Postsocialism

Postsocialism

I was asked to speak to you today about postsocialism. I could focus on critiquing the concept of postsocialism; we could discuss how postsocialism is actually a non-concept with no definable contents of its own. It is commonly described as what it is not, defined as relative to something that is no more. Postsocialism is defined by the absence of socialism. As a concept, it does not explain how that absence came about, let alone what socialism was.

That critique of a concept could take us into other important topics. For example, socialism has been subjected, since its emergence, to both state and non-state repression. It was subject to persecution and massacres in the nineteenth century (think of the Paris Commune). In the twentieth century, the Versailles Peace Conference organized a military intervention in the newly founded Russian Soviet Republic. Twenty years later, Nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union. World War II was followed by the American-led Cold War.

But in this talk, I will make a less familiar claim: postsocialism represents the defeat of socialism by liberalism. It marks the defeat of socialism in the Cold War and the rise of what I call the liberal autocracy.

To make this claim, I will dwell on the history of liberalism. In the conclusion, I will describe the main characteristics of liberal autocracy, that is, of postsocialism. I will move through a great deal of material, drawing on two of my recent books: one on big business, neoliberalism and war, and one on Bonapartism.11.See Tomaž Mastnak, Črna internacionala: vojna, veliki biznis in vpeljava neoliberalizma (Black International: War, big business and the introduction of neoliberalism), Ljubljana: Založba */cf., 2019; Tomaž Mastnak, Bonapartizem: prolegomena za študij fašizma (Bonapartism: Prolegomena to the study of fascism), Ljubljana: Založba */cf., 2021, jakrs.si. 

I will do all this to help lay the groundwork for our tasks in the School of Common Knowledge. As the organizers of the School put it in their call for papers, in our time together we will be ‘investigating and co-learning to resist the alliance of neo-liberal and neo-fascist forces that have established huge influence in world politics and its military, economic and cultural policies’.

The emergence and triumph of liberalism

My first claim is that histories of liberalism (for the most part) have been written from the standpoint of liberalism and its victory. We mainly know the story that liberalism tells of itself. We know a liberal narrative of liberalism. Herein lies much of the ideological power of liberalism: it has successfully designed its own history, and inserted that history as a prism through which to see ‘universal’ history. The history of liberalism appears as a history of freedom; liberalism becomes the force that promotes freedom. This history conventionally reaches back to the seventeenth century and John Locke. It often reaches back to the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, and sometimes goes even deeper into the past.

The logic of liberal historiography is simple: liberalism equals the love for freedom. As such, struggles for freedom in human history are liberal or proto-liberal. Struggles for freedom become part of the history or prehistory of liberalism. Liberalism colonizes history. It appropriates the history of struggles for freedom. The colonizing inclusiveness of liberalism is, of course, exclusionary. Liberalism excludes from its history of freedom the struggles for freedom fought by its ideological and political antagonists. Antagonists of liberalism are turned from what they were – ideological and political opponents of liberalism – into enemies of freedom.

Critical histories of liberalism exist, but they are an exception. Perhaps the most thorough such history is Controstoria del liberalismo (2005) by the late Italian Marxist philosopher and historian Domenico Losurdo.22.Domenico Losurdo, Controstoria del liberalismo, Rome and Bari: GLF editori Laterza, 2005 / Liberalism: A Counter-History ( trans. Gregory Elliott), London: Verso, 2011. As the title conveys, Losurdo wrote a history that counters liberal self-representation. A master of Western history of political thought, Losurdo documented the positions of celebrated liberal thinkers and politicians vis-à-vis non-European peoples, slavery, the labouring poor, and women. We see a shocking panorama of racism and European supremacism; advocacy of slavery, imperialism and colonialism; contempt for the labouring classes, the poor, and women. Endorsement of repression and violence is overwhelming.

Losurdo overthrew the lofty and noble image liberals had crafted about themselves. And yet, his counter-history accepts the liberal history of liberalism as the framework for his critique of liberalism. He shows the dark side of the prevailing history of liberalism, but he does not challenge the liberal colonization of history. The real history of liberalism is much shorter than liberal histories of liberalism make us think; it is no longer than two centuries. This has implications: neither humanist supporters of tolerance nor protestant advocates of personal freedom were liberals. Nor were John Locke or Adam Smit, who neither regarded themselves as liberals, nor were they regarded as liberals by their contemporaries.

Liberalism did not exist before the word ‘liberalism’ existed morphologically, semantically and lexically. There was no liberalism before the new word ‘liberalism’ was coined; before it became a concept; before it was introduced to common usage. I can put this differently: Liberalism did not exist before there existed a political language in which liberals could understand themselves as liberals. Liberalism did not exist before its advocates could express their identity as liberals both individually and collectively. It did not exist before the language of liberalism became socially recognizable, accepted and used broadly enough for non-liberals to begin to embrace liberals’ self-identification as liberals, nor before non-liberals themselves began to designate a specific ideological and political orientation as ‘liberalism’.

That language emerged in the early nineteenth century, when the French Revolution was brought to its end. The word and concept of liberalism began to spread with the Napoleonic imperial wars, with the ‘exportation of freedom’, as the Italian historian Luciano Canfora would say.33.Luciano Canfora, Esportare la libertà, Milano: Mondadori, 2007. The emergence and spread of liberalism, in other words, is intimately linked with political dictatorship and imperialism.

In contrast to the so-called Great French Revolution of 1789, the 1830 revolution in France was already a liberal revolution. At least, some historians characterized it as such. Liberals played an important role in the 1848 revolutions as well, but it was after their defeat that liberalism really spread deep and wide. The nineteenth century became the liberal century: liberalism triumphed.

Nineteenth-century liberalism is usually called ‘laissez-faire liberalism’ or ‘Manchesterian capitalism’. Laissez-faire liberalism spread in the name of free trade; liberalism adopted and promoted the notion of free trade which predated liberalism. ‘Free trade’ meant that the state should not interfere in the economy. Instead, individual economic agents should have free reign. Such a state of affairs was called freedom. This was a particular kind of freedom: the freedom to exercise economic power. It led to wild competition and the merciless exploitation of workers, but it was celebrated as a liberating force that would sweep away the remnants of feudalism.

The idea of free trade was gradually succeeded by the slogan of ‘the free market’. Advocates and apologists alike presented this ‘free market’ as the organizing principle of society.

Another side to nineteenth-century liberalism can be found in the writings of John Stuart Mill. Mill argued that the liberal doctrine of free trade was based on principles other than individual liberty, a cause he advocated. For Mill, liberalism concerned freedom of thought and freedom of expression. Liberalism meant the right to freely shape one’s own life (which he called ‘experiments in living’).44.John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts & Green, 1864, p. 101, archive.org.  As such, liberalism was a way of life: a political theory of an individual way of life.

This approach to liberalism would reappear in the twentieth century in the thought of John Maynard Keynes. For Keynes, next to the ‘economic question’ the most important questions liberalism had to address were ‘questions of sex’ and ‘questions of drugs’.55.John Maynard Keynes, ‘Am I a Liberal?’ in: idem, Essays in Persuasion, reprinted in vol. 9 of The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, London and Basingstoke: MacMillan/St Martin’s Press for The Royal Economic Society, 1972, p. 301. He paid more attention to sex and drugs than to the questions of government and questions of peace.

Liberalism oscillates between advocacy of free trade or the free market on the one hand, and free choice in ‘way of life’ on the other. But these two understandings of liberalism are ultimately irreconcilable. Liberalism is marked by a fundamental contradiction. In concrete, real life, the practical abstraction of the free market denies freedom of life choices to the majority of people. Liberalism squeezes the state out of economic and individual lives and leaves the issue of economic power unaddressed. Unrestrained economic power creates problems that ultimately threaten the existence of liberal regimes and invite state repression.

The crisis of liberalism

Let me now turn to the crisis of liberalism, which is a constant mark of liberalism’s history. To depict the inner dynamics generating the crisis of liberalism, I will first turn to the 1848 democratic revolution in France. The crisis of liberalism at that junction of history is widely known through Marx’s portrayal in his Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (1869).66.Karl Marx, Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte, Hamburg: Otto Meissner, 1869 / Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (trans. Daniel De Leon), New York: International Publishing Co., 1898. Forgotten today is an almost identical analysis by the ultra-reactionary Auguste Romieu. In my presentation I draw on both.

The driving force of the revolution of 1848 was workers and peasants, who helped the liberal bourgeoisie come to power. Once in power, the liberals staged a bloody repression of workers to deny them a say in government. But the liberals proved themselves unable to govern and paved the way to Louis Bonaparte’s seizure of power and establishment of political dictatorship.

The liberals came to power in 1848 due to the attractiveness of their ideas and principles. Had those ideals been taken seriously, workers and peasants would have taken part in government for the first time. But workers and peasants wanted socialism. The logic of liberal ideas and principles, quite simply, opened a way toward socialist future. Had the liberals put their ideas and principles into practice, they would have lost power. To stay in power, they had to renounce their ideas and principles. Those were the two options. Liberals chose the second.

At first, liberals deployed repression themselves. Next, they enabled the Bonapartist dictatorship. They gave up direct political power in order to maintain their economic power and to preserve their social privileges; they discarded political freedom to protect their economic freedom. Bonapartism was a political counterrevolution that carried through an economic revolution, inventing the formula for the triumph and spread of liberalism: political dictatorship plus economic freedom.

Let us turn from France to Germany where, after the defeat of the Europe-wide 1848 revolutions, August von Rochau conceptualized a way out of the crisis of liberalism: discarding the ‘illusions’ of the revolutionary era to embrace the ‘realist’ position. By this he meant that ‘the basic truth of all politics’ was the simple ‘fact’ that he who has power governs.77.August Ludwig von Rochau, Grundsätze der Realpolitik, angewendet auf die staatlichen Zustände Deutschlands, Stuttgart: Verlag von Karl Göpel, 1853, p. 2 / REALPOLITIK (trans. Victor Van Brandt, Perth: Imperium Press, 2026.  Liberals should accept that political power was in the hands of the reactionaries; they themselves should count on their growing economic power and its ability to force the government to take their interests into account. That was realpolitik. (Some say von Rochau invented that term; he certainly popularized it.) Realpolitik dictated a historical compromise between reactionary political power and liberal freedom of economic power.

As defined by von Rochau, liberalism was rendered free of all theories, abstractions, dogmas and doctrines. Its political realism was apparently non-ideological, but it embraced the ideology of laissez-faire, framed as ‘freedom of economic movement’. Of key importance for societal and national development, according to von Rochau, was the growth of production – in the economic, not the political domain. The role of the state was to protect the economy from external interference, that is, to ensure economic freedom.

Von Rochau’s views prompted biting criticism by a leading conservative German political theorist of the time, Constantin Frantz. Frantz was scandalized that economy had become ‘the organon of all political thinking’, and that the state had become nothing but ‘an economic institution’. Thus, in fact, liberals who had given up direct political power dictated the direction and limits of politics.

As we move on to Western Europe in the aftermath of World War I, we will see traces of how the nineteenth century dealt with the crisis of liberalism. Bonapartism in particular served as a paradigm for both the ‘saviours’ of liberalism and their critics in the early twentieth century, though there were differences.

In the 1850s, French liberals handed the restoration of order to Bonaparte; after World War I, liberals left the dirty work to fascists. Mussolini, for example, promised ‘total economic liberalism’ before seizing power. Italian liberals praised Mussolini: They understood his coup d’état as a return to the ‘Manchesterian’ state. They applauded his inaugural speech because it was ‘radically anti-socialist’ and most ‘Manchesterian’. They styled the Fascist seizure of power a ‘liberal coup d’état’.

Some Italian Fascists saw their movement as a renewal of liberalism. A case in point is Massimo Rocca, a member of the National Directorate of the Italian Fascist Party, who wrote that ‘the old liberalism degenerated, because it had courted democracy, which itself courted socialism’.88.Massimo Rocca, ‘Un neo-liberalismo?’ Risorgimento, September 1921, reprinted in Idee sul fascismo, Firenze: Soc. an. editrice La Voce, 1924, pp. 39–40. The Fascists had saved the day. In Italian Fascists’ self-understanding, fascism was the anti-democratic and anti-socialist rehabilitation of liberalism. They called that rehabilitation neoliberalism.

Ludwig von Mises, from today’s western Ukraine, figures as the founding father of neoliberalism. He praised fascism for saving Western civilization irrespective of fascist brutality and violence.99.Ludwig von Mises, Liberalismus, Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1927, p. 45 / The Free and Prosperous Commonwealth: An Exposition of the Ideas of Classical Liberalism (trans. Ralph Raico), Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1962.  Curzio Malaparte, at the time a Fascist himself, proudly characterized fascist violence as ‘the harshest, the most inexorable, the most scientific of violence’.1010.Curzio Malaparte, Technique du coup d'état (trans. Juliette Bertrand), Paris: Éditions Bernard Grasset, 1931, p. 221 / Coup d’État: The Technique of Revolution (trans. Sylvia Saunders) New York: E.P Dutton, 1932.  Mises justified fascist violence as an understandable reaction to Bolshevism. Worker strikes were ‘terrorism’, according to Mises.1111.Ludwig von Mises, Die Gemeinwirtschaft: Untersuchungen über den Sozialismus, Jena: Gustav Fischer, 1922, p. 470 / Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis (trans. J. Kahane, but from the 2nd, 1932 Gustav Fischer edition), London: Jonathan Cape, 1936. Fascist terror was defence of civilization. I want to make it clear that these are Mises’s words and interpretation, not mine.

Fascism, in short, secured liberal economic interests through suppression of the labour movement and the deconstruction of democracy. The real object of fascists’ struggle was revolutionary workers’ unions, as Malaparte pointed out, not liberal government. Fascism was anti-labour, pro-industrialist and pro-business. Fascism, in short, was much like liberalism.

Responses to the crisis of liberalism

Neoliberalism was one liberal answer to the crisis of liberalism. The first such answer had been British ‘new liberalism’, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. The new liberals were the first to talk about the crisis of liberalism. They named and conceptualized this crisis, accusing the ‘old liberals’ of having lost vision and purpose. The Liberal Party had quailed before the great tasks of political reconstruction and social reform. Liberalism was in crisis because liberals were unable, unwilling, or both unable and unwilling to address the problems created by the triumph of liberalism. The most serious of those problems were the social question, imperialism, and the decay of democracy. The decay of democracy was multifaceted: it included the manipulation of elections, the subjugation of the press by big business, the passivity of the state, and the merely illusory nature of political freedom.

Another critical response to the crisis of liberalism was ‘social liberalism’ in Germany. It demanded the extension of liberal principles of ‘freedom’ into the social and economic sphere. In the 1930s, another critical liberal group called ordoliberals emerged in Germany. Ordoliberals were steadfast in their opposition to excessive economic power, economic monopolies in particular. They argued that the state should set up a legal framework and rules of the game for market activity\ and define the social ends of economy.

In France, ‘constructive liberals’ sought to save economic freedom from economic liberalism. The order of the day for liberalism, facing the rise of Nazism, was to give a strong enough authority to the state to hold organized private economic interests in check.

The most consequential liberal response to the crisis of liberalism was neoliberalism. The fundamental difference between new liberals, social liberals, ordoliberals, constructive liberals, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann in the US on the one side, and neoliberals on the other, was that the former saw the root of the crisis in the failures and inner weaknesses of liberalism itself, whereas neoliberals squarely blamed the crisis on external attacks on liberalism. As such, the former sought to reform liberalism in the spirit of social justice and political responsibility, whereas neoliberals mobilized against those they saw as the enemies of liberalism – socialists and communists. Thanks in no small part to Mises’s fundamentalist sectarianism and to Friedrich von Hayek’s organizing efforts, neoliberalism would marginalize other liberal responses to the crisis of liberalism. After World War II, neoliberalism became the dominant, hegemonic current of liberalism. It became the liberalism of our times – the highest stage of liberalism.

There were two main non-liberal responses to the crisis of liberalism as well. Here, of course, I refer to fascism and socialism (or communism). As a side note, let me remark that ideological and political differences between socialism and communism were often blurred in the interwar period and during the Cold War. In what follows, I will use the two terms more or less interchangeably.

The interwar period: liberalism, fascism, socialism

National and international power relations, centred in the Western world, changed with the end of World War I. A new ideological, political and military force appeared: fascism. The historical dynamics of the interwar period were played out in the triangular conflicts of liberalism, fascism and socialism. Of these ideological, political and military blocs or formations, communism was resolutely anti-fascist and undoubtedly anti-liberal; fascism, on the other hand, was partly and occasionally anti-liberal; liberalism was at times and inconsistently anti-fascist. But both liberalism and fascism were unquestionably and consistently anti-communist.

Efforts to build a Popular Front of socialists and liberals against fascism were ultimately unsuccessful. Instead, anti-communism brought together liberals and fascists. Liberals’ attitudes toward fascism were mixed and shifting, including all of the following: turning a blind eye to fascism, making excuses for it, praising it, supporting it as a lesser evil than communism, or considering it an ally in the fight against communism.

Anti-communism was a mighty historical force whose role in shaping the history of the past century tends to be trivialized and underestimated. It’s alive and well even today, long after communism itself was declared dead.

Following the failure of the Popular Front, World War II broke out. The military alliance of Western liberal powers with socialists and communists against the fascist axis was not, in fact, built on anti-fascism. We know that even before the war ended, Western allies resumed their struggle against the Soviet Union. They never severed contact with fascists. The Bank of International Settlements was their meeting place during the war years. Ties between the US and German big business in particular were tightly knit. So-called ‘trading with the enemy’ had never stopped. In fact, in 1944 US Senator Kilgore sounded the alarm against what he called the ‘Black International’, by which he meant an ‘international brigandry of cartel management’.1212.Harley Kilgore, ‘The Menace of the Black International’, The Journal of the National Education Association, vol. 33, no. 4, 1944.

The Cold War

This historical background may help us understand why nazism was never politically defeated. German military defeat was represented as the end of nazism. It was not.

New York bankers and corporate leaders who managed to assume control of the US Occupation Authority in Germany blocked denazification. Driven by fear of socialism/communism, they suppressed the mass German anti-fascist and labour movement that emerged from hiding when the Nazi regime collapsed. Their business interests and ideological affinities dictated that they assure the continuity of Nazi administrative and economic structures. That was the basis on which, in 1948, Western occupation forces introduced neoliberalism as official German policy. Neoliberalism became liberalism for a post-war international order, enforced under American hegemony.

Twenty-five years later, neoliberalism was once again introduced by a military as official state policy – this time in Chile. Hayek supported the Chilean military junta and declared that he preferred ‘a liberal dictatorship’ to ‘a democratic government devoid of liberalism’. The opposition between liberalism and democracy has rarely been so clearly expressed. Liberal dictatorship as opposed to democracy was the social, political, and economic order for the imposition of which Western powers under American leadership fought the Cold War.

Unlike conflicts of the interwar period, the Cold War was fought between two blocs, liberal and socialist. Fascism had supposedly been eliminated. The dynamics of triangular conflict were succeeded by a bipolar confrontation.

To some, the Cold War looked benign. Of course, the Cold War in the North was laced with countless military coups, interventions, and ‘hot’ and dirty wars in the global South. But in the global North, the Cold War was a war without mercy, a war to the end, a war of extermination of any actual or potential, perceived or imagined alternative to the liberal system. The slogan of triumphant liberalism was ‘There is no alternative’.

After the Cold War, Postsocialism

The Cold War ended with the defeat of socialism. Dizzy and confused by their so-called liberation from socialism, defenceless countries were flooded by Harvard economists, investors, financial advisors, market consultants, speculators; activist ideologists and missionaries of all sorts; agents of political parties, NGOs, public relations and media experts; ordinary criminals, con artists and veteran Nazi collaborators from World War II; all of whom all began to plunder public wealth, turning it into private riches, or else to prepare the terrain for political and economic subjugation. Such predators were aided by local collaborators, including corrupted civil society activists of the 1970s and 1980s, or random strivers who had floated to the surface and climbed to the top.

Victorious in the Cold War, liberalism now ruled both supreme and alone. From the triangular relations of the first half of the twentieth century and the bipolar confrontation of the second half of the century, we had arrived at a ‘unipolar moment’: both fascism and socialism were offstage; the dynamics of history were concentrated in one point. In the strict sense of the term, what had risen with the end of the Cold War was liberal autocracy. That liberal autocracy was, and is, postsocialism.

What are the main characteristics of postsocialist liberal autocracy?

1. Liberal triumphalism: In the early 1990s, the ‘end of history’ was declared. With the unchallenged reign of liberalism, we were told, the telos of history had been reached. By the late 1990s, liberal elites in the West had consolidated their political power. Ideological and political alternatives had been deconstructed. The left, as the older among us used to know it, is extinct or completely marginalized. Most of what is left under that label speaks liberal language and has adopted the liberal agenda. Opposition to the liberal consensus is slandered, delegitimized, silenced and increasingly, criminalized.

2. Oligarchization: In the West itself, the prevalent form of government is oligarchy, calling itself democracy. After the demise of the socialist systems, this ‘democracy’ was exported to the East. The aim of the so-called democratic transition was to remake Eastern Europe in the image of the West. The result was the establishment of oligarchies in the former socialist countries. That oligarchization was, and continues to be, a deconstruction of democracy.

The deconstruction of democracy as a form of government proceeded together with the inflation of talk about democracy. The way democracy is talked about consolidates the understanding of democracy as an individual way of life, even while destroying the concept of democracy as a form of government.

Democracy is no longer judged from the point of view of sovereignty and the rule of the people. Instead, it is measured by progress in adoption and implementation of particular programmes marketed by the US in the name of individual freedom and way of life – for example, by a willingness to adopt particular US government-backed LGBTQ+ campaigns.1313.In Trump’s second term, though, things have shifted in this particular regard. Rather than taking on the frightening rise of executive power, the subordination of legislative power, or the neutralization of political representation in the West, the public discourse focuses on ‘culture wars’. Unelected and unaccountable centres of power are rising in strength. Their power is being consolidated; their reach is expanding. The mechanisms and channels of political decision making are increasingly controlled by globalist corporations. Just like under the Nazi behemoth, as described by Franz Neumann, criminal is becoming business, and business criminal.1414.See Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 2nd revised ed., New York: Octagon Books, Inc., 1963.

3. Militarization: Liberalism has become inextricably linked with war. We can speak of ‘war liberalism’.

From the first Gulf war in 1991 onward, we have been living with incessant wars, threats of war, provocations of war, military interventions and occupations; the bombing of maligned countries; the employment of terrorism, extrajudicial killings and assassinations; the building of military bases and biolabs; the cancellation of international treaties (especially those concerning arms control), the regime changes, the rejection of diplomacy. We are soaked with war propaganda, the dehumanization of chosen enemies and demonization of their leaders.

The new century has so far been marked by the so-called global war on terror. The liberal permanent war has spread from the global South into Europe. In Ukraine, the past decade has been consumed with the US / NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The war in Ukraine is a liberal holy war. Since October 2023, we have been living with live-streamed genocide in Palestine. Instead of ‘Never again’, the phrase born after the Nazi genocide of the Jewish people in Europe, we have ‘Ever anew’, implemented by a state acting in the name of its victims. There is no end in sight to the horrors.

The Euro-American liberal power elite is not only condoning this genocidal war, it is actively enabling and supporting it. Further, it has taken up arms against those who oppose the genocide: the US and some European countries have again gone to war against Yemen; German authorities have banned any criticism of the Israeli government; armed police were sent to campuses around the US to crack down on student protest, and the US Congress passed a bill making it illegal to criticize Israel or the US’s support for its genocidal war. Liberalism has become openly genocidal.

However, the list of liberal warmongering and wars does not end here. War in the Middle East and Persian Gulf may spread,1515.Since this paper was written in May 2024, the war has indeed spread. After more than a hundred days of the US and Israel’s latest war of aggression against Iran, on 9 June 2026, the US Central Command is claiming it is striking Iran ‘in self-defence’ in ‘response to unjustified Iranian aggression’. and war against China might well be in the making.

Western societies are increasingly militarized. The European Union is steering its collapsing economy toward military production. In the US, the military industrial complex dominates government and makes enormous profits. Next to war, the most profitable business is human trafficking, which prospers in wartime. Sexual abuse and organ harvesting flourish as well, as a growing number of reports indicate.

As Western societies are increasingly on a war footing, total propaganda spreads. Unprecedented uniformity of opinion is imposed. Dissent is not tolerated. Information war, psychological war and what some call cognitive war target the general population in the West.1616.On cognitive war, see François du Cluzel, ‘Cognitive Warfare’, Innovation Hub, June–November 2020, innovationhub-act.org. This strategic study was sponsored by ACT – Allied Command Transformation, one of NATO’s two strategic commands.

4. Economic warfare: Speaking for the collective West, we might recall, a French minister in 2022 proudly announced that ‘total economic war’ had been launched against Russia. Economic war is war sui generis. Its instruments are economic sanctions, the weaponization of the US dollar’s status as a world reserve currency, the freezing of foreign bank assets, confiscation of property, and outright theft. The ‘free market’ no longer appears as a regulative mechanism, if it ever was. Economy increasingly rests on political decrees and military force. The mythical free market is being succeeded by the free exercise of military force.

5. Transformation of social control: As it existed for roughly the past two centuries, industrial society was built and organized around labour. Industrial society was, as the Germans put it, Arbeitsgesellschaft, a labour-centred society. It rested on the subjugation of labour to capital, with a web of social control spun around labour. Deindustrialization has been underway in the West for the past few decades. It is accelerating in Europe with the war in Ukraine. Traditional industrial society is declining; labour-centred social control has weakened.

New modes and means of social control are being invented. This new model aims at controlling the entire population, for the entire day, seven days a week, for an entire lifetime. The basis of control is life itself – biological life, as Agamben might say. Control reaches from medicine at the one end, over the (Foucauldian) ‘care of the self’ in the well-to-do centre to mass killing at the other end. It is a closed circle. This form of social control employs a plethora of new technologies, most notably digitalization and artificial intelligence. It turns technological potential toward nefarious ends. Philanthropic, humanitarian and well-wishing narratives appeal to what good is left in us, and in the process pervert it, escorting us to this dystopia as we march on through the ‘green transition’ to the ‘fourth industrial revolution’, ‘posthumanism’ and ‘transhumanism’.

6. Fascization of liberalism: Earlier in this talk, I argued that over the course of the twentieth century, triangular power relations among liberalism, socialism and fascism shifted to the Cold War dichotomy between liberalism and socialism, and finally to a unipolar moment after the Cold War, when historical dynamics concentrated in liberalism. That plenitude of power, however, was a curse: it meant that liberalism had taken into itself all the contradictions of the previous century. And now, liberalism is in the process of self-destruction. It is imploding.

When socialism was economically brought to its knees, ideologically disarmed and politically defeated, the pressure of there being an alternative political-economic model to Western liberal order ceased. Under the pressure of that alternative model of socialism, the welfare state developed in the West. Now, that welfare state is being swept away, just like social security in the East.

Socialism was also the principal force in the struggle against fascism. I mentioned how, in the aftermath of World War II, the US blocked denazification in Germany and prevented the political defeat of fascism. With the end of the Cold War, this blocking of denazification in the heart of Europe began to bear fruit as nazism began to raise its head once again. Now, in a time when nazism’s main opponent has been eliminated, we are entering what looks like a gradual renazification of Europe.

You might recall from earlier in my talk how, in the mid-nineteenth century, liberals left the dirty work of their confrontation with the labouring classes and the thwarting of democracy to Bonapartism. In the 1920s and 1930s, liberals left the dirty work to the fascists. After the end of the Cold War and the disappearance of socialism, liberalism became the sole centre of power. No one else was left to deal with its opponents or to do the dirty work.

At this point in history, liberalism has incorporated a resurrected fascism as its own productive force. Now, in postsocialism, fascism is oozing out of the liberal establishment. Fascism is oozing out of the ruling political centre.

Liberalism at war

Let me bring my long lecture to a close.

From the point of view of the centre of power, everything outside is illiberal or anti-liberal. Liberalism is now, metaphorically and literally, at war with the entire world.

Just as in earlier historical instances, liberalism today is at war: with democracy, with popular representation, with freedom of thought and freedom of speech, with the freedom of assembly and protest. Now, too, big economic power is being freed from legal constraints to dominate populations, unimpeded by laws and rights. Legislative authority and the social role of the state are being diminished; repressive apparatuses of the state are ever being strengthened.

War to maintain and extend what I have called liberal autocracy is linked with militarization, permanent war, and the imposition of new models of social control. This war is peppered with misanthropy, sociopathy and the intrinsic anti-populism of the ruling oligarchy. As such, this war goes further than the historical parallels or precedents I have touched on in this talk.

Liberalism is turning into totalitarianism. For the first time in history, that old concept of totalitarianism, used and misused to characterize socialism and equate it with fascism, makes sense. Our present predicament is not about the curtailment of individual liberty: It is a war against the majority population within increasingly porous national borders. And it is war against the global majority.

That global majority, however – to end on a cautiously optimistic note – is resisting the destructiveness of liberal totalitarianism that threatens the survival of the world. Power relations in the world are shifting. Half a millennium of Western domination over the rest of the world is coming to an end. The West, of course, is not willing to renounce power, even as it lacks enough to maintain its hegemony. In panic and despair, it is making ever more extreme moves, even taking us to the brink of World War III.

The majority within Western societies is seething with frustration, discontent and anger. National power elites are also panicked and desperate, just like supranational elites. Their inordinate efforts to cling to power and privilege may be waking up a sleeping giant.

It is not yet clear what will be the outcome of the tectonic changes we are living through. What seems sure, though, is that liberalism has run its course; I will even say it has become a destructive force of organized evil. Such a moment also means the end of postsocialism. Will this moment offer an opportunity to reinvent socialism, or to organize a force striving for what socialism stood for? Will such an opportunity be seized? All of that remains to be seen.