I haven’t been able to motivate myself to write for 4 years now. I lost two family members to cancer in relatively quick succession and then the COVID pandemic struck. My friends and family, much like everyone else’s reacted in a myriad of different ways to the pandemic. Among them, certain previously well educated and measured people who I had loved and respected for most of my life seemed to lose all sense of balance and rationality, repeating what were clearly absurd but nevertheless very dangerous lies and conspiracies.

Already on the back foot from my own losses and worries, this compounding destabilisation of my network of friends and family happening against a backdrop of the institutions of power accelerating along their neo-liberal trajectories was just too much to cope with. And while the behaviour of the power elite wasn’t entirely unexpected, it was much harder to give it the focus that it required due to the physical and emotional demands I found myself under.

However during these last few months and years there seems to have been a significant change in the speed and care taken by the global power elite in the pursuit of their pathological greed. All around the world the “ruling elite” seem to be edging closer to the existential threat stage of capitalism that is fascism.

For decades I had thought man-made climate change and it’s driving force capitalism was the greatest threat to life on earth. But more recently I have been confronted by a much darker reality. It is quite possible that capitalism itself, and its steady march towards autocracy may get us before climate change. While I know that sounds overwhelmingly depressing at first hearing, let me just say that I still don’t think that it is entirely inevitable.

With hindsight it is not difficult to see those early signs on the journey that brought us to here. Recognising that now is all well and good but it doesn’t really help us to move forward. In order to do that we must first take stock of exactly what it is we are living through.

Few would argue that these recent years haven’t had a profound affect on all of us. I don’t personally know anyone who doesn’t argue that their lives since the outbreak of COVID are among the hardest years they can remember. Of course not everyone has had such a bad of time of it. That being said, the reality for most of us is that our friends and family are mostly angry, desperate, scared or simply looking for an explanation for how we have managed to fall as far as we have.

And it is during these very sorts of large scale emotional turmoils where the capitalist model unhitches itself from the wider community in terms of shared goals and responsibilities. In the UK today like much of the world, a very small number of rich and powerful sociopaths are doing the best to sow division, by focusing the exploited class on one another rather than on the those same sociopaths who have not only taken the opportunity of the chaos to steal more, but by controlling access to information have also been able to divert all of our attentions away from them.

It is the perfect sleight of hand trick, as long as you have no problem with hate-spewing racist, homophobic and misogynistic rioters running amok through our communities being the diversion. But then again if you live in Kensington, send your children to gated fee-paying schools and off-shore all your valuables in feudal secrecy jurisdictions why would you give a shit about the rest of us having to live in what appears to be a film set for a post-apocalyptic dystopia.

This argument that these small groups of badly educated thugs making everyone else’s lives a misery are nothing more than an expendable diversion in a sleight of hand trick played on society by capitalist-extremists is not a particularly controversial position to take. While fascism in 1920’s and 30’s Germany was rationalised and applied differently to the fascism movements in Spain, Italy, Britain, France and America during that same period there was one factor that was consistent across all of them, and still is at the core of all fascist movements today. Intrinsic to fascism is the desire to concentrate resources and power into ever fewer hands. Which almost without exception will be the hands of the power elite in that specific historical and geographical context, in terms of their gender, race, religious and class.

And it is in this that the key to understanding the insidious persistence of fascism in modern society can be found. Fascism is an unavoidable outcome of the the economic and political processes in the post-enlightenment world. Capitalism’s overarching driver is the concentration of wealth and resources into ever fewer hands. Democracies and dictatorships within a global capitalist economy will almost invariably become subordinated to the capitalists that control the flow of resources and wealth, who in turn demand the concentration of political power into the hands of those who can be trusted to perpetuate and protect the concentration of that wealth.

Put simply, capitalism requires fascism to achieve its goal. It is the super-rich and the capitalist apparatus beneath them that is the driving force behind the growth in fascism. Democracy and Capitalism can not co-exist without one eventually subordinating the other. And the nature of this zero-sum relationship is far more nuanced and complex than I am implying in this rather boisterous oversimplification. But it was this understanding of the political and economic systems, highlighted by COVID-19 and the state looting by the super-rich that followed the outbreak that sapped my energy so overwhelmingly.

One of the areas of discussion that had left me so exasperated 4 years ago was the continuous and rather monotonous need to keep explaining to people that the right wing rhetoric showering down over them in a deluge was in fact a highly divisive and coercive propaganda campaign created and managed by the power elite to draw attention away from the real culprits of the working classes exploitation and oppression.

Migrants aren’t siphoning the money out of the country, but tax evading corporations and billionaires are. And it is not organised criminals secreting illegals into the country that poses the biggest threat to the economy, it’s multinational accountancy, legal and banking firms colluding with the political institutions to aid those multi-national corporations and billionaires in their pillaging of the people and rape of the planet. The reality is that Capitalism strives toward fascism, because it has to in order to survive.

It is also worth remembering that the global capitalist power elite have only one defining trait in common with each other, and it is not gender or race, but rather their wealth and power. The only thing they have in common with each other in every country is their massively disproportionate control over the national and global economies and their private ownership of resources therein. They do have a tendency to skew in race and gender terms, but this has more to do with the maintenance of inherited power and wealth over centuries of European colonialism.

Across the planet, from local governments to global markets, it is the major shareholders, hedge-fund manages, billionaires and their political puppets in the chorus lines that are driving the collapse of modern civilisation and the destruction of the planets capacity to sustain life.

And this leaning into the fascistic stage of capitalism by sections of the ruling global elite is entirely predictable because it is intrinsic to the political and economic structure of global society today. And it is for this reason that the exploiter class needs the populations of each sovereign state to fight amongst themselves so that the oppressed don’t start comparing oppressors and find out that they have a common enemy.

The reality is that some people are building their political positions on information that is simply wrong. And while everyone has the right to be ill-informed, historically-illiterate, and hold positions that are quite clearly flawed, that doesn’t mean that serious debate or analysis needs to take those positions into account if they are demonstrably wrong.

When one person suggests that a politician or business person appears to be following a trajectory towards fascism and the argument put forward to counter this is to suggest that the speaker is comparing said politician or business person to Hitler the stupidity of the argument needs to be called out. Any one with a basic secondary school education in either politics or history will be able to quickly explain why this is fundamentally wrong. Some opinions, however loud they are shouted, are simply based on a lack of understanding. While all people have the right to their opinions, not everyone’s opinion is informed or based in fact.