Profiting from Blood

Fascism as Capitalism’s Most Efficient Weapon

Morning Comrades.

For a number of reason it feels that once again the clarification of what capitalism is and how fascism comes to play necessitates a further, explanation. Not because the chit chat online is increasingly being overrun by AI bots and engagement farm trolls and thus becoming even more intolerable but because of a number of chats “out there” this past week.

Fascism is not a deviation from capitalism, it is capitalism in its most distilled, brutal, and profitable form. When liberal democracy can no longer contain the contradictions of capital, when parliamentary maneuvering fails to repress workers, immigrants, and the colonised, capitalism does not collapse; it mutates. It dons the jackboot, wraps itself in flags, privatises the bullets, and brands genocide as national revival. I would argue that fascism is the most profitable form of capitalism, not to add another edgy aphorism or hyperbolic protest chant to our vocabulary but rather as an observable, historical truth that the ruling classes have known and acted upon for over a century.

As Walter Benjamin warned, “Behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution” but just as crucially, there is also a successful re-organisation of capital, an acceleration of accumulation, and a liquidation of any obstacle to elite power. From Mussolini’s Italy to Pinochet’s Chile, from Hitler’s Germany to today’s authoritarian neoliberal regimes backed by U.S. arms and Western finance, fascism has functioned as capitalism’s emergency switch: not a breakdown, but a consolidation.

Fascism is not the opposite of capitalism, it is its most effective and ruthless servant. It arises when capitalist elites are willing to sacrifice all pretenses of democracy and all human lives on the altar of profit. The efficiency of exploitation, the militarisation of labour, the annihilation of dissent, and the financialisation of war, these are not bugs in the fascist system. They are its core business model.