Thank you Rachel for this crisp and cutting hand mirror, as always. I feel compelled to add that the world as ‘resource scarce’ is but one imaginary that feeds our status quo. It is a rhetoric of fear and competition that forecloses the possibility of other ways of living where the earth, even as she is now - damaged, abused - can be seen as abundant, resilient and ceaselessly life giving. Should some of us (and especially the mega extractors and abusers) give up some of our comforts and desires we’ve confused for needs. If we trade an energy of fear and ‘problem solving’ or ‘innovating’ with a lens of connection and possibility.
Thank you Adele Tufford for this comment. And thank you Rachel Donald for this article, and countless connecting, useful interviews.
After centuries of extractive capitalism/agriculture, the land and plants have been drastically altered. Topsoil thousands of years in the making has been moved from our hilly Piedmont fields to somewhere downstream it doesn't belong. An invasive plant covered floodplain? An endangered minnow's nesting waters? The Atlantic? A minority of the plants in the rolling green and gold hills around me are natives, but given a rest from intensive cropping, native broomsedge bluestem (A. virginicus) and common milkweed (A. syriaca) return. And thus do the monarch butterflies every spring, summer and early fall.
As surely as the sun rises, life continues. Life whose course was altered by fascist extractive forces, but teeming with members who are still fully themselves and able to separate from this terrible history.
Capitalism needs strong controls, it needs to be muzzled, lest it break free and run amuck, biting and tearing the hand that feeds it.
Make no misjudgement, this has been coming for decades. I saw it 40 years ago when I was a teenager that the powers that be wanted a return to feudalism. They wanted to be kings, sitting on thrones of gold while the rest slaved in the dirt for the privilege of being allowed to exist.
Yes. I am currently reading Stephen Harrod Buhner’s work. Riveting. We must open our hearts and ally with nature. We don’t only oscillate from the brain, we can use our hearts as organs of cognition and perception. This is a better way forward (if there is one) than trying to fight these brain-led dominators with dollar-signs for eyes on their terms. We will never win there.
You don't need to bring communism into it tbh, as someone who is communist-adjacent myself. Nothing more capitalist than the state propping up the capitalists by ensuring them unfettered access to resources and markets. Enclosure Acts, Royal Charters (such as the one that allowed the East India Company to operate), the British Military Campaign against Egypt in 1840 to keep the cotton export market to the Ottomans open.... etc.
Capitalism and fascism are both the product of massive human overpopulation. We are now 3,000 times more numerous than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced ancestral Hunter-Gather/pastoralist clan/band members, never containing more than the Dunbar number of 150. These were/are the only social organizations that were/are necessarily egalitarian, and matriarchal. With the discovery of the new storable energy source in sedentary farmed grain crops, capitalism was born and hierarchical social structures grew into the urban centers of the ancient world, now predominant in the "modern" megalopolises of our massively overcrowded world. Beating dead horses is always an exercise in frustration. Large scale politics is always a fool's errand. Have a blessed day!
I am not a nihilist. Most important action to save what's left of the natural order is voluntary contraception. Recent PEW survey reveals 47% of Americans 18-50 choosing NOT to reproduce. My focus is not anthropocentric and I'm convinced that Mother Nature is attempting to reduce our number through "stress diseases", wars, starvation, and willfully reduced fertility. Life will return as soon as we leave, or eradicate ourselves through whatever the catastrophe of the moment. I'm very positive for the future of life on earth, just not human life. Have a blessed day!
This is basically what is happening anyway right now and emissions are still going up.
In the equation: emissions = population*per capita emissisons
Why focus on the term you can't actually control in the near term? Especially when it's so clear we can provide quality of life with vastly lower per capita emissions than are prevalent in the west?
Your final point regarding the separation of humankind and nature reminds me a lot of Jason W Moore and Raj Patel's: The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
They trace a lot of this back to the 16th Century when capitalism and modern colonialism were kicking off. The binary they use is "Nature" and "Society". "Nature" is where you put the stuff you want to make cheap for exploitation: trees, ores, and people (via the constructed categories of race and gender).
The re-assertion of Fascism in some ways is the re-assertion of those structures that make some things cheap, and help capitalism stay on the road.
There is a common denominator here, the patriarchy. The hierarchical organization of society with men at the top, absolutely “God the Father,” and at every sublevel below, king, president, down to the father of the family. For millennium, men have used violence to establish and maintain this hierarchy. Fascism is merely the political manifestation of patriarchy. As long as patriarchy is the dominant form of social organization the war on women and Mother Earth will continue unabated.
Humans are absolutely ruining the world and undermining their own survival. Few people understand the scale and the speed of the environmental destruction and how it affects them and their future. It's a fascist corporate endeavor of brutal domination wrapped in the ideology of Capitalism (pathological human greed).
The easiest way for fascists to demonstrate their power is to victimize the weakest and most vulnerable. The victims could be the environment, animals, or other humans including women, children, immigrants, etc. The weak and vulnerable are the preferred targets because they're defenseless, it's easy to attack them. The fascists who want to get society "back on track" don't see the hypocrisy: if these people are so weak, why are they such a threat? Don't think too much about it, just act! More violence will save us! There's a noble purpose! Sacrifices must be made! Environmental destruction is actually a virtue for these people.
I suggest that we start capitalizing the word Earth and give it the recognition it deserves. Although it's not standard literary practice at present, it might help to change the perception of the living world (the biosphere) from worthless commodity to be consumed, polluted, and wasted to fragile, precious, and irreplaceable.
A common definition of Fascism is a movement that holds power and contains Palingenesis and Palindefence in its ideology:
Palingenesis is the creation myth of the nation, which says that at one point it was strong and mighty, and things were better. In this story the nation has been corrupted and is on its way to annihilation.
Palindefence is the idea that the decline of the nation can be halted and reversed by the "true people" confronting* the "false people" that have lead to the aforementioned decline. Because the "false people" are not actually responsible for the perceived decline, no level of confrontation is ever enough. The base radicalise the leadership, and the leadership the base, in a feedback loop. Until the regime collapses.
Both these themes are really quite clear in many of the powerful today. Trump, Modi, Musk, Farage, etc.
*confronting can be anything from curtailing rights to eviction to extermination.
Yes, neoliberal US Imperialism is being replaced by nationalistic US Imperialism.
The former kept the public quiet by paying lip-service to climate change and equality, the latter is convincing the public that climate change and equality are nothing to worry about.
Neoliberal US Imperialism is being rebranded as both a failure (though it wasn't for big oil and animal ag) and as globalism. This has been done to create a deliberate backlash in favour of nationalism and capitalism.
Good luck to the US cut off from trade with China.
Maybe you don’t like the word Woke.. but its clear that not only has our trade economics changed for the worse, but our respect for our nation has been damaged by the left leaning post modernism and DEI nonsense that has done huge damage to the moral fibre of the nations and its young people… let’s hope this gets fixed with the new leadership.
🎥 Save Private Ryan (1998) by Steven Spielberg. Since WWII decisive US intervention to defeat fascisms in Europe, the foreign political strategy of the superpower has been focusing on establish itself as the only force having the right to control the world economical system. The result is to have cancelled years of progress in the name of military ventures around the world in favor of fascism-like governments. The result is the leadership of new fascist parties as obvious as in Italy.
I have often wondered how different this all could have been if not for one phrase in the Bible about the chosen people having dominion over the earth.
What if it had called for us to be Shepards or caretakers. All too often the Bible, and religion in general, has been used to mask mankind's worst impulses. It's almost as if the "infallible" words of their god had been edited by humans greedy to rape and plunder the bounty of nature.
I think your use of the word "fascism" basically stands for "what I don't like", "ugh, ugh!".
Fascism is, according to what I have learned an ideology of corporativism. Ideally, it's an idea of cooperation of workers trade unions and capitalists with a strong state. As with most ideologies requiring hegemony in a society it will resort to violence in case of meeting resistance. In that way it is very much similar to socialism and communism. National socialism is a fascism like ideology adding an idea of race superiority to its core.
Your and our problem is the false ideology of division between man and nature ("creation") that is much deeper rooted than any political ideology. It has been with us from the beginning of civilizations as we know them ("patriarchy"). The Abrahamitic religions are notorious:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
[…] Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that †† (heb. Creepeth). moveth upon the earth.
(Genisis 1 :26,28)
That is not “fascism”, that is anthropocentrism and a very bad start for the wisdom of living on Earth.
Capitalism is not fascism. The most consequent ideology promoting capitalism is libertarianism, and that is much more like anarchism. No state – “just follow your greed and everything will work out fine.” A very deceptive idea of “freedom” but impossible in a world of finite resources.
Thank you Rachel for this crisp and cutting hand mirror, as always. I feel compelled to add that the world as ‘resource scarce’ is but one imaginary that feeds our status quo. It is a rhetoric of fear and competition that forecloses the possibility of other ways of living where the earth, even as she is now - damaged, abused - can be seen as abundant, resilient and ceaselessly life giving. Should some of us (and especially the mega extractors and abusers) give up some of our comforts and desires we’ve confused for needs. If we trade an energy of fear and ‘problem solving’ or ‘innovating’ with a lens of connection and possibility.
Thank you Adele Tufford for this comment. And thank you Rachel Donald for this article, and countless connecting, useful interviews.
After centuries of extractive capitalism/agriculture, the land and plants have been drastically altered. Topsoil thousands of years in the making has been moved from our hilly Piedmont fields to somewhere downstream it doesn't belong. An invasive plant covered floodplain? An endangered minnow's nesting waters? The Atlantic? A minority of the plants in the rolling green and gold hills around me are natives, but given a rest from intensive cropping, native broomsedge bluestem (A. virginicus) and common milkweed (A. syriaca) return. And thus do the monarch butterflies every spring, summer and early fall.
As surely as the sun rises, life continues. Life whose course was altered by fascist extractive forces, but teeming with members who are still fully themselves and able to separate from this terrible history.
Then i’ll give fascism an eviction notice. If it plans on squatting, i’ll give it the boot!
So you're going to help abolish capitalism, right? Because capitalism is fascism.
Yup.
🥳🎉🎊
Capitalism needs strong controls, it needs to be muzzled, lest it break free and run amuck, biting and tearing the hand that feeds it.
Make no misjudgement, this has been coming for decades. I saw it 40 years ago when I was a teenager that the powers that be wanted a return to feudalism. They wanted to be kings, sitting on thrones of gold while the rest slaved in the dirt for the privilege of being allowed to exist.
Capitalism is the antithesis of life. It must be destroyed. 🤡
Capitalism is fascism.
Yes. I am currently reading Stephen Harrod Buhner’s work. Riveting. We must open our hearts and ally with nature. We don’t only oscillate from the brain, we can use our hearts as organs of cognition and perception. This is a better way forward (if there is one) than trying to fight these brain-led dominators with dollar-signs for eyes on their terms. We will never win there.
Some of your verbiage I want to reuse for poetry.
Thank you for this article.
I am neither a fascist or a communist. I call the current system fasciocommunist. And others call it corporate communism.
Collectivization on the global scale requires blood, muscle, capital, boots on the ground and practical.
I am against empire and love earth and nature. They don't.
You don't need to bring communism into it tbh, as someone who is communist-adjacent myself. Nothing more capitalist than the state propping up the capitalists by ensuring them unfettered access to resources and markets. Enclosure Acts, Royal Charters (such as the one that allowed the East India Company to operate), the British Military Campaign against Egypt in 1840 to keep the cotton export market to the Ottomans open.... etc.
Sontag, sigh. Such a tremendous source. Thanks once again Rachel for bringing these weavings to us! Truths!
Capitalism and fascism are both the product of massive human overpopulation. We are now 3,000 times more numerous than were our self-sustaining ecologically balanced ancestral Hunter-Gather/pastoralist clan/band members, never containing more than the Dunbar number of 150. These were/are the only social organizations that were/are necessarily egalitarian, and matriarchal. With the discovery of the new storable energy source in sedentary farmed grain crops, capitalism was born and hierarchical social structures grew into the urban centers of the ancient world, now predominant in the "modern" megalopolises of our massively overcrowded world. Beating dead horses is always an exercise in frustration. Large scale politics is always a fool's errand. Have a blessed day!
If there's nothing that can be done (bar genocide) what's the point in commenting anything?
I am not a nihilist. Most important action to save what's left of the natural order is voluntary contraception. Recent PEW survey reveals 47% of Americans 18-50 choosing NOT to reproduce. My focus is not anthropocentric and I'm convinced that Mother Nature is attempting to reduce our number through "stress diseases", wars, starvation, and willfully reduced fertility. Life will return as soon as we leave, or eradicate ourselves through whatever the catastrophe of the moment. I'm very positive for the future of life on earth, just not human life. Have a blessed day!
This is basically what is happening anyway right now and emissions are still going up.
In the equation: emissions = population*per capita emissisons
Why focus on the term you can't actually control in the near term? Especially when it's so clear we can provide quality of life with vastly lower per capita emissions than are prevalent in the west?
Your final point regarding the separation of humankind and nature reminds me a lot of Jason W Moore and Raj Patel's: The History of the World in Seven Cheap Things.
They trace a lot of this back to the 16th Century when capitalism and modern colonialism were kicking off. The binary they use is "Nature" and "Society". "Nature" is where you put the stuff you want to make cheap for exploitation: trees, ores, and people (via the constructed categories of race and gender).
The re-assertion of Fascism in some ways is the re-assertion of those structures that make some things cheap, and help capitalism stay on the road.
Cherished,
Rachael, I wait for your essays, your interviews as if waiting for my best friend. Today I read again with tears in my eyes.
There is a common denominator here, the patriarchy. The hierarchical organization of society with men at the top, absolutely “God the Father,” and at every sublevel below, king, president, down to the father of the family. For millennium, men have used violence to establish and maintain this hierarchy. Fascism is merely the political manifestation of patriarchy. As long as patriarchy is the dominant form of social organization the war on women and Mother Earth will continue unabated.
You may wish to consider what Paul Kingsnorth has to say. I found it enlightening and most helpful to my understanding, personally.
https://open.substack.com/pub/paulkingsnorth/p/the-machine-in-the-garden?r=cyze3&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Humans are absolutely ruining the world and undermining their own survival. Few people understand the scale and the speed of the environmental destruction and how it affects them and their future. It's a fascist corporate endeavor of brutal domination wrapped in the ideology of Capitalism (pathological human greed).
The easiest way for fascists to demonstrate their power is to victimize the weakest and most vulnerable. The victims could be the environment, animals, or other humans including women, children, immigrants, etc. The weak and vulnerable are the preferred targets because they're defenseless, it's easy to attack them. The fascists who want to get society "back on track" don't see the hypocrisy: if these people are so weak, why are they such a threat? Don't think too much about it, just act! More violence will save us! There's a noble purpose! Sacrifices must be made! Environmental destruction is actually a virtue for these people.
I suggest that we start capitalizing the word Earth and give it the recognition it deserves. Although it's not standard literary practice at present, it might help to change the perception of the living world (the biosphere) from worthless commodity to be consumed, polluted, and wasted to fragile, precious, and irreplaceable.
I think it’s a confusion of thinking that its fascism when its really a highly necessary resurgence of nationalism after the mistake of globalism.
A common definition of Fascism is a movement that holds power and contains Palingenesis and Palindefence in its ideology:
Palingenesis is the creation myth of the nation, which says that at one point it was strong and mighty, and things were better. In this story the nation has been corrupted and is on its way to annihilation.
Palindefence is the idea that the decline of the nation can be halted and reversed by the "true people" confronting* the "false people" that have lead to the aforementioned decline. Because the "false people" are not actually responsible for the perceived decline, no level of confrontation is ever enough. The base radicalise the leadership, and the leadership the base, in a feedback loop. Until the regime collapses.
Both these themes are really quite clear in many of the powerful today. Trump, Modi, Musk, Farage, etc.
*confronting can be anything from curtailing rights to eviction to extermination.
Yes, neoliberal US Imperialism is being replaced by nationalistic US Imperialism.
The former kept the public quiet by paying lip-service to climate change and equality, the latter is convincing the public that climate change and equality are nothing to worry about.
Neoliberal US Imperialism is being rebranded as both a failure (though it wasn't for big oil and animal ag) and as globalism. This has been done to create a deliberate backlash in favour of nationalism and capitalism.
Good luck to the US cut off from trade with China.
It a return to a Pre Globalization economy and rejection of woke thinking.
"woke thinking" Lol you're not a serious person. Shoo
I am dead serious matey…..
Maybe you don’t like the word Woke.. but its clear that not only has our trade economics changed for the worse, but our respect for our nation has been damaged by the left leaning post modernism and DEI nonsense that has done huge damage to the moral fibre of the nations and its young people… let’s hope this gets fixed with the new leadership.
🎥 Save Private Ryan (1998) by Steven Spielberg. Since WWII decisive US intervention to defeat fascisms in Europe, the foreign political strategy of the superpower has been focusing on establish itself as the only force having the right to control the world economical system. The result is to have cancelled years of progress in the name of military ventures around the world in favor of fascism-like governments. The result is the leadership of new fascist parties as obvious as in Italy.
I have often wondered how different this all could have been if not for one phrase in the Bible about the chosen people having dominion over the earth.
What if it had called for us to be Shepards or caretakers. All too often the Bible, and religion in general, has been used to mask mankind's worst impulses. It's almost as if the "infallible" words of their god had been edited by humans greedy to rape and plunder the bounty of nature.
How different indeed.
I think your use of the word "fascism" basically stands for "what I don't like", "ugh, ugh!".
Fascism is, according to what I have learned an ideology of corporativism. Ideally, it's an idea of cooperation of workers trade unions and capitalists with a strong state. As with most ideologies requiring hegemony in a society it will resort to violence in case of meeting resistance. In that way it is very much similar to socialism and communism. National socialism is a fascism like ideology adding an idea of race superiority to its core.
Your and our problem is the false ideology of division between man and nature ("creation") that is much deeper rooted than any political ideology. It has been with us from the beginning of civilizations as we know them ("patriarchy"). The Abrahamitic religions are notorious:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
[…] Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that †† (heb. Creepeth). moveth upon the earth.
(Genisis 1 :26,28)
That is not “fascism”, that is anthropocentrism and a very bad start for the wisdom of living on Earth.
Capitalism is not fascism. The most consequent ideology promoting capitalism is libertarianism, and that is much more like anarchism. No state – “just follow your greed and everything will work out fine.” A very deceptive idea of “freedom” but impossible in a world of finite resources.