“If you gaze long enough into an abyss”, Friedrich Nietzsche is regularly quoted as saying, “the abyss will gaze back into you.”
Read: An extract from Disaster Nationalism
Reading Richard Seymour’s Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization is certainly an act of staring into the abyss. Such an emotional investment demands a high return.
Read: An extract from Richard Seymour's The Disenchanted Earth.
The book’s chapters spiral down from “class”, “disasters” and “sex” through “war machines”, “the armed shitstorm” and “genocide” before finally bottoming out at “dark climate”. This really is the descent into hell.
Pain
The book is an extremely thorough and unflinching study of “disaster nationalism”, a form of proto- fascism, as it emerges around the world.
We take in various human calamities from lone woolf shooters to state sponsored pogroms: from UKIP and Reform in the UK, to Trump and his supporters in the United States, Modi and the BJP in India and the genocide inflicted on Palestinians.
The stakes are extremely high: as a companion to Seymour’s previous book, The Disenchanted Earth: Reflections on Ecosocialism and Barbarism, this work can be read as a warning that indeed everything, every living thing, is now at stake.
As such, Disaster Nationalism is deeply distressing to read. It can almost feel like being deliberately and repeatedly electrocuted.
But of course, this is a non-fiction work, and everything described here is actually taking place. If you were ignoring the pain currently being suffered around the world, this book is the jolt you needed.
Collapse
Seymour forces us along this single-vector helter-skelter ride to provide a conjunctional analysis of the ascent of far right disaster nationalism around the world.
This in turn might equip us to prevent fascism coming to power again: and equally importantly, remedy the causes that have made its hallucinatory poison such a seductive remedy for so many people.
Seymour is doing serious work: staring into the abyss so you don’t have to - or at least not quite so intently.
So what can Seymour tell us about fascism, and what can be done to stop it, as we also attempt to stop climate breakdown and biodiversity collapse?
Hallucinatory
He describes disaster nationalism as “vaguely rebellious or dissident impulses” deflected into a defence of “muscular national capitalism and ethnic revenge.”
Seymour forces us along this single-vector helter-skelter ride to provide a conjunctional analysis of the ascent of far right disaster nationalism around the world.;
A central claim of the book is that disaster, including natural disasters made worse by climate breakdown, often lead to social conflict such as pogroms and genocide, and these in turn can make the perpetrators more popular and politically powerful.
There is a distinction between the fascism of the 20th century and the disaster nationalism of the 21st. As an example, disaster nationalism today is more online, “more decentralised and networked than in classical fascist movements.”
Seymour suggests that the driver for actual human beings adopting disaster nationalism is a void - and one immediately recognises Nietzsche's abyss.
Seymour poses a vital question: what work is disaster nationalism doing? What real need does it appear to resolve for those who adopt it?
“[T]he question is why these problems should be metaphorized in the first place. What is the yield there?” Later, he asks: “For what illness is this flight into hallucinatory, networked madness the cure?”
Trust
One answer is that this “dreamwork” has “transformed political problems into erotic fantasies…the expression both of a desire and a counterattack upon desire.” He adds: “What is at stake here is the conspiracist’s contradictory desire for totalitarianism, as a solution to the crisis of authority.”
The attraction to this new form of fascism, he says, is “the existential void concomitant upon the countless calamities of recent decades, their assault on the fabric of trust and meaning, their legacy in a subterranean, unspoken depression and anxiety to which disaster nationalism offers a unique and highly addictive remedy.”
How does disaster fascism spread? Damon Cetola, a sociologist, is referenced to distinguish between simple and complex contagions of ideologies.
Seymour summarises: “Simple contagions have a low threshold for uptake, so they spread quickly through the most random connections…
“A complex contagion…anyone considering an idea that is risky, or whose benefits are uncertain, needs a lot of persuasion and social validation. The result is that such a contagion spreads most efficiently through close communities with a lot of social trust.”
Cruelty
The causes of disaster nationalism contagion are both deep and shallow, simple and complex.
The deep causes are, among other things, the imposition of neoliberalism around the world. This has destroyed both the practical infrastructure of the social safety net - from schools, through to social services and health provision, including mental health provision.
At the same time, work has become harder, more precarious, less rewording or even justifiable. Venal politicians justify this attack by persuading the general public of its own venality. It is a cruel, dark, miserable world.
Neoliberalism, which might be called “muscular capitalism”, has simultaneously created almost unprecedented social inequality. The obscene rich are now obscenely rich; the desperately poor are now obscenely desperate.
Social mobility requires criminal levels of ingenuity and self interest. This in turn creates a political theatre of cruelty.
Conspiracy
The vector of neoliberal capitalism carries the disease of proto-fascism. We live in a world where we have all become victims of an abstract intangible force: capital accumulation.
This will only become more vivid as capitalist extraction drives climate breakdown and other ecological disasters, such as seen during the Covid pandemic.
But the response of many is to metastice victimhood into a new, more virile form of victimisation. “The fantasy may be that I am persecuted and hunted by that in the world which I, in fact, hate and wish to destroy”.
The ruling class that cleaves to capitalism, and delivers neoliberalism, is not going to save us. “The ruling class whose feathers were ruffled over Trump’s election and the Brexit vote had already by that point demonstrated a certain tolerance for capitalism with pogromist characteristics.”
The more shallow cause of fascism’s rise can be described as Muskification. Elon Musk, jumping around the political stage sporting a personalised DARK MAGA baseball cap, has chosen to be the poster child of the spread of conspiracy driven fascism online.
Anxiety
Disaster nationalism spreads in communities of disconnection. This means it spreads quickly. A lie travels around the world while truth is still getting its boots on.
White, middle-aged, middle-class men who cannot process their sense of victimhood are early, if shallow adopters, of each new iteration of the disaster nationalist fever dream.
However, fascism and modern disaster nationalism does not end well, certainly for its victims, but equally as reliably for its proponents.
Firstly, disaster nationalism does not provide its adherents the release it promises.“No amount of killing or performative cruelty will finally scratch the itch.” Adorno is quoted as saying that the fascist cannot sleep “until he has transformed the whole world into the very same paranoid system by which he is beset.”
Seymour continues: “But no amount of violence can staunch the anxiety, just as no amount of killing spiders will cure arachnophobia because the spider is not the real source of the fear. The more the enemy is crushed, the less it appears to solve, and the more helpless one is in the face of anxiety.”
Antidotes
Disaster nationalism is therefore, and ultimately, a suicidal strategy - and this is much of its attraction. “[I]f the escalation is forcibly halted, it results in a mania of collective suicide.”
Fascism in its earlier manifestation was a direct result of racist colonisation by the European powers, Seymour suggests. Britain, as well as Germany, must accept responsibility for this.
Moreover, we can predict that the colonisation taking place right now in Palestine may have similar political consequences around the world. A mania of collective suicide.
Another driver for disaster nationalism, as with older fascisms, is a fear of communism. “Anti-communism without communism is hallucinatory, but not entirely new,” he explains. “The Nazis took power on the strength of preventing a fictional communist coup.”
The prognosis that fascism spreads both because of deep social malaise and because of the shallow and broken community networks means that we can identify specific antidotes.
Communities
These are, however, by necessity incredibly deep and complex: the fix will be challenging, exhausting, exposing and anything but guaranteed to make any kind of difference.
The concluding chapter is subtitled dark climate but the focus quickly shifts from warning about breakdown to discussing how precisely we address the deep subterranean problems that are driving disaster nationalism, and also driving all social and ecological crises.
Here Seymour draws heavily on Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. The latter’s claim, that we can choose between barbarism or socialism, is yet to be disproven. But the socialist who warned in the 1920s about the rise of fascism in Europe has much to tell us about the rise of disaster nationalism in the 2020s.
We need to defend our communities against fascism. But to succeed, we really need to build out those communities through deeper and wider connections across geographical and interest groups.
We then need to defend our communities against neoliberalism - and acknowledge that neoliberalism itself is the only version of capitalism on offer.
Fantastical
Adam Schiff, a member of the US House of Representatives, stated during the January 6 Commission into Trump’s 2016 attempted coup: “The system held, but barely”. Seymour concludes: “If the system barely held, the need for system change could not be more obvious…Yet the new administration [under Democrat president Joe Biden] existed precisely to avert system change.”
This does not mean we must turn our backs on thinking and imagining disaster. Catherine Keller is quoted as saying: “All the Western egalitarian or revolutionary movements, the fights for democracy, socialism, women’s rights, emancipation of slaves, right on through Martin Luther King’s ‘dream’ tapped apocalyptic metaphors of great tribulation and transformation.”
Seymnour returns to the same point towards the end of the book. “We cannot disown apocalyptic desire. Movements for change, from abolitionism to Extinction Rebellion, thrive on the horizon of the imminent end, which is either the catastrophe or the jubilee in which all debts are forgiven, all injustices cancelled, and people’s freed.”
Indeed, Luxemburg would suggest that the contradictions within capitalism would “inevitably lead to its ruin” leading to “a general and catastrophic crisis” and therefore we must have in mind “the concept of breakdown, of a social catastrophe…a cataclysm.”
The Luxembourg crisis may not be inevitable, says Seymour. But if we want to avert fascism we need to stare into the actually existing void, and not use a fantastical, yet less powerful, fear as a defensive delusion.
Monsters
A deep irony runs through this book: disaster nationalism is accelerated through a deep paranoia about the power of a fictitious form of communism, eclipsing any discussion of an ethical, anti-war communism..
We desperately need social cohesion, equality, safety and love. It needs to be universal and international. Some people will insist on calling that communism.
Disaster Nationalism is an incredibly important and impressive work. Perhaps its most important lesson is that none of us are inherently immune from the seductive call of fascism. As life gets harder, the desire for simple solutions that blame the powerless for the vice of the powerful will become ever more saccharine sweet.
“One need not be specifically moronic to have one’s attention gamed, partake in online demonology, or fall for a fabricated story,” Seymour warns.
As we all suffer greater hardship as ecological and economic conditions decline we must steel ourselves against myth, conspiracy, blame and the politics of hate.
Nietzsche, and especially his concept of the superhuman, was coopted by the Nazis. The quote above is preceded by another, which proved prescient. “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.”
This Author
Brendan Montague is editor of The Ecologist.