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An Explosively Outward Politics
Can you be a socially liberal fascist?
May 07, 2024
Back during the days of my alt-media outfit Trigger Warning, the anti-woke subculture had yet to become a viral OnlyFans show. Ann Sterzinger and I received lots of random submissions from underground writers looking for a platform. It was both fun and overwhelming. Speaking of Ann, you should check out her Substack here, especially if you love sardonic writing. She’s working on the serialised edition of Elektra’s Revenge, a space opera that takes you into the dystopian world of restaurant and brothel workers in the bowels of the luxurious moon.
I recently came across a submission from a guy named Adam Fitchett while I was looking through the Trigger Warning archives. Having been obsessively focused on Fiume, the artistic micro-nation founded by D’Annunzio predeceasing the Italian Futurists, I decided to treat his piece to a minor edit. Adam was among the first to foresee the upcoming political realignment that transcended the left/right binary. Adam, if you’re out there, do get in contact. Fiume is calling.
By Adam Fitchett
1919: Italy—on the losing side of World War One—hands the city of Fiume over to Yugoslavia, par the terms of a peace agreement with the Entente. Italian poet and proud nationalist Gabriele D’Annunzio is furious; against the wishes of his government, he leads a battalion of 2000 men to Fiume, conquers it, and declares himself dictator of the city. He tries to give it back to Italy, but the bemused Italian government says no.
For over a year after that, D’Annunzio remains dictator of Fiume, transforming it into one of the strangest political entities ever seen. The corporatist organisation of the state (workers organised into caste-like groups, with poets at the top), as well as aesthetic gestures like D’Annunzio’s use of the Roman salute and his speeches delivered from a balcony, serve as key inspirations for Italian Fascism. Yet somehow the descriptions of Fiume’s nightlife seem exceedingly libertine.
“Artists, bohemians, adventurers, anarchists, fugitives, stateless refugees, homosexuals, military dandies, and crank reformers of every stripe began to show up at Fiume in droves. The party never stopped. Every morning D’Annunzio read poetry and manifestos from his balcony; every evening a concert, then fireworks. This made up the entire activity of the government.” -Hakim Bey
Was Hakim Bey romanticising Fiume to fit his anarchist ideals? Perhaps. Yet the fact remains that D’Annunzio, decadent poet, libertine and anti-egalitarian ultranationalist, presents something of a paradox: a socially-liberal fascist. Clearly this is an oxymoron, yet D’Annunzio’s worldview is perfectly consistent. The paradox of the socially-liberal fascist says more about the inadequacy of our categories than it does about Fiume.
The figure of the aesthete who blends liberal, anarchistic, and fascistic elements has recurred on both the right and the left throughout history. One might look to Foucault, a card-carrying leftist if there ever was one, who nonetheless shirks traditional Marxism in favour of an immoralist post-ethics of artistic self-development and limit-seeking. One could also look to Foucault’s precursor Bataille, a leftist who was far more Marquis de Sade than Marcuse, advocating base materialism and ceaseless transgression.
The Italian Futurists, who sang with orgasmic intensity on the virtues of growth, speed, and innovation were firmly on the right — yet they were the opposite of conservative. Marinetti penned The Fascist Manifesto and soon came into conflict with fascists who didn’t understand that Italian Futurism was his creative masterpiece. They wanted to take away his artistic freedom. He wanted them out of his movement. The Futurists were “progressive” in the most unrelenting, merciless sense, in a way that could never gel with anything truly “conservative.”
Conservative revolutionary Ernst Jünger, whose allegiance feels much closer to Stirner than Spengler, celebrates the figure of the egoistic Anarch. Nick Land, whose post-libertarian meta-politics of Exit and entropic dissolution explodes all possible categories, exchanges political praxis for cybernetic systems and chthonic flows. Somewhere, in the midst of the mess where these aestheticist notions congeal, there’s a new, as-yet-unnamed, partially-assembled worldview that yearns to burst out.
Neither left-wing nor right-wing, it wants socialism without equality, fascism without authority, liberalism without rationality, and anarchism without anarchy. Its only direction is outward—explosively.
Politics is the domain of the superego, but this super-liberal post-politics demands a healthy dollop of id. It yearns to spring desire free from its repressive box—not the desire-as-lack of Freud but the desire as overflowing plenitude of Nietzsche and Deleuze. What this new post-politics demands is literally unthinkable. Mind should give way to body, heaven to earth, and ideal to material.
It’s imperative to explore this new terrain during the ongoing collapse of the left-right spectrum and consensus centrist-liberal politics. As liberals scramble to paper over the cracks in The End of HistoryTM, self-named “post-liberals” are venturing onto the stage. As intriguing and insightful as these thinkers are, their response to the death of liberalism is archaic and unsatisfying.
Most post-liberals express little more than reheated conservativism. They are suspicious, like all conservatives, of the unbridled and the libidinal. Benjamite leftists and deep ecologists conspire to cancel the future. What stands in their way? Little more than End of History 2.0 “acid Corbynists” and the decaying corpse of classical liberalism. Those with liberatory ambitions must think and act fast.
The world must not fall back into a pre-Enlightenment malaise repression. Attempts to freeze us in the present offer little more than a slide into the abyss. A new future can make itself, but first it must be let out of the box. Let us travel explosively outward and create a new politics for the era ahead.
