Fascism conserves obsolete bourgeois forms stripped of their economic basis

Evidence

Absurdly, the Fascist regimes of the first half of the twentieth century have stabilized an obsolete economic form, multiplying the terror needed to maintain it now that its senselessness is blatant. Thereby has private life also been marked. With the strengthening of external authority the stuffy private order, particularism of interests, the long-outdated form of the family, the right of property and its reflection in character, have also re-consolidated themselves. But with a bad conscience, a scarcely concealed awareness of untruth. … For while bourgeois forms of existence are truculently conserved, their economic pre-condition has fallen away. Privacy has given way entirely to the privation it always secretly was, and with the stubborn adherence to particular interests is now mingled fury at being no longer able to perceive that things might be different and better. In losing their innocence, the bourgeois have become impenitently malign. The caring hand that even now tends the little garden as if it had not long since become a ‘lot’, but fearfully wards off the unknown intruder, is already that which denies the political refugee asylum. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 30

Categorization

• XREF: The pun ‘privacy/privation’ and the garden-as-‘lot’ gesture toward the genealogy Adorno later develops in ‘The Authoritarian Personality’ and the bourgeois family critique. — connects to: Fascism exposes bourgeois universal reason as an instrument of particular privilege; Fascism restored class consciousness and organization to the bourgeoisie; Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism: An Intervention, 193 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Fascism restored class consciousness and organization to the bourgeoisie #expands (0.85)
• Fascist austerity dismantled postwar gains and re-separated economics from politics #expands (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193
• Economists served fascism by reestablishing the economics-politics divide #expands (0.78) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 193
• Bourgeoisie rule can hide behind the facade of old aristocratic classes #complicates (0.72)