Authoritarian Capitalism, Authoritarian Movements, Authoritarian
Communication

Christian Fuchs, 2018 May
University of Westminster, UK

Authoritarian capitalism is a form of capitalist political economy, in which the principles of right-wing authoritarianism – authoritarian leadership, nationalism, the friend/enemy scheme, militarism, patriarchy, – are, to a specific degree, practiced by the state in order to organise capitalism and assert capitalist interests. In authoritarian capitalism, nationalism, political fetishism and scapegoating are politically practiced as ideology put into legal form in order to distract attention from class contradictions.

The bourgeoisification and neoliberalization of social democracy, the weakness of the left, and postmodernist identity politics that underestimated the importance of class politics and class analysis exacerbated the rise of the far-right and authoritarian capitalism.
Neoliberal capitalism resulted in the universalization of alienation. As Harvey, Hardt and Negri, as well as myself have argued elsewhere, neoliberalism brought about the commodification of almost everything so that we have experienced ongoing primitive accumulation by dispossession and the real subsumption of society under capital. In David Harvey’s words: “Widespread alienation has resulted in Occupy movements as well as right-wing populism and bigoted nationalist and racist movements. Donald Trump is the President of alienation.”

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