Anthony Vernon

Dreams of death and violence pervade the fascist psyche. Dozing off and imagining the state murdering all your adversaries is an all too common occurrence. Part of the reason many fascists desire hyper-nationalism is because fascists hold a particular power fantasy, one where they are liberating a powerful state from all the agents that seek to destroy the nation. Wherein fact, the reality of the fascist power fantasy is simply a repression of those not considered a part of the nation in the fascist’s vision. Who are these fascist dreamers, or better yet, producers of nightmares? Well: “Hitler can be seen in dreams, in deliriums, in films, in the contorted behavior of policemen, and even on the leather jackets of some gangs who, without knowing anything about Nazism, reproduce the icons of Hitlerism”.¹

The fascist does not simply wish to keep their power fantasy within the realm of the imaginary, but instead, the fascist seeks a power reality. One means by which the fascists seek to destroy their perceived enemies is by economic violence. Austerity is not ideologically unique to fascism, but fascists will further weaponize austerity, ensuring their measures mostly harm the categories of people they do not see as part of the ‘nation’. Simply put, “Fascism has been about repressing wages”.² While the fascist participates in the suppression of wages and often social services. Fascists suppress social services in the sense of deuniversalizing service, only granting services to ‘worthy’ citizens: “Welfare, often bordering on charitable aid, was not conceived as a public function, but as an expression of the single party, of the government, which used its own discretion in choosing fields and subjects of action through targeted interventions of a political and clientelistic nature”.³

Fascists are not unique in thinking that the government should not administer social welfare and that citizens should ‘pull themselves up their own bootstraps’. We can still, for example, see the “Fiscal discipline that Italian fascism wrought”.⁴ Yet, while fascists rhetorically promote self-creation, in every instantiation of fascism thus far, fascists kowtow to big business: “Italian fascism by its early path of laissez-faire and subsequent turn to corporatism”.⁵ Still, corporations can also be useful for fascists as they are skilled in siphoning the population’s income into business entities that can serve hyper-nationalist interests, such as IG Farben, Volkswagen, and Palantir. And when the people are under austerity, they have less income, so they must turn to the cheaper goods that corporations create. In all of this, in fascist expressions or not, “The aim of austerity is to ensure capital’s survival, to favor the minority at the expense of the majority”.⁶

Austerity is such a common theme that some view it as the very essence of fascism: “Austerity is the core of fascism, even when the austerity is getting administered by a liberal state”.⁷ People die under austerity, “Cuts were not without consequences: they resulted—again on average—in a 3% rise in avoidable deaths among both men and women”⁸ and “ A decrease of 2.5 to 5 months in life expectancy”.⁹ Austerity and corporation are conduits, useful tools of the fascist power fantasy, the death drive over those not considered part of the nation. When examined under a fascist lens, austerity and corporatism show, “All fascist meanings stem out of a composite representation of love and death, of Eros and Thanatos now made into one”.¹⁰

The death drive is never the desire of death in and of itself. Instead, death is wrought about in the context of machines, where particular forms of death and specific people’s deaths are made acceptable. Fascism sells death as desirable and presents itself as a machine that can bring about acceptable deaths, be it via austerity or outright, blatant extermination. “A machine of desire encounters forms of individuation, that is, of alienation. Neither desire nor its repression is an ideal formation; there is no desire-in-itself, no repression-in-itself” .¹¹ While fascism’s political ideology is hyper-nationalism, its libidinal energy is found in death, and fascism ultimately creates of politics of death, “The fascist insurrectional machine was a formidable apparatus for the organization of dis-organization, the hyper-political imposition of a deadening depoliticization, something that it carried out on the parallel tracks of direct violence and corridor conspiracies”.¹²

“Fascism seems to come from the outside, but it finds its energy right at the heart of everyone’s desire. We must stop, once and for all, being misled by the sinister buffooneries of those socio-democrats who are so astonished that their army, allegedly the most democratic in the world, launches, without notice, the worst of fascist repressions”.¹³ Yet, fascism is ego-driven, death-driven, ego-death-driven, where one kills off their own ego for the nation to build a new ego which only concerns itself with itself for the nation which is themselves. Fascism asks the fascist to sacrifice themselves for the nation, to be prepared to die themselves, not just bring death upon others. In some sense, fascism asks for a Valhalla mentality, where one may need to die in glory, even in glorious defeat for the nation, “Marital-sacrificial religion of death…defeat is transfigured into the sacrament of a political religion of death”.¹⁴ Fascism seeks to make one desire bring not only death to others but also death to oneself so that they may be a killing machine. These killing machines do not have to execute direct violence, but can be killers of everything from spirits to being literal takers of life.

The fascist power fantasy is not just comprised of the grand extinction of fascist enemies, but also in achieving ‘little’ victories which lead to fulfillment of the ultimate hyper-nationalist fantasy. “Fascism, like desire, is scattered everywhere, in separate bits and pieces, within the whole social realm; it crystallizes in one place or another, depending on the relationships of force. It can be said of fascism that it is all-powerful and, at the same time, ridiculously weak. And whether it is the former or the latter depends on the capacity of collective arrangements, subject-groups, to connect the social libido, on every level, with the whole range of revolutionary machines of desire”.¹⁵ It is these ‘little’ steps that allow for the fully fascist individual to be formed; macro-fascism could not exist without micro-fascism. It is the ‘little’ steps that drive an ego to desire the particular death drives fascists desire; one is always developed into a fascist. It is a series of developments that develops one into a fascist: “A slow-burning fascism in familialism, in school, in racism, in every kind of ghetto, which advantageously makes up for the crematory ovens. Everywhere the totalitarian machine is in search of proper structures, which is to say, structures capable of adapting desire to the profit economy” .¹⁶

How does the fascist power fantasy come about by taking over all the machines within a given nation? How then is the fascist power fantasy stopped? The fascist power fantasy is stopped by “engaging in a political struggle against all machines of the dominant power, whether it be the power of the bourgeois State, the power of any kind of bureaucracy, the power of academia, familial power, phallocratic power in male/female relationships, or even the repressive power of the superego over the individual”.¹⁷ Ultimately, fascism seeks to categorize everyone into camps of kill or be killed. “The fascistic tendencies of the present manifest a tenuous relation at best to such a system-wide libidinal surplus…the demand that homogeneity inoculate itself with an ‘imperative’ excess”.¹⁸ The fascist seeks to create homogenous individuals who wish to bring about excessive death, whose power fantasy is to bring about excessive death. If we are to have austerity upon anything, there should be a steep cut to fascist power fantasies.

---

---

1. Felix Guattari, “Everybody Wants To Be A Fascist.” Chaosophy, Chimeres, <www.revue-chimeres.fr/IMG/pdf/everybody-wants-to-be-a-fascist.pdf>. ↩︎
2. “Economic Update: How Austerity Paves the Way for Fascism.” Democracy at Work, interview by Richard Wolff, 20 Mar. 2023, <www.democracyatwork.info/eu_how_austerity_paves_the_way_for_fascism>. ↩︎
3. Chiara, Giorgi “Social Policies in Italian Fascism. Authoritarian Strategies and Social Integration.” Historia Contemporánea, no. 61, Oct. 2019, p. 907. <https://doi.org/10.1387/hc.20259&gt;. ↩︎
4. Dillon Wamsley, “The Logic of Austerity.” Phenomenal World, 23 Oct. 2024, <www.phenomenalworld.org/reviews/austerity-logic>. ↩︎
5. Wamsley. ↩︎
6. Max Harris, ‘The Capital Order: How Economists Invented Austerity and Paved the Way to Fascism ’ <EH.ne teh.net/book_reviews/the-capital-order-how-economists-invented-austerity-and-paved-the-way-to-fascism-2>. ↩︎
7. Nick Serpe, “The Dawn of Austerity — Dissent Magazine.” Dissent Magazine, 21 Feb. 2023, <www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-dawn-of-austerity>. ↩︎
8. Emanuele Arcà et al. “Death by austerity? The impact of cost containment on avoidable mortality in Italy.” Health economics vol. 29,12 (2020): 1500-1516. ↩︎
9. Yonatan Berman, and Tora Hovland. “The Impact of Austerity on Mortality and Life Expectancy.” SocArXiv, 20 May 2025. Web. ↩︎
10. Guattari. ↩︎
11. Guattari. ↩︎
12. Alberto Toscano, Late Fascism. Verso, 2023. ↩︎
13. Guattari. ↩︎
14. Toscano. ↩︎
15. Guattari. ↩︎
16. Guattari. ↩︎
17. Guattari. ↩︎
18. Toscano. ↩︎