Fascism exposes bourgeois universal reason as an instrument of particular privilege

Evidence

After all, the ‘more bourgeois the workers feel in their own subjective consciousness, the more they will view one another as competitors, just as other groups in society do’. Adorno regards the ‘concept of the white-collar proletarian’ (Stehkragenproletarier) as a ‘key anthropological category’ insofar as he sees it as showing that the individual is defined by its class affiliation: ‘The bourgeois is a human being who cannot change classes. His class is his individuality. It is the true guarantor of his estate. Here lies the actual key for the whole of fascism’. — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1421 (#expands, via linked claim)

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 With the strengthening of external authority the stuffy private order, particularism of interests, the long-outdated form of the family, the right of property and its reflection in character, have also re-consolidated themselves.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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Progress under capitalism turns into regression and fascism — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 25; Bourgeois class behavior explains the subjective key to fascism — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1421; Capitalism and formal humanism lead logically to fascism — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 24 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Bourgeois class behavior explains the subjective key to fascism #expands (0.82) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1421
• Fascism restored class consciousness and organization to the bourgeoisie #corroborates (0.80)
• Fascism conserves obsolete bourgeois forms stripped of their economic basis #expands (0.78) — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 30
• Capitalism and formal humanism lead logically to fascism #corroborates (0.75) — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 24
• Comintern factions defined fascism as armed dictatorship of capitalist fractions #expands (0.75)
• Fascism emerges organically from liberalism within a single capitalist social order #expands (0.72) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 403
• Gramsci analyzed fascism through its social base rather than abstract class form #qualifies (0.72) — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 186