With the rise of contemporary authoritarian regimes (including those of Duterte, Bolsonaro, Orbán, and Erdoğan) in notional, or prior, ‘liberal democracies’ and especially with the revival of Trump in the US, the term ‘Fascist’ has become a popular and widely applied descriptive term – a quick means of summing up both recent changes and the possible dangers that lie ahead. Of course, like any term, it can suffer from ‘Crying Wolf’ syndrome if it is applied too easily and widely. Indeed, it is known that far-right ‘Libertarians’ can call their more socially-conservative brethren ‘Fascists’, due to differing stances on state-church ‘authorities’ and their political usage. Criticising use of the term ‘Fascist’, however, should not forget that there are connections between a phenomena like the 2nd Trump ‘administration’ and Nazi Germany (and other ‘totalitarian’ states), such as the scapegoating of minority populations, attempts at (and actualised) mass deportations, and a clawing culture of fellow-travelling loyalty to a false-god patriotism. Yet, my criticism here is aimed at the distractive use of “Fascism” in deflecting attention away from the bubbling-stream source of such turns towards reactionary politics, namely, capitalist crises (both with small ‘c’), and the underlying desire for a reconstruction of not just ‘authority’ but, more importantly, profitability.

That recent changes are to be summed up and identified as ‘Fascist’ overlooks two key facts: (1) that there is no form of ‘good’ capitalism against which to contrast the “Fascist” (the latter was/is a product of the former: it’s off-spring); and (2) that Fascism (now in ‘bold’ type) was a specific historic social movement which arose in a pre-Keynesian (so pre-‘planner state’) era, where Fascism represented one ‘possible’ alternate means of capitalism’s ‘evolution’ out of crisis at a specific moment in time (1920s-40s). Furthermore, it competed with Stalinism, Keynesianism, and Japanese Imperialism (all different responses to a global crisis in ‘world markets’, i.e., capital accumulation); only two of which managed to ‘survive’ the war.

Social historian Ellen Meiksins Wood (2002), in The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View, described the French Ancien Regime as a social form (mode of production) which withered on the tree of life – it literally had its head cut-off by the French Revolution. Nevertheless, in 19th century France there were several attempts at a monarchial revival, and there were certainly members of the French nobility knocking about Europe (never mind France) providing mimetic vocabulary to garnish constitutional debates with their liberal adversaries. Though such nobles did traverse the world with bankers’ drafts in their pocket – not the quick rents nor corvee (labour taxes) of Ancien Regime peasants, ‘incomes’ which were abolished with their ancestors’ ‘offices’ in 1793 (the political positions that had enabled a historically and geographically peculiar form of extra-economic domination). While the idea of aristocratic rule then ‘echoed’ down the decades, the generator of this increasingly-distant sound wave had disappeared in any physical/practical sense.

Hence, today we may have the silhouette of what a reactionary politics coping (or not coping) with a crisis in capitalism accumulation looks like, but in drawing attention to the silhouette do we run the risk ignoring its source: the fire and the people making shadows?

When is a capitalist a “Fascist”?

Let me now turn to matters much more mundane. On Monday 15th September 2025, I spotted an investigative report by the BBC World Service entitled “Ex-London bus driver runs degrading sex-trade ring in Dubai’s glamorous neighbourhoods”. Mr Charles Mweisgwa claimed he “could provide women for a sex party at a starting price of $1,000 (£740), adding that many can do ‘pretty much everything’ clients want them to”. According to women involved, one client “regularly asks to defecate on the women”. The women come from poor countries, notably, rural areas of Uganda; so are being exploited due to their lack of jobs and their desperation to earn a living, to survive. They are drawn to Dubai on promises of obtaining work in “supermarkets or hotels”, and face violence if they want to go back home when the promise (expectation) of normal work is not fulfilled. Reporters were also informed by the women “that clients were mostly white Europeans, and included men with extreme fetishes” – which, of course, can only be fulfilled through cold, hard financial transaction.

Of course, Mr Mweisgwa denies the allegations that he’s a pimp who abuses visa ‘rights’ and uses violence. He merely “helps women find accommodation through landlords, and that women follow him to parties because of his wealthy Dubai contacts”. Thus, it’s the women’s free-willed desire for and chase after money that leads them into such situations – everyone wants a piece of action in Dubai! And Mr Mweisgwa doesn’t appear to be a Fascist, even though he facilitates arrangements which are clearly racist. As one witness noted: [The white clients] “want somebody who is going to cry and scream and run. And that somebody [in their eyes] should be a black person”. But if they turn to the police, they are told: “You Africans cause problems for each other. We don’t want to get involved”.

Indeed, Mr Mweisgwa is a worker (a former wage slave) ‘made good’. From starting out as a bus driver in London, he now appears to be ‘living the dream’ in a posh part of Dubai. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by either racism (he is Black living alongside Dubai’s police, who wouldn’t care about offering him protection) nor nationalism (after all, his business is international and multi-national, offering Europeans the services of Africans in a Western Asian/Arab setting). As far as the Dubai authorities are concerned, nothing illegal is taking place, as it’s just Africans hurting each other. Tightened rules on immigration would harm his profitability. Mr Mweisgwa has moved from being one of life’s exploited to being one its successful exploiters. He’s now making more money than he did before, when he was an ‘honest’ bus driver. That’s business. That’s good business. This is the outcome of societal values instilled within Mr Mweisgwa. Once he ‘makes’ enough money the red carpet will be rolled out for him. Dirty money will be cleaned; it will go on to be invested in all sorts of ‘wholesome’ essential businesses (from tyre manufacturing to artificial intelligence and fast-food outlets). After this point, all taxes will be paid, and respect ‘earned’. There is nothing unusual here, as this is everyday capitalism.

Holding on to Capitalism without “Fascism”

Can we imagine Mr Mweisgwa’s ‘enterprise’ operating under the keen eye of ‘inspector capitalism’, that is, the left-leaning social marketeers of socialist heritage who, apparently, want to regulate their nation’s workplaces into conditions of ‘social justice’? The BBC are bringing our attention to this specific case because of its extremities. But it is not just because someone defecating on another (abused) person will gain readers and ‘clicks’ (an instrumental requirement of the media industry, for it to make money or at least justify journalists’ existence). Rather, Mr Mweisgwa’s enterprise does not meet the ‘ideal’ (utopian) standards of how capitalism should operate, as set down by large multi-national corporations such as McDonalds, Walmart, Elbit Systems, Coca Cola, Astra Zeneca, Pfizer, Lush, Ben & Gerry’s, Shell, Mobile, Starbucks, etc. The BBC are reminding us that this is not the way in which things ‘should be’ organised under capitalism – the ‘good’ capitalism that everybody loves and is ‘in favour’ of as “the worst system available, except for all the others” (Churchill).

But the ‘good’ capitalism is mythical as it always relies on memory loss. It’s a product of dementia, literally, being driven demented. Money ‘earned’ during the slave era was reinvested, reinvested and reinvested. But more importantly, as Bonefeld (2023) puts it, today’s workers are employed with money stolen from the very same workers the day before. The system is continuous, with no ‘break’ between the bad and the good days.

Yes, people are suffering under the new “Fascist” Trumpian regime; but people also suffered under Obama, who increased the number of drone strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq on his predecessor, George W Bush, who launched an illegal war leading to the deaths of 1.6 million people. Prior to this Bill Clinton bombed Iraq several times. All of them supported Israel and its use of ‘administrative detention’, based on a law introduced by the British in the 1920s. All of these, along with Western European ‘democracies’, saw regimes such as the Dubai, Qatari, Bahraini, and Saudi ‘monarchies’ as allies (who regularly used torture). Meanwhile, take up a ‘counter-hegemonic’ stand with Second and Third World ‘nations’ and governments isn’t going to help in the classification of Trump as ‘weirdly’ out of sync with what has gone before: Putin, Xi, the Kims, Modi, the Egyptian-Pakistani-Brazilian-Greek-Turkish-Argentine military ‘juntas’, then there are the Black Nationalist ‘socialists’ of East Africa, the Apartheid of South Africa. Can or should we redefine ‘Fascism’ as when suffering ‘comes home’?

My point, to be clear, is not that type of ‘regime’ does not make a difference to ordinary peoples lives, and especially to some people (the lucky ones). Of course regime change can make a difference. But calling Trump a “Fascist” simply takes away from the fact he is a “Capitalist”. And he is the latter first and foremost! Trump has always been motivated by money and capital accumulation; as have his entourage. They are all motivated just like Mr Mweisgwa. Trump’s policies, which he himself has given no overall ‘ideological’ shape to (we see this in his erratic swings and shifts), are an experimental, hotch-potch attempt (similar to Thacther’s) to reconstruct ‘capital’, by which I mean the relationship of labour to capital, between workers and money. The days of seeing the ‘capitalist’ as a top-hat wearing Mr Scrooge are long gone – such people never controlled, individually, the dispossession of indigenous communities, enclosure of land, the enforcement of private property ‘entitlements’ (‘rights’), the privation and starvation of needless / ‘useless’ mouths, programmed reductions in the cost of living (e.g., the reproduction of workers through cheap, subsidised housing), nor the ‘required’ education (indoctrination) of workers and the wider population. It is the (capitalist) State that has always been tasked with ensuring the population of its territorial area (domain) becomes and remains compliant with the core, self-evident truth of modern (bourgeois) society, namely, the successful accumulation of capital: that (as Mr Mweisgwa discovered) money can somehow, magically, become more money. Grabbing the state’s levers hasn’t just been a tactic of Fascists – its been done by Leninists, Conservatives and Social Democrats – but the results have always been some form of reconstruction of ‘capital’, and never the State’s own “withering away”.

So, is Trump a “Fascist”? Well, let’s say he is. The question becomes ‘so what?’ He’s a capitalist, and it is the ‘idea’ (notion) that there can be some form of better or ‘good’ capitalism (a utopia of cold monetary relations) that needs to be questioned!

References:

Bonefeld, W. (2023) A Critical Theory of Economic Compulsion: Wealth, Suffering, Negation London: Routledge.

Wood. E. M. (2002) The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View London: Verso.