The bourgeoisie, like all other rulers before them, rely on a web of social narratives that justifies their position over the lower classes. This position as hegemon over social discourses serves a variety of purposes- tamping down on potential the revolutionary consciousness and highlighting offenders of that order as scapegoats to take the blame for that society’s material contradictions. Much like the Capitalist economic structure itself, the reactionary and frictive tendencies within Capitalist society reproduces not for its own purposes, but to uphold that ruling class, the bourgeoisie. However, in the current era, the bourgeoisie’s control has become so absolute, and been so unchallenged, that those bourgeois leaders find the world they have made insufficiently tailored to their liking. Amidst the triumph of bourgeois reaction, their clearly stated intent is further regression to pre-Liberal forms: the conversion of the wealthiest bourgeoisie into new absolutist royalty. This ultra-reaction shows the futile short-termism of Capitalist thought; these mega-rich would trade (and have traded!) the functions of their control for illusory heightened form. Such contradiction is frankly inevitable; the existence of any ruling class is one which constantly commands that it be carried to new heights.

The current fascist movement makes no secret of its Monarchist dreams. Whether Caesar or CEO, their fondest wish is to return society to the absolutist forms of pre-bourgeois Liberal revolutions. The current society, they cry, is ruled over by inhuman “bug-men” lacking any sort of elan or dasein, which requires the restoration of an absolute ruler. This, obviously, is utter nonsense; the backers of the Fascist movement are, as in every other instance in history, the highest ranks of the financial bourgeoisie. As Marx described in The German Ideology, the contrived motivations of these Neo-Monarchists is complete fabrication, designed to sell their lust for ever more power to their lower-class supporters, giving the foot-soldiers of fascism a scapegoat to be aimed at, one they are more likely to see in their daily lives than the most elevated bourgeois ruling from afar. The first irony here is that this scapegoated group-the administrative state, the “lanyard class”, the “Cathedral”-exists to facilitate Capitalist industry and regulate the working class into a reliable labor force. But after decades of vilifying this “middle management”, the ascendance of a certain pyromaniac tendency within the Fascist movement sees the would-be kings of the bourgeoisie gleefully taking an axe to the legs of their thrones.

And, one might ask, how stable would such a throne be? From historical examples, we can see clearly just how well pre-democratic absolutism responded to their inevitable material contradictions-that is to say, not well at all. Try as they might with ideas of eugenics, the Prosperity “Gospel”, and white supremacy, these bourgeois Neo-Monarchists do not have anything even approaching a superstructure capable of returning the United States back to a previous state of history. We can see in their relentless pursuit of AI that (among other unsavory things) this would-be nobility seeks to maintain or even further empower the security state that is modern American society so as to dampen the response to the complete regression of that society to the absolutist mode. Of course this “security” industry that such an effort would require itself requires, like every other industry that currently enriches the bourgeoisie, a highly educated, literate, and technically capable working class, something that absolutist society has also shown itself historically incapable of supporting. The endgame of bourgeois absolutism shows in total clarity the contradictions of any ruling class’ desire to maintain that rule: their wealth and power draws from the capabilities of the working class, but their unchecked and insecure thirst for power makes the growing ability of the working class an intolerable breach of their control. The bourgeoisie are compelled to dream of regressive social forms by their fearful need to maintain the forms of rulership, even at the cost of those functions by which their present power is maintained.

Perhaps nothing so clearly epitomizes their vain and delusional efforts as the racism which so clearly permeates and drives the current Fascist movement. The working class, simply by being the majority of society, has always been the most diverse class-something the ruling classes, both absolutist and Liberal, have often exploited. The United States, from its conception, has been proof of that trend, utilizing the supposed inferiority of non-“white” proletarians to create a group of even more exploitable labor and stymie the development of class consciousness in the American proletariat. But once more, in the current historical moment, the bourgeoisie-led Fascist movement have mistaken the forms of racist oppression for their function, curbing its usefulness within the Liberal superstructure to uphold bourgeois rule. This is not itself a new mistake; the bourgeoisie of the Gilded Age, and their successors married into the European Ancien Regimes, were obsessed with eugenics and “racial science” in ways their modern Fascist heirs clearly ape. Within the mindset of bourgeois social dominance, non-white people, in contrast to the more uniformly white bourgeoisie, are representative of and belonging to the “lower classes”; their social presence and influence, like the growing capabilities of the working class as a whole, cannot be tolerated by these would-be tyrants. Hence the increasing application of their attack dogs, the Fascist street gangs and police state bullies, into Latino, Black, and Asian communities to return them to some imagined docility. But these immaterial delusions of bourgeois “race science” and its brutal application upon the American proletariat appears to be backfiring in historical fashion. These superstructural divisions may delude some dispossessed but socially privileged members of the proletariat, but it is apparent that this crackdown on the non-white members of the working class has pushed even Left-Liberals to great and authentic opposition with the current Fascist movement. By buying into their own racist illusions and pushing them past the tolerances of Liberal acceptance, the bourgeoisie forgo the functions of racial division for the form of racial purity. This is the inevitable tendency of ruling classes-like the accretion of planets from cosmic rubble, the gravity of their control demands more and more mass by its sheer existence.

This inevitability should not lead us to pity or forgive the bourgeoisie. As much as their actions are determined by their position as a ruling class, it is ultimately their decision outside of the historical moment to maintain that parasitism over the working class. Fascism, then, serves as the 21st-century “white terror” against the threat of communist uprising-with no Ancien Regime to regress to, the forces of reaction seek to crown the leading bourgeois heads as Neo-absolutist rulers. Such moves reveal the blinkered and fearful thinking of the Capitalists-understanding neither the history that led to their present position, nor the society that has been so thoroughly crafted to their benefit, they will tear up this society to their autocratic liking, leaving us all reduced in the process. Until communist revolution ends this cycle of rulers and ruled, society will forever be held back by such dominators.