Naomi Klein’s new book End Times Fascism, co-written with Astra Taylor, is not for the fainthearted.
Six months ago, few of us would have mentioned fascism in polite circles, digressed into neoliberalism or feared personal damage at the hands of the super-rich of the tech and the digital worlds. Capitalism was on the wane and the new future had not yet arrived.
At this point in the spiral though, a working grasp of the fascist playbook and its incompatibility with democracy might again have to be burned into our collective psyche. As it was for our parents and grandparents by the end of the second World War.
Klein has previously tackled neoliberalism and the digital world. Now the writer and activist is taking on the tech billionaires, tracking how the super-rich are capitalising on climate and financial chaos in pursuit of power.
It describes the world we’re in, with the slide to authoritarianism and fascism modelled everywhere we look.
The neoliberal age – roughly between the end of the cold war and Covid – was, as described by Klein in a recent Guardian interview, “lying on the couch in its underwear, going ‘what are you gonna do, leave me?’”
During the cold war, a little competition went a long way. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, that competition was lost and capitalism stopped trying. But there was still a vulnerability to being super-rich in those days, she says, because whether you had come by your wealth through privatisation politics in the West, or by hastier, more kleptocratic means in former communist states, it was plainly public wealth that was captured.
“So they would stage these seduction rituals, whether it was at Davos or Aspen, or at Ted. The World Economic Forum provided a platform for the super-rich to describe all the good they are doing on poverty and climate, and to give us a glimpse into their enviable lives.”
This year it included a vision of a paradise city, gated at every entrance, no need for weapons there; everyone in it rich. A paradise called New Gaza.
“What we witnessed was, quite brazenly, the world’s richest men gathering to discuss the real estate possibilities of a mass grave,” she says.
It was also the year Donald Trump announced his Board of Peace for the reconstruction of Gaza. It has delivered nothing substantial in the seven months since, but more significantly, “we’re being hit with so many extraordinary events that it’s hard to hold on to what a big deal it is. They have announced a privatised United Nations!”
There’s an element of ego rage, that we just aren’t grateful enough, Klein says. Ultimately, though, “we end the book concluding that wealth has its own deranging effects. It almost inevitably turns you into a supremacist because humans are creatures of story and you need a story to rationalise ‘Why you?’ – why do you have so much in a time of so much want and need? And the only possible story that’s available is that there’s something about you that justifies it.”
“There’s a new goading quality to the talking points of the super-rich – explicit eugenicist and Islamophobia, raw delight in the prospect of AI wiping out our jobs. It almost feels as though they’re daring us to rebel, just so that they can prove that rebellion is fruitless.”
This is fascism with a difference, Klein says. Its proponents are actively willing an apocalypse, or a wave of interconnected apocalypses brought forth by climate change and financial chaos, to hasten us towards a post-democratic world in which only a rich few survive to prosper.
“There is something so profound about no longer believing in the future, about seeing no value in our shared home, in the natural world. They are traitors to creation.”
New Zealand is in no way remote from this, the blight of Washington ideology having coloured our economic life for nearly four decades.
Our current coalition government seems happy to let its taxpayers starve at the checkout, incarcerate the indigent or young, freeze the minimum wage for three years, rip out minerals from the conservation estate to be exported, and to tear up foundational documents at the behest of an authoritarian agenda – at great cost to the social fabric.
No less than 92 pieces of legislation, much of it ideologically torching every area of our natural and national wellbeing, have been rushed through with virtually no public scrutiny.
Our finance minister wants to replace our civil service with AI to save NZ$3.9 billion and sets targets for still more divestment of trained staff, while deploring unemployment statistics, the “economy” and “productivity” maths.
This election has degenerated into a power-grab of hideous proportions, waged by political parties with widely disparate financial resources.
As Klein says, part of the new shamelessness we’re seeing is just what happens when this amount of financial, mediagenic, technological and public discourse is concentrated in the hands of small, unaccountable groups of privileged people devoid of humanity.
• Liz Waters
