Modern capitalism seems to operate with what in gambling is called a double bluff. In many areas of social and political life, it displays an overtly fascist face. Most people, even on the Left, think: “But capitalism can’t really be identical with fascism.” And yet, it is. The ambition of this book is to contribute to the effort to break the double bluff of modern capitalism.

The theoretical starting point of the book is a variation of a well-known phrase by Nicos Poulantzas: Capitalism is authoritarian or it is not capitalism.

The above assertion, which in our disoriented times may seem excessively provocative, is not saying anything radically new. Already Marx and Engels in 1848, in the foundational text of Marxist ideology but also of Marxist social theory, had identified some fundamental characteristics of capitalism, already evident at the time of the Communist Manifesto.

On the political level, the bourgeois state is identified with the bourgeois class: Workers are forced by the state institution to accept their exploitation by capitalists. On the economic level, workers are obliged to endure daily a relationship of subjugation within the very factory itself, from the capitalist, their supervisors, and the machines. And on the ideological level, something especially apparent in the era of neoliberalism: This whole relationship of exploitation/subjugation, this “despotism,” as Marx and Engels call it, is morally legitimized by the clear and explicit goal of the capitalist, which is profit.

The book explains how in the modern era the inherent authoritarianism of capitalism is now fascism.