This Machine Builds Fascists: Nationalism as Mode of Distribution

The reappearance of fascism on the world scene requires a retheorization of nationalism. If the purpose of theory is that it allows us to see something safely, as Andrea Wilson Nightingale has argued—accompanying and guarding us like an old army general whose view of combat from distant elevated ground reveals patterns no fighting soldier could see—then the return of the past century’s most dangerous phenomenon indicates a theoretical failure at the heart of our strategic planning. Our inherited concept of nationalism has made navigating the lifeworld much more dangerous and difficult than it needs to be. It is either unfinished or poorly made.

We don’t know how to feel about the nation, despite much writing on the topic. Attempts to unravel “the question of the nation” without specifying the materiality that organizes it are futile exercises—as futile as attempts to unravel “the question of the factory” without recognizing production as a material problem in need of perpetual renegotiation.1 It was the actions of the nineteenth-century workers’ movement within and against the factory-institution that recorded the concept of production as a larger, transhistorical theater of class struggle. From signifying the fabrication of goods, production became a principle of explanation, a way of describing the social-historical world without recourse to ideas of “God,” or “Nature.” Similarly, the nation-state operates within the wider theater of distribution, in which class struggle divides the social surplus into the prices of land, labor, and money. Recognizing contemporary movements within and against the nation therefore requires according this concept of distribution the same weight previously given to production. Like production, distribution is a distinct theater of class struggle, rather than a preamble or a gloss for another more fundamental conflict. In order to understand our current crisis, we need to acknowledge that the class struggle within the theater of distribution is as persistent and as material as it is elsewhere.

This billboard was installed in 1989 by real estate developer Seymour Durst, who paid $100.000 for its construction. The clock displays, both, the U.S. gross national debt, as well as each family’s share of it.
 

What is Distribution?

Distribution refers to the distribution of the social surplus.2 To prevent distribution from becoming another night in which all cows are black, it is important to emphasize what distribution is not. In the same way that red is not blue but both red and blue are colors, distribution’s peers clarify what it is. To borrow and refurbish some categories from orthodox political economy, distribution exists alongside production, reproduction, and representation. As a concept defined in relation to other concepts, distribution is what is not-production, not-reproduction, and not-representation.3 That is: if we consider the sum total of social-historical processes and subtract everything better described by production, reproduction, or representation, what remains is distribution. All four can be understood as theaters, fixed by the class struggle, and charged with staging the differences between the material and the immaterial, the visible and the invisible, politics and economics. In the same way that transhistorical genres appear in different modes at different times (performance exists always but not always proscenium performance and so proscenium is the mode, while performance is generic), we receive the four theaters of class struggle as always already fixed into this or that contingent mode. Class struggle is what reveals this contingency and records the difference between theaters and modes. If we can say that Taylorism is a mode of production, it is only because we have recognized production as a transhistorical theater of class struggle that has resulted in Taylorism at whatever specific place and time. Insisting on this distinction prevents us from naturalizing such results, even as we argue over how best to characterize whatever mode. Is the shift in the mode of representation best characterized as moving from analog to digital or from paper to pixel? Is patriarchy a mode of reproduction, representation, distribution, or a combination of all three? In each case, what matters is the difference between modes that come and go—patriarchy, Taylorism, the spectacle—and the theaters of their appearance—reproduction, representation, distribution, and production—which, once the class struggle has constituted them conceptually, do not.

After Seattle University announced its refusal to bargain with the adjunct and contingent faculty union, despite is status being certified by the National Labor Relations Board, the union began a campaign calling out the Seattle University Administration by filing a “missing [social justice] values report.”

Contradiction and Overdetermination

For Benedict Anderson, nationalism is a mode of representation: “the nation” refers to the imagined community made possible by the forces of representation unleashed by the technology of the printing press. For Sylvia Walby, nationalism is the public, segregationist subgenre of the patriarchal mode of reproduction wherein women’s exploitation is based on the employer and the state rather than the family (as it was with the private, exclusionary kind). Nationalism is a mode of reproduction in a different sense for Ernest Gellner, who argues that it is necessary for industrial production.4 Few writers have argued that nationalism is itself a mode of production, but many, like Gellner, have seen it as in some sense derivative, parasitical, or otherwise determined by it.

I think nationalism is better understood as a mode of distribution. Distribution is responsible for the existence of prices for land, labor, and money.5 These are brokered by market-staging institutions such as central banks, institutions for arbitrating labor disputes, and court systems—para-market formations both indigenous and exogenous to markets themselves. Land, labor, and money are not commodities like any others, as any reference to supply and demand is particularly inadequate in accounting for their prices. Unlike the exchange of other goods, the exchange of land, labor, and money requires more in the way of social validation from supplementary institutions in order to maintain itself as a market. For this reason, some have called land, labor, and money “peculiar” commodities, because their patterns of exchange are exceptional. Some don’t think they should be referred to as commodities at all, owing to this same institutional excessiveness. In this and much else, I will follow Suzanne de Brunhoff and refer to them as “non-commodities,” to signify the fact that the commodity character of their exchange is a contested outcome of class struggle.6

Class struggle is the reason the exchange of non-commodities tends to generate brokering institutions. When a central bank adjusts interest rates, it is adjusting the price of money, and shifting the distribution of the social surplus between profit and interest. When the US National Labor Relations Board hears a case, it is adjusting the price of labor-power and shifting the distribution of the social surplus between workers and owners. Something similar happens when an institution like Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac in the US guarantees a mortgage and adjusts the price of land.7 Social surplus is allocated by way of such adjustments, and the character of their staging corresponds to a given mode of distribution. When these market-staging or brokering institutions are predominantly national institutions, nationalism describes the mode of distribution.

Certainly describing nationalism as mode of distribution opposes the efforts of previous thinkers on this subject. However, my aim is not simply to insert the concept of distribution into the place held by reproduction, representation, or production in these earlier, pathbreaking conceptions of nationalism. Rather, the goal is to replace a monocameral model of social-historical explanation—in which it is understood that one or another of these theaters always predominates—with a quadracameral one. This model understands any predominance of one theater over the others to be the result of class struggle, rather than a metaphysical inevitability. It is class struggle which determines, in any given social-historical moment, which class identity is constituted in which position by reference to which combination of elements.8 It is because of the workers’ movement that we have the concept of production; it is because of the women’s movement that we have the concept of reproduction. Theory follows practice, and so the class struggle records itself in genres of concrete materiality. Instead of the politics or economics of reproduction being reduced to the politics or economics of production—or vice versa—both production and reproduction (and representation and distribution) are always already politically economic.

It is truly the case, as has been said, that recorded history is the history of class struggles. But it is not true that there are two, or only two, primary classes. This binary is an error in the record, and an effort to limit class struggle in advance.9 In point of historical fact, it is up to the class struggle how many class relationships persist throughout the political economy, which is never less than the sum of the four theaters. Such relationships form not only along the line dividing politics from economics in production, but also along comparable lines in representation, reproduction, and distribution. The record of class struggle insists on these divisions, and history will not sit for a simpler portrait.

The aim of reading nationalism as a mode of distribution is thus not to claim that it has priority over the other modes, or that it determines them, but only that it can do so, at certain times and under certain conditions. The largest obstacle inherited by revolutionary theory from the past century is the neuroses that insists on one or the other element of political economy being always already generic or universal enough to dominate or determine the other three. We have been perpetually told that the important thing is really writing, or the materiality of the value-form (mode of representation); or really computers or immaterial labor-power (mode of production); or really plasticity and ontogenesis (mode of reproduction), and so on. This is the analytical equivalent of saying that what really matters in an electrical circuit is the load, rather than the power source, the connectors, or the switch, when it is the presence of all four kinds of thing that makes it what it is. In the same way that an electrical circuit can stop functioning due to problems within one or more of it elements, so too do crises in the political economy often begin with one or another of its elements before spreading to the others. This predominance is contingent rather than axiomatic.

All modes have both a diachronic and synchronic existence. When considering the social history of any given theater, it is important to examine both the coexistence of multiple modes within a single time frame, and also the shift, from time frame to time frame, of which mode predominates within a given theater. Diachronically, we might say that by the twentieth century, Taylorism had replaced the cottage industry as the predominant mode of production. Synchronically, we nevertheless note that many contemporary industries maintain cottage modes of production. This is why, in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, Lenin could identify no less than five modes of production existing side by side at the end of the nineteenth century, even as he recognized the shifting hierarchy among them. Similarly, to say that nationalism is the predominant mode of distribution today is not to say that it is the only one. A corresponding work of twenty-first century revolutionary theory would be The Development of Nationalism on Gaia, which would similarly identify the persistence of other distributive modes, even as it recognized the global ascent of nationalism and its attendant crises, of which fascism is certainly the most famous.

A man holds up a tea kettle during an Atlanta Tea Party tax protest in April 2009. Photo: John Bazemore/AP

What Does the National Mode Replace?

If nationalism is the predominant mode of distribution today, what mode came before it? Some argue that such a question is nonsensical, because there is no such thing as a mode of distribution, only mechanisms of redistribution, which should be abolished as quickly as possible. What I am referring to as distribution would then be split into a natural or divine outcome, on the one hand, and a contingent element of the political economy, called “redistribution,” on the other (mere “periodic interventions” into an otherwise self-regulating machine). In this scheme, distribution as a social historical reality is replaced by a combination of myth and morality. To desire a return to the gold standard, the abolition of the minimum wage, or a lifeworld populated only by associated producers is to desire economics without politics, or politics without economics. Unfortunately for our conservative comrades—and there are more of these than will recognize themselves as such—the dream of a distribution-free world, understood as the free and happy functioning of land, labor, and money markets independent of distributing institutions, cannot survive even the shallowest acquaintance with history. It is utopian in the strict sense of describing a place that has not been found to exist.

A reactionary position, as opposed to the conservative one, is more consistent with historical reality. The reactionary wants to restore absolute monarchy, which does in fact describe accurately the mode of distribution displaced by the nation. Like feudalism before it and nationalism today, absolutism refers to a set of institutions engaged in staging markets for land, labor, and money. The feudal bond priced land in terms of military labor, requiring landowners to furnish the king with a fully equipped knight for forty days a year—a price regime that dissolved when the money market allowed monarchs to raise military funds independently of the distribution of land.10 Under absolutism, instead of depending on the nobles for knights, a monarch became a military capitalist, raising money on the strength of future expectations as an entrepreneur would. When these bills came due, the monarchs either paid in loot or levied taxes, which led more or less directly (if not at all quickly) to consolidating the lords’ alliance with the expanding professional class and eventually to the replacement of the absolutist mode of distribution with the national one.

Here we see why it is important to distinguish between the four theaters as places where multiple and overlapping conflicts between forces and relations take place: because it is often the forces of one that upset the relations of the other. The rise of print, to return to Benedict Anderson’s thesis, was a force of representation that helped undo the feudal relations of distribution. The rise of radio was a force that consolidated national relations of a similar kind. Many national institutions are the products of class compromises intended to stabilize exactly these kinds of interactions. At the end of a long and costly sequence of strikes and lockouts, a national institution is formed for arbitrating labor disputes. After numerous and costly credit crises, a central bank emerges for arbitrating the cost of money. The nation is what replaces the king as the repository of local responsibility for non-commodity management. And in the same way that the “good king” was one who successfully exported violence abroad, so too does the nation seek to exile class conflict to the borders of its territory.11 It is in response to the need for institutionalized mechanisms of non-commodity management that the nation arises to disaggregate labor-power into a kind sold by a class of citizens at one price and a kind sold by a class of non-citizens at another. These must either seek national permission to exchange their labor-power, or work illegally.12

Such efforts at managing the price of labor-power often coincide with efforts to manage the price of money, which is likewise reinstituted as a national concern in the form of central banks. In national distribution, the class struggle between owners and workers, on the one hand, and creditors and borrowers, on the other, is partially mitigated by the creation of a class struggle between citizens and foreigners.13 But none of these class divisions are any more fundamental than any of the others, or have more metaphysical weight. Class struggle predominates over everything, including the question of which class division becomes an active antagonism in which conjuncture.

Fascism, historical and otherwise, follows from a crisis in the national mode of distribution. It arises when the contradictions inherent in that mode become exacerbated—in particular when the nation-state loses the ability to socially pre-validate its non-commodities, and thus no longer functions to bridge the gap between social recognition and material realization, imperiling accumulation. Fascism is reactionary because it aims to restore the political economic significance of an enfeebled mode—in this case, the nation—by supplementing it with violence. Racism is the ideological expression, post facto, of violence performed in the nation’s name. All nationalisms are potential fascisms to the extent that they are relied on to stabilize non-commodities for exchange. In order to see why this is so, it is necessary to briefly examine the relationship between the non-commodities and capital.

A man confronts a Ku Klux Klan rally in Columbia, South Carolina on July 18, 2015.

The Non-Commodities and Capital

Often, when we set out to analyze capital, we end up only speaking about power and commodities.14 Many an ultraleftist has inflated these concepts into a new metaphysics. Intending to communicate the severity of our collective situation, some comrades frequently end by obliterating the concept of capital itself, and thus denying the overwhelming reality they had set out to demonstrate. Said simply: if everything consisted in some combination of commodities and power, there would be no capital, whose conceptual existence rests on the difference between commodities and non-commodities as objects of exchange.

A capital is a circuit of accumulation. It is traditionally notated in its simple form as M – C – M’, that is, money (M) transformed into commodities (C) transformed into more money (M’). Here we can already see that our capacity to perceive this transformation, and thus, our capacity to conceptualize capital itself, rests on defining money as a non-commodity. Otherwise our circuit would become a tautology, indistinguishable from a series of barter exchanges, reading C – C – C.

The same is true for labor-power, another non-commodity managed by the mode of distribution. The traditional notation of industrial capital is M – (C + L) – C – M’, that is, money (M) is transformed into commodities and labor-power (C + L), which are combined to produce new commodities, which are then transformed back into more money (M’). If, as in the previous example, labor-power and money are not understood as non-commodities, we are once again back in the tautological night where all cows are black: C – (C + C) – C – C. If there is no exchange of non-commodities, there is no transformation, no accumulation, and no capital. It is only the persistence of the distinction between non-commodities like money and labor-power, on the one hand, and standard commodities for production and consumption, on the other, that makes capital capital.

What is important for our analysis of distribution broadly—and for nationalism and the resurgence of fascism in particular—is only to note that capital is not capable of providing M or L. It can combine these to accumulate more of M—that is what makes it capital—but it must encounter these non-commodities ready-to-hand, so to speak, if any accumulating transformation is to take place.15 However, it would be a mistake to then conclude that because capital cannot provide money and labor-power, the nation immediately can. If distribution names the sum total of processes implicated in staging these non-commodity markets, this does not mean that any particular mode of distribution has a primordial monopoly on doing so.16 In fact, it is the difficulty of maintaining these non-commodities as objects of exchange that accounts for the antagonism at work in any given mode of distribution, national or otherwise.

In other words, the fascist effort to revalorize the nation is an effort to reestablish the role of the nation in facilitating the exchange of non-commodities. For example, tightening the border, “protecting” jobs, and deporting “illegals” all seek to increase national influence over the price of labor-power. Race is the mythological residue of this national distributive mechanism. Here it helps to remember Robert Paxton’s insight that the Ku Klux Klan is the first fascist formation, a paramilitary nationalism organized to drive down the rising cost of labor-power after emancipation (and whose tragic success was famously celebrated by D. W. Griffith as the Birth of a Nation).

Likewise, the first Italian squadristi were organized by landowners in the countryside in response to professional efforts to raise the price of labor-power sold by those working the land. Once in power, fascism further depresses the price of labor-power by outlawing strikes and birth control and placing a renewed emphasis on national potency. Potency—the capacity to reproduce—refers both to the ability to issue money and the ability to issue people, and the nation compensates for its decreasing ability to manipulate the one by more and more aggressively manipulating the other. By forcing the identities of “woman” and “foreigner” into increased circulation and reinstituting to a greater or lesser degree the slavery—in the sense of the un- or undercompensated exchange of labor-power—of those so labeled, fascism promises to extend the privilege of collecting hereditary rent outwards from aristocrats with the appropriate bloodlines to the mass of male citizens possessing the appropriate racial purity. Included in the bargain is the partilineal anxiety about losing one’s inheritance either to an illegitimate heir born of an adulterous wife or to interest payments owed to a professional moneylender living in the city. And so the anti-Semitism and misogyny proper to a previous era’s ruling class returns in today’s alt-right/neo-Nazi memeology of “cucks” and “globalists.” Racist patriarchy is the toxic fumes emitted by a nation desperate to recover its distributive significance by exacerbating the contradictory conditions of its own possibility. Instead of recognizing how territorial borders work to cheapen labor-power worldwide, fascism rebuilds the violence of the border within the territory itself. Racism is simply the common name for this reappearance of border-class struggle within an already instituted distributive unit.

The United States provides a recent concrete example of such a distributive crisis. Beginning in 2008, a decades-long policy of nationally pre-validating the price of land led to a lending crisis.17 Due to the exceptional position of the US dollar as both a national and an international currency, this threatened the global price of money. It was only the extraordinary efforts by the American institutions in charge of the price of money and the price of land—most notably the Federal Reserve and the Treasury via Fannie and Freddie—to re-validate both non-commodities by buying mortgages and debt that kept these markets from collapsing entirely. However, the decades-long destruction of American labor unions by representatives of the former slave states meant that the price of American labor-power enjoyed no corresponding beneficence. It did not return to its precrisis levels, but continued to exchange at a depressed rate. In sum: following the crisis the Federal Reserve played its role as lender of last resort, stabilizing the non-commodity money and reestablishing its exchange.18 The Treasury followed suit, buying enough mortgages via Fannie and Freddie to stabilize the price of land and reestablish its exchange.19 In the matter of the non-commodity labor-power, however, the response was opposite. Not only did the US nation fail to play its role as “labor union of last resort,” but captured state and federal governments actually shed more than half a million jobs following the crisis.20 This is the equivalent of Treasury trying to stem the housing crisis by selling more mortgages, or the Fed responding to the lending crisis by increasing rates.21

With the national mode of distribution comes ways of ameliorating these crises by means of national institutions, but without a guarantee that these will be deployed.22 The nation becomes the territory responsible for absorbing the crisis material of this or that political-economic cycle, but whether it succeeds or fails in doing so depends on other factors. The material trauma of unemployment and the material trauma of bankruptcy are both resolved, to a greater or lesser degree, into the material trauma of the national territory. What the mode of distribution determines first of all is the characteristic distribution of political economic fallout. Like the kingdom before it, the nation is what suffers.

If the functional purpose of the mode of distribution is to effect the class compromises necessary to limit the danger to accumulation posed by the strange capacity of non-commodities to refuse exchange, this function has recently been undermined by the explicit unbundling of fiscal and monetary policy, whose putative combination was the instrumental condition of possibility for the late nation-state’s responsibility. We have seen how this has happened in postcrisis America, which acted decisively to restore the global monetary system but not its citizens’ standard of living. This splitting is also written into the treaties governing the European Union, which mandate the control of inflation but not the control of unemployment, stripping their member states of monetary control without making a comparable adjustment in fiscal policy, which in theory remains with the member states. What both the American and European cases indicate is that the contemporary mode of global distribution is putatively split between a national mode of fiscal policy and a regional mode of monetary policy. The myriad European crises since the global financial crisis of 2008 indicate that the distance between these two kinds of policy inhibits the existence of either, as Greece and other states have learned. Meanwhile, the Union itself is in serious danger of learning the opposite lesson: a regional currency cannot persist without some allowance for regional fiscal policy.23

The resurgent right-wing regimes openly menacing global peace do so in the name of permanently collapsing this distance between sovereignties in favor of the nation—an impossible, utopian task. Faced with the destitution of their kingdoms, absolute monarchs launched pogroms to recover the hoards accumulated by the same class who they depended on, in better times, to raise them money and keep their rivals poor. Fascism is just the national-popular application of this same logic. It is the attempt by the nation to reconquer money by murdering its decadent, cosmopolitan agents, and to shrink the stock of labor-power by re-enslaving women and foreigners. Like workers and professionals, these can be immiserated or destroyed. The restless instability of the non-commodities cannot. These will remain, constitutively, in need of distribution.