefore in the procedural structures of governance developed. However, they all stress the importance of personalized relationships between agents and the specificity of community contexts” (Narotzky 2007:406, my emphasis).

Following in her footsteps, I would like to explore how third way postulations, and the processes of personalization/naturalization of socio-economic relations that are integral to it, could be related to the macro-context of austerity measures. Can this dynamic of personalization/naturalization be interpreted as the nexus determining a mutually constitutive relationship between austerity and charisma? The above might not give us certainties on what fascism is or is not, but could perhaps illuminate social processes, structures and constraints that elicited the emergence of fascism in its historical form, and that have – at other times – produced ideological tendencies that are – to an extent – comparable with it.

If we look at the historical context, our first realization is that all of these formations were constituted at moments of deep crisis of capital accumulation (historical fascism in the late 1910s, the Liga Veneta – then Lega Nord, then Lega – in the early 1970s, Spontaneismo in the mid 1970s, 5SM in 2009). This is not to say these political formations were reacting to economic crisis per se, rather, they all seemed to embody a reaction to what Stuart Hall has termed – with Gramsci – “a passive revolution”, a sort of reaction to a non-reaction: “when none of the social forces were able to enforce their political will and things go stumbling along in an unresolved way” (Hall and Massey 2010).

Another recurrent aspect in all of these situations is the emergency of austerity as a culturally hegemonic discourse. In a recent book Clara Mattei (2022) explores the relationship between austerity and fascism in Italy, as a process of reciprocal constitution. She sheds new light on austerity presenting it as a project elaborated by British and Italian think tanks at the dawn of the last century with the goal of liberating the forces of capital from the yoke of political control. She reminds us of how in his very first discourse as Prime Minister, Mussolini spoke the idioms of austerity, and promised to de-politicize the economy and remove all meddling of the state within it (Mattei 2022:205). Obviously, the other conjunctures in which the “idioms of austerity” were enforced as culturally hegemonic, were precisely the moments, named above, where the forces of capital appeared to be under severe threat (the 1970s and the 2010s).

Now, there are of course enormous differences, and neither Lega, Spontaneismo, or 5SM, embraced austerity the way Mussolini’s regime did. But I am not interested here in the direct relationship between these movements and austerity. Rather, I’m trying to suggest that austerity became a paradigm, powerful enough to establish a new representation of the relation between the economy and the state, where the possibility and the duty of the former to intervene in the latter and regulate the markets, disappears. This implies a set of consequences that, I shall argue, can be seen as co-responsible for the emergence and social establishment of the ideological configurations listed above.

Yesterday, like today, austerity seems to have the power to de-politicize issues, where these are “removed from the level of public accountability, and designated as ‘non-political’” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108). Integral to austerity is what Don Kalb has termed “the unstoppable rule of experts” (2011: 3), whereby economic forces are not any longer the object matter of politicians (who govern things), but of technicians, scientists and technocrats (who study and manage things). This seems to inaugurate a process whereby the necessity to govern socio-economic forces is obscured. More than that: these are divorced from their social situatedness, their rootedness in the social process, and their being integral to the unequal relationalities between power holders and the subaltern classes. We could say that – with austerity – economic processes, social facts, power relations, develop a tendency to exit the social, and enter the domain of nature. Costis Hadjimichalis (2018) has shown how the discourse of austerity seems to be endowed with the magic power of making bloody attacks on social welfare, budgetary cuts for health and education, disappear beneath the idioms of flexibility, efficiency, and modernization. The result is “a culture of fear, alongside feelings of injustice and anger” (Hadjimichalis 2018: 108).

I was grappling with similar issues when faced with the problem of populism and conspiracy theories within the 5SM in the immediate aftermath of the 2009 economic breakdown, where not only the relation between the masses and the leader had become personalized, individualized, and as it were unmediated (Calise 2016, Comby 2014), but social and political forces were seen as personified and animated. The state had become a Vampire, the politicians were Zombies, while conspiracy theories about vaccines or organ removal during Covid-19 had come to represent the penetration of the extractive logic of capital down to the intimate sphere of the body itself.

We have known at least since Weber that “the social relationships directly involved in charisma are strictly personal, based on the validity and practice based on charismatic personal qualities” (1964 [1947]: 363-364). Yet, we can perhaps enrich this idea further by exposing a relationship that might connect personalized logics of charisma, 3rd way attempts, attacks on rationalism, with the larger systemic shift to hegemonic austerity. As we have seen, austerity deliberately dis-empowers the state as an abstract mechanism of social-economic regulation: a normative centre immanent over social relations, overseeing, governing, and intermediating social, economic and political interactions between actual persons, groupings, and different orders of institutions. The power of abstraction with which we endow the state, is key to that socially regulating function, tasked with emancipating social relations from their situated imbalances of power and their hierarchical relationalities. It is via these abstracting properties that the socially equalizing function of the state can be implemented via the establishment of a normative order. Obviously, when that function is removed not only is the field open again to the re-embedment of power relations into the given social hierarchy, but also to the general essentialization of social characters and social forces. It seems to me that this is the kind of context Gramsci alluded to, precisely when talking about fascism in austerity ridden Italy, when he saw, between the old that is dying and the new that cannot be born, an interregnum where “a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

Giacomo Loperfido is an ERC researcher in social and political anthropology for the PACT (Populism and Conspiracy Theory) Project, at the University of Tübingen. His research deals with questions of political violence, political radicalism, cultural enclavization, social and economic disintegration, in the wider context of global systemic crisis. He edited the volume “Extremism, Society and the State” (Berghahn Books, 2022).

References

Calise, Mauro. 2016. La Democrazia del Leader. Roma, Bari: Laterza.

Comby, Jean-Baptiste. 2014. “L’individualisation des Problèmes Collectifs: une Dépolitisation Politiquement Située.” Savoir/Agir:2: 45-50.

Hadjimichalis, Costis. 2018. Crisis Spaces. Structures, Struggles, and Solidarity in Southern Europe. London, New York: Routledge.

Hall, Stuart, and Doreen Massey. 2010. “Interpreting the crisis.” Soundings 44.44: 57-71.

Kalb, Don. 2011. “Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe, Introduction”, inKalb Don and Gabor Halmai, Headlines of Nation, Subtexts of Class. Working-class Populism and The Return of the Repressed in Neo-liberal Europe. New York, Oxford : Berghan Books.

Loperfido, Giacomo. 2018. “Neither Left nor RIght. Crisis, Wane of Politics, and the Struggles for Sovereignty”, in Kalb, Don and Mollona, Mao, Worldwide Mobilizations: Class Struggles and Urban Commoning, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 118-141.

–. 2020. “The entrepreneur’s other: Small entrepreneurial identity and the collapse of life structures in the ‘Third Italy’”, in Narotzky, Susana, Grassroots Economies, Living With Austerity in Southern Europe. Pluto Press, 173-191.

–. 2022. “The Empire and the Barbarians: Cosmological Laceration and the Social Establishment of Extremism”, in Loperfido, Giacomo, Extremism, Society, and the State, New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books, 87-108.

Loperfido, Giacomo, and Antonio Maria Pusceddu. 2019. “Unevenness and Deservingness: Regional Differentiation in Contemporary Italy.” Dialectical Anthropology 43:4, 417-436.

Mattei, Clara. The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism. University of Chicago Press, 2022.

Narotzky, Susana. 2007. “The Project in the Model. Reciprocity, Social Capital, and the Politics of Ethnographic Realism.” Cultural Anthropology, 48:3, 403-424.

Weber, Max. 1964 [1947]. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: The Free Press

Cite as: Loperfido, Giacomo. 2024. “Austerity, Charisma, and the Attacks on Reason” Focaalblog, 1 February. https://www.focaalblog.com/2024/02/01/giacomo-loperfido-austerity-charisma-and-the-attacks-on-reason/