U.S. capitalism is rotting. We can smell the decay on the air. We can see it in the stale and joyless advertisements, the collapse of banks bidding heavily on speculative investments, the sharp rollercoaster of the daily stock market as it bumps and jolts from highs to lows, in the steep climb of food and fuel prices, in the retreaded and rechewed movies from mega-franchises, and we can hear it in the desperate rhetoric of our imperial politicians. Nowhere is this structural putrefaction more advanced than in the state of Florida.
Fascism, remember, has three faces: nascent fascism, or fascism out-of-power, secure fascism, or fascism-in-power, and fascism in crisis. George Jackson wrote of fascism, in his seminal Blood in My Eye, that
[fascism] exists in more than one form. In fact, historically it has proved to have three different faces. One “out of power” that tends almost to be revolutionary and subversive, anticapitalist and antisocialist. One “in power but not secure”—this is the sensational aspect of fascism that we see on screen and read of in pulp novels, when the ruling class, through its instrumental regime, is able to suppress the vanguard party of the people’s and workers’ movement. The third face of fascism exists when it is “in power and securely so.” During this phase some dissent may even be allowed… In April 1925, three years after the fascist March on Rome, Benedetto Croce was able to publish a clearly anti-fascist manifesto.
These correspond to the three periods of U.S. history. Rising fascism was the ethos of the settler-republic as it spread across, first, the continent and then the globe. Ascendent fascism reigned from the end of the second World War until the mid-1990s. Now we are faced with an increasingly aggressive crisis-fascism, and fascism in crisis takes no prisoners.
Florida, under its far-right governor DeSantis, has served for the past seven years as the beating heart of U.S. reaction. A nonexistent income tax, almost no COVID protections, a network of virulently anti-Communist Latine communities — Puerto Ricans against independence for their state, Venezuelans opposed to the Bolivarian Revolution, and of course, the enormous numbers of Cuban exiles who once owned lucrative businesses, casinos, plantations, and criminal enterprises in what is now a Marxist-Leninist republic — gave the reactionary GOP what they needed to dominate state politics. Thus, the right flank of the imperial political machine — the ultra-reactionary wing of the GOP — has seen the reward of their decades-long strategy to transform Florida from a swing state into a bastion of resurgent right-fascism. The political program of the GOP has blossomed into the full and noxious flower of an expansive terrorist-state, with its terror aimed squarely at the immiserated and oppressed.
The Fascism of the United States
Fascism was defined by the Communist International, much too simply, as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.” This is the definition most often parrotted today, without much interrogation. But this was 1935, and an in-depth and correct analysis of fascism was yet to come. Landmark work by Black theorists like Aimé Césaire and George Jackson would further illuminate the nature of fascism, would further explore the connection between the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler and the great imperialist undertakings of the West.
In particular, German fascism drew much of its inspiration from the legal, social, and economic structure of the U.S. settler-republic and its reaching toward empire. The elements of fascism are the same as the elements that make a successful European domination of a foreign colony. In the United States, like all settler-colonies, the colony being dominated has always been within the geographic borders of the state itself. Unlike Germany, in the early part of U.S. history, when it was still primarily a collection of English and formerly French colonies, the U.S. had two settler-colonial nations: the Yankee north, composed primarily of English protestant smallholders, merchants, slave-traders, and artisans, and the Dixie south, composed of an admixture of French and English plantation owners and small-scale farmers. These nations both developed brutal, repressive techniques of control and exploitation: economic, social, and legal. These include class collaborationism — the fusing together of the interests of disparate social classes in one nation — “racial” laws, and eugenics.
Go ahead, if you will, and hear what Dmitrov has to say about the German fascist project: it is, he says, “not only bourgeois nationalism, it is fiendish chauvinism. It is a government system of political gangsterism, a system of provocation and torture practised upon the working class and the revolutionary elements of the peasantry, the petit bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. It is medieval barbarity and bestiality, it is unbridled aggression in relation to other nations.” He could very well be speaking of the U.S. government itself.
Class collaboration was, for a very long time, the basis of all U.S. governmental policy. Land was given to the land-hungry Yankee handicraftsman or Dixie farmer by taking it directly from the Indigenous peoples the government was murdering. In the early period of the U.S. settler-republic, fascism was insecure and establishing itself. After the Civil War, it became a secure fascism. In its political security, fascism need not maintain a “terroristic dictatorship” — except among the oppressed nations within its borders. The U.S. has, for the last century, been in a state of more or less secure fascism. But fascism in crisis rules differently. As the rate of profit falls and the great capitalists of the settler-colony become more and more desperate to stave off social revolution — fascism in crisis rules by blood and gunpowder. It rules by national domination.
DeSantis himself represents this most dangerous strain of fascist retrenchment. A Yale and Harvard graduate, lawyer, and U.S. Naval officer, he participated in the criminal deployment in Guantanamo in 2006 and the equally criminal invasion of Iraq in 2007. From this typical background he went on to serve in the federal government as the mouthpiece of the most extreme right-leaning bourgeois interests. He was a founding member of the ultra-right “Freedom Caucus” in the United States House of Representatives.
What is the spoiled harvest that Florida’s cackling DeSantis is now reaping? He leads the way in COVID denialism, going so far as to have data scientists working to reveal the dangers of the disease and the true scope of its spread attacked and jailed by police. He also stands at or near the forefront of the heinous anti-LGBT crusade launched by the right-fascists. His pet legislature has passed into law HB 1069, prohibiting sex education on sexual orientation or gender identity up through the 8th grade; SB 254, an extreme ban on gender-affirming care, and HB 1521, a so-called “bathroom bill.” He has also signed SB 266, enabling state oversight of education, and SB 1580, which permits healthcare providers from denying care to patients on the basis of “religious, moral, or ethical beliefs.” A more detailed list of these assaults on human dignity can be found at the Human Rights Campaign website.
Like the other arch-reactionaries, DeSantis and his cronies have assaulted not only workers and the oppressed, but have also launched their attacks against other fractions of the ruling class. His government has been engaged in a long-standing tangle with the Walt Disney Company and its exercise of near-feudal rights over a portion of central Florida. Not that DeSantis takes exception to a corporation acting as a municipal government. No, it’s the fact that Disney occasionally showcases LGBT identities and gay and lesbian relationships in a positive light that so offends Mr. DeSantis and his legion of monsters.
The “Transportation” Scheme
But what does all this have to do with Florida’s workers?
As part of a league of reactionary and xenophobic governors and legislatures in the most reactionary southern governments, the DeSantis administration has joined with men like Texas Governor Gregg Abbott to “transport migrants” out of Florida. The opening salvo from DeSantis came last year when he rounded up two planes full of undocumented workers and flew them to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Apparently by executive order, he commanded the Florida Department of Transportation to spend $615,000 chartering the flights. In the wake of that scandal, DeSantis promised, “These are just the beginning efforts… We’ve got an infrastructure in place now. There’s going to be a lot more that’s happening.”
He wasn’t lying.
On Wednesday, February 15 of this year, DeSantis signed into law a $12 million program designed to “relocate unauthorized aliens from this state.” The governor now has the power, through this bill and the Florida Department of Emergency Management, which has been given the authority to perform the “relocations,” to award lucrative government contracts without bidding or vetting to anyone he chooses. Those awarded the contracts would be made responsible for “moving migrants across the country.”
On May 10, 2023, DeSantis fired the latest salvo in this scheme: Senate Bill 1718, requiring all Florida employers with over 25 employees to affirmatively verify the work-status or citizenship of every employee. The law takes effect July 1, and provides stiff criminal penalties to businesses that employ undocumented workers. Transportation of undocumented workers into the state will be punishable by five to fifteen years in prison. It will require hospitals to check the immigration status of all patients. In the words of the archbishop of Miami, it would “criminalize empathy.”
A Reich in Search of Its Volk
Because the Civil War destroyed the division between Yankee and Dixie, and because the U.S. was flooded with a huge wave of immigration from Europe at the end of the 19th century, the discrete, coherent settler-nations disintegrated in the early 20th century, leaving behind only the generalized category of “white” racialization.
It’s not enough for fascism to have this overall category. The most powerful aspect of the ideology is the use of a national identity to foster class collaboration. Lacking a modern U.S. white-national identity, the fascists have set out to build one. The constant deployment by the right-fascist politicians of various forms of white religiosity (Evangelical, Catholic, you-name-it) is but one example of the efforts undertaken by the right-fascists to build up a white national identity.
Aggressively fascist policies like the transportation scheme cooked up by the reactionary league are another method of white-nation-building. This is blood-and-soil white nationalism of the kind espoused by the marchers in Charlottesville, Virginia in 2017: ”You” — or, sometimes “Jews” — “will not replace us.” One of the things fascists promise to bring the working class onto their side is internal colonization: the removal of “undesirable” ethnicities and nationalities, and the transference of their land to the favored nation. Here, the establishment of “undesirables” will help to define the white southern nation.
But the result of DeSantis’ extreme and aggressive fascism hasn’t been a new lebensraum for the people of Florida. Quite the opposite: shelves are emptying and stores are closing down. Florida is, after all, home to a population of some 800,000 undocumented workers out of a workforce of approximately 9.6 million. That’s over eight percent of the working population of Florida that will be subject to removal.
The Contradiction and the Catastrophe
For a fascist plan like this to work, there needs to be an oppressor nation in the first place, and in the second, that oppressor nation has to actually take over the jobs and land of the displaced and deported people. That’s not happening in Florida.
The state director of the American Business Immigration Coalition explained why: “The narrative that immigrants are not welcome here is going to have a huge impact on our business community — in particular industries such as construction, hospitality, health care, and agriculture — because they rely solely or primarily on migrant labor.” (Emphasis added.)
That is to say, the lifestyles of Floridians, and U.S. imperial workers in general, is funded on the exploitation of cheap labor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of undocumented immigrants have already begun to flee Florida, moving to get out from under the Sword of Damocles DeSantis’ bellicose team have swung. According to CBS, the law was already causing a panic before DeSantis even signed it. Empty construction sites have appeared all across Miami-Dade County. TikTok and Youtube videos reveal empty store shelves and shuttered businesses.
The fact of the matter is this: the semi-fascist U.S. already exploits these migrant laborers. The extraction of their labor at the most menial and subsistence tasks is already more than DeSantis can hope to win by handing over their meager apartments and few belongings. The cheap products that we rely on here in the midst of the U.S. Empire are cheap directly to the degree that enslaved and semi-enslaved labor produces them. As the undocumented families leave Florida, labor costs will continue to rise. Markets will sit empty, fruit will rot on the shelf, and buildings will stand unbuilt.
The right-fascists have made a critical miscalculation: the people they are trying to fuse into a single white-national United States has absolutely no desire to do the kind of menial, repetitive, and physically demanding jobs carried out every day by undocumented workers, with no enforceable worker’s rights, and no way to enforce them even if they wanted to. Many workers in the U.S. Empire, even though they can’t find work, side with the imperial overlord itself.
We, the pampered and cozy workers of the Western empires, have grown accustomed to our cheap amenities: coffee, with the beans imported from slave-conditions in Central America; cell phones, whose processors are made out of conflict materials; the list goes on and on.
While attempting to prop up his fascist program, DeSantis has actually knocked down a leg of the precarious assembly of economic facts that his office has been trying to weaponize. This deadly hatred espoused by DeSantis is, of course, what the bourgeois capitalists would like to do to all of us workers. DeSantis merely has the courage, in a roundabout and purposefully circumscribed fashion, to speak his mind, to tell the people that he believes they should be imprisoned, deported, or killed. This contradiction is part of a wider contradiction, in which Capital — bourgeois, capitalist production as a whole, the aggregate of all the individual capitalists of the U.S. state — creates the conditions for its own, ultimate destruction.
Here, we see it in action in its most regressive and brutal form. DeSantis is creating the conditions not only for the destruction of the liberal order of Europe and the Americas: he is creating the conditions for the revolutionary overthrow of his office itself.
