Below we publish an article originally published in Numéro Zéro, written by Daniel Adam-Salamon. In it, the author offers a critical reflection on what he calls “ordinary totalitarianism,” understood as a form of diffuse domination in which the market, state power, control mechanisms, and the gradual normalization of behavior are intertwined.
In many ways, this analysis resonates with certain reflections recently published on this site about contemporary forms of domination and the capture of political imaginaries.
Our intention in publishing this text is simple: to stimulate reflection and encourage dialogue between analyses from similar and/or complementary perspectives.
Neither masters nor markets—putting an end to ordinary totalitarianism
We will not fix the world by tackling specific details, however urgent they may seem. These superficial corrections—adjusting a tax parameter here, enacting a climate law there—only serve to conceal, or even legitimize, the entirety of the problem we face: nothing less than the programmed disappearance of our species. Treating the symptoms while allowing the disease to thrive is like desperately trying to plug the holes in a ship whose hull is irreparably fractured. Reformism, in this context, is not political prudence: it is complicity.
What must be crushed is the vital center of this system—a system that survives only through its own decomposition, feeding on the exhaustion of bodies, lands, and souls. This center is capitalism in its very principle and in all its concrete manifestations: the commodification of life, the financialization of existence, the methodical destruction of the commons. Starting with what constitutes its deepest anthropological foundation: wage labor, that modernized, polished, and legally framed image of the condition of slavery. The ancient slave belonged to a visible master; the wage earner belongs to an abstraction—the market, capital—which makes his servitude all the more difficult to name and combat.
For capitalism does not engender fascism by accident or through excessive zeal: it methodically creates the conditions for it. When the logic of accumulation enters a phase of organic crisis—over-accumulation, collapse of institutional legitimacy, impoverishment of the middle and working classes—it spontaneously secretes authoritarian political forces charged with containing social revolt and safeguarding the relationship of exploitation. This is not a deviation from capitalism: it is one of its options for survival, embedded in its very structure. Twenty-first-century fascism is the result of a triangulation between the forces of the extreme right present in civil society, a reactionary political power seizing control of the state, and the support of transnational capital—finance, the military-industrial complex, and extractive industries. It is therefore no longer, as in the previous century, an alliance between national capital and an authoritarian state: it is the dictatorship of transnational capital seeking a political arm. Multinationals have no homeland; they have interests, and fascism can serve them very well.
Neoliberalism presented itself as the doctrine of freedom against all forms of authoritarianism: it has achieved precisely the opposite. In theory and in practice, it denies democracy, if by that we mean the transfer to the people of the effective power to define the fundamental orientations of their social organization. It reduces popular sovereignty to an electoral formality, while engraving in stone, in treaties, economic constitutions, and supranational institutions, market principles that no majority can question. Neoliberal democracy is a castrated democracy: we vote, but we do not decide. By destroying trade unions, subjecting workers to fierce competition, privatizing public services, and concentrating wealth at the top, it has created the psychosocial conditions for an authoritarian shift: mass anxiety, feelings of abandonment, pent-up hatred, and resentment.
Nascent fascism plays on this lever by turning the fear and anger of the masses against scapegoats—immigrants, minorities, “cosmopolitan elites”—thus diverting the energy of protest away from its real target. In its final phase, the neoliberal project radicalized its own foundations: what had remained latent in its early theorists—a hierarchy of individuals based on a supposed natural inequality—was now expressed openly, dressed up in the modern language of IQ, genetics, and “human capital.” Neoliberalism no longer shies away from the biological racism it once harbored. The more the consent of the people erodes, the more the ruling class opts for coercion; and an ever-increasing fraction of the bourgeoisie is choosing to abandon democracy in favor of authoritarianism, or even open fascism. Where neo-fascists take over from neoliberals, they resume and amplify the offensive against the world of work—overexploitation, fragmentation, precariousness—while reducing the state to its coercive function alone, stripped of any social pretensions. The transition from neoliberalism to neo-fascism is therefore not a break: it is a radicalized continuity, the same class war waged with uninhibited means.
In this regard, a strict distinction must be made between established fascism—an installed, visible, nameable regime—and fascisation, a gradual and capillary process that is much more difficult to identify and, precisely for this reason, much more formidable. Fascistization operates below the threshold of visibility, within the fabric of institutions and mentalities, long before anyone dares to utter the word. This process is already at work: the gradual normalization of exclusionary discourse, the militarization of internal and external borders, the systematic criminalization of social movements, widespread surveillance, and the continuous restriction of civil liberties under the guise of national security or a state of emergency that is extended indefinitely. Fascism does not always come in uniform and with a truncheon in hand: it often takes root in a suit, within the formal framework of democratic institutions, which it empties of their substance without ever abolishing their forms—allowing it to maintain a semblance of legality while it builds the instruments of future domination. It forges a legal and institutional arsenal that will immediately give fascists, when they come to power, the legal means to deploy unlimited violence against any opposition. Liberal democracy does not fall under blows: it collapses from within, eaten away by the forces it has itself created. The worsening socio-ecological crisis—mass migration, rivalries between powers for the monopolization of resources, the return of open warfare—will only accelerate this movement. We are not at the beginning of a future danger: we are already in the process.
Faced with this, the task is daunting. And yet, no one is in a position to tell others what to do, how to do it, or when. One of the first necessities is to remove petty leaders of all stripes—self-appointed or media-sanctioned spokespersons, enlightened vanguards of all kinds, institutional parties and unions. These figures, whatever their rhetoric and the sometimes genuine sincerity of their initial convictions, will only ever work to satisfy their thirst for power at the expense of the people they claim to emancipate. To be caliphs in the caliph’s place. To find themselves, in the end, more equal than the rest of their equals. The history of revolutionary betrayals is long; it teaches us that danger comes not only from the declared enemy, but also from those who pose as liberators.
Revolution never happens on command. It is not the result of instructions or plans hatched in offices—this is where it differs radically from the Bolshevik counter-revolution, which was precisely a vertical seizure of power disguised as a popular uprising. Genuine revolution arises from a multitude of autonomous centers, from an insurrection of individual wills that converge without merging, from a collective energy that cannot be controlled.
However, it is imperative not to repeat the revolutionary forms of the past, however effective and glorious they may have been in their time. The barricades of the 19th century, the general strikes of the following century, the occupation of roundabouts—all these forms had their moment. But the forces of repression, after being surprised and thrown off balance by their spontaneity, have since methodically learned everything from these old forms of struggle: they have studied them, modeled them, and integrated them into their doctrines of intervention. Now they lie in wait for rioters, with ever more considerable means at their disposal—technological, legal, psychological. In terms of direct confrontation, the strongest always wins: this is a law that nostalgia cannot abolish. New strategies must therefore be invented—not for the sake of novelty, but out of vital necessity. Each revolutionary episode must create its own forms in the time and space in which it occurs; these forms cannot be prescribed in advance or imported from elsewhere, they arise from the situation itself, and this implies the initiative of each individual, without delegation or expectation of a providential vanguard.
Nor should we ignore this uncomfortable truth: capitalism is totalitarianism. Not state totalitarianism in the classical sense, but a diffuse, capillary totalitarianism that colonizes minds as much as bodies, desires as much as behaviors. It is not only prevalent in economic structures or political institutions: it is prevalent in each of us, in our consumption habits, in our relationship to time, in the way we evaluate our own worth and that of others. It is therefore important, alongside any collective action, to strive to eradicate it from ourselves—a difficult, never-ending exercise, but a sine qua non for any revolutionary coherence.
It is then that the revolutionary moment is recognized in all its truth: when the world as it is—its promises of unlimited consumption, its gleaming screens, its constant entertainment, its commercial dreams—is finally revealed for what it is: a terminal sewer in which it is not only useless but deeply repugnant to continue wallowing.
March 5, 2025
Daniel Adam-Salamon
Source:
- Numéro Zero: https://lenumerozero.info/Ni-maitres-ni-marches-pour-en-finir-avec-le-totalitarisme-ordinaire-7820
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