Reflections on Authoritarian Times

In his Scritti corsari (Corsair Writings, 1973-75), Pier Paolo Pasolini made claims that shocked many of his interlocutors in Italy and elsewhere. His critique of the idea of progress would certainly infuriate intellectuals and politicians who struggled for liberal democracy after decades of rule by dictatorship in Southern Europe. In a text he wrote on June 10, 1974, for the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, under the title “Italians Are Not What They Used to Be” (retitled “A Study of the Anthropological Revolution in Italy”), Pasolini noted with typical verve:

if [Portuguese] fascism were to prevail, it would be the fascism of Spínola, not that of Caetano: that is, it would be a fascism even worse than the traditional kind, but it would no longer be precisely fascism. It would be something that we [in Italy] are in fact already living through …¹

1974 was the end of an era for Portugal; and here was Pasolini, a filmmaker people admired, changing the lens through which others saw the world. He wrote these words just weeks after the outbreak of the Carnation Revolution of April 25, which put an end to 48 years of fascism in Portugal. During those weeks and in the course of the following months, people celebrated the end of the long dictatorship in Portugal, an end that was intimately tied to independence of the colonies after thirteen years of wars of liberation: Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cabo Verde, São-Tomé-e-Principe. Pasolini’s statements felt shockingly dissonant not only because Portugal at that very point in time was celebrating the end of a protracted fascist-imperial rule, but also, more importantly, because he was exposing a breach in those cries of freedom that only now is becoming apparent: the quiet sabotaging of liberal democracy’s own dusky anti-fascism. Indeed, Pasolini saw Marcello Caetano as a less bad “traditional fascist” than the new president, General António De Spínola.

Caetano represented the ruler António de Oliveira Salazar in 1968, when, due to a fall from a chair, Salazar went into a semi-comatose state and died two years later. As an old ally of Salazar’s, Caetano held the ruler’s position until the Carnation Revolution. Spínola, on the other hand, was the first presidential representative after the revolution who had been appointed by the very liberating powers of the MFA (Movimento das Forças Armadas, or Armed Forces Movement). So why would Pasolini say that Spínola, the representative of a new era of democracy, heralded a fascism “even worse than the traditional kind”? Moreover, why would he say that what made this new, post-revolutionary fascism worse was that “it would no longer be precisely fascism”? How should we understand the relationship between the “worse” and the imprecise? In other words, how could Spínola’s quasi-fascism be worse than Salazar’s and Caetano’s own traditional fascism?

That question is particularly intriguing given the long-held debate among historians as to whether the regime in Portugal was a legitimate example of fascism—with its non-expansionist agenda (Salazar’s imperial rhetoric emphasized preservation, rather than expansion, as in the famous 1950s slogan, “Integrate so as Not to Hand Over”), its cult of isolationism and poverty, and its ruler’s non-charismatic personality. Indeed, and ironically given Pasolini’s theory, the prevalent reading of Portugal’s dictatorship is that it was always an “imprecise” form of fascism. To be sure, this reading is based on the balance of power characteristic of the Portuguese type of authoritarianism. Unlike in Italy and Germany, where an aggressive populist right dominated the conservative bourgeoisie with which it made alliances, in Portugal it was the bourgeois conservative right that dominated, and manipulated, the more plebeian populist right with whose forces it unified against the common enemy, revolutionary socialism. In short, what made Portugal’s an always already “imprecise” fascism was the dominance of the traditional bourgeoisie over the rowdy, rabble-rousing tendencies of the populist right elsewhere. This explains why, exercising cold-war Realpolitik, Western liberal democracies saw no incongruity in inviting Portugal to be one of NATO’s founding members in 1949.

Pasolini’s writings between 1973 and 1975 were prescient warnings about Italy’s future, but the future he foresaw would become a global condition. He targeted the intellectual biases of the “conformist left,” less for its failure to see the fading of a world than for its misreading of the world that was emerging. Given to ecological speculation, Pasolini compared this misreading to the failure to notice the disappearance of fireflies.² Originally titled “The Vacuum of Power in Italy,” the article on fireflies he wrote on February 10, 1975, draws a parallel between this “explosive and riveting” phenomenon and the left’s attachment to narratives of liberal freedom and progress. With its clamorous praise for the bright daylight that it associated with economic development in the post-war era, the “old left” also ignored the dusk that would have allowed them to detect the odd vanishing of fireflies. In fact, the light of day was artificial, a mere postponement of darkness—this Pasolini grasped. For his part, Pasolini wanted to grapple with the dusk, to dwell in the transition between worlds, and to reflect on how each world grows out of another. He wanted to awaken the left from the moral comforts of binary oppositions, between conservative and liberal, right and left, fascism and anti-fascism.

To be sure, Pasolini did not fail to take these oppositions seriously. Rather, he was interested in comprehending the dialectical fluidities of a logic that, through these very oppositions, was ultimately benefiting right-wing powers. Pasolini saw with political acumen the theatrical trick, the tension between contraries, that anthropologist Claude Lévi-Straus taught us in “The Sorcerer and His Magic.” Quesalid (“for this was the name he received when he became a sorcerer”), the most skeptical of shamanistic techniques, became the greatest shaman of all.³ Precisely the thing that would weaken the persuasiveness of Quesalid’s shamanistic performance, his skepticism, made his healing system work. For in his wish to debunk the system, he had to master the techniques behind it. Foremost among these was the technique of transitioning from polar opposition—for example, the sorcerer-patient dyad—to a logical confusion of revealing and concealing that obscured the boundaries between them. Similarly, Pasolini analyzed the operations of a fundamental misperception that leads to a dumbfounding question: What if the right creates a fascism that will create an anti-fascism whose ultimate purpose is to educate the left? This is the kind of cunning, the diabolical cynicism, that led Pasolini to sound the alarm, delivering a call that irritated his left-wing comrades in the years before his own death in 1975.

When, on the dawn of April 25, 1974, the MFA took power, Caetano famously declared to the revolutionaries that he would only renounce power to a higher-ranking officer. The Armed Forces then agreed to this condition. They assigned General Spínola, who had been Governor and Vice-Chief of the Armed Forces of Portuguese Guinea before returning to Lisbon in 1973, at the invitation of Caetano himself, to lead the “Overseas Dossier.” Spínola was a hardline bourgeois conservative who had called for the retreat of the Portuguese from the colonies in Africa. The General spoke of the need to bring the wars of independence, which had been ongoing since at least 1962, and which had killed many people and left many more injured, to an end. Because the ousted regime within the metropolis was so tightly bound up with the maintenance of the colonies at any cost, Spínola’s outspoken anti-colonialism, and even his avowed anti-fascism, could momentarily be seen as liberal and progressive, and thus he could be seen as fit for the presidency in the post-revolutionary era. That this would prove a miscalculation was evident when his plot to carry out a counter-revolutionary coup to reinstall a capitalist right-wing government was discovered. Following the failure of the military coup on March 11, 1975, Spínola exiled himself to Brazil, then under the US-backed military rule of Emilio Medici and Ernesto Geisel, whose government combined fascist techniques with policies meant to encourage an economic rebuilding.

Time would show that opposition to the maintenance of the “Overseas Provinces”—which is how the colonies were renamed in the constitution in the early 1950s, after Portugal became a founding member of NATO—did not in itself make one a left-wing liberal or progressive. In his well-known book Portugal and the Future, Spínola makes it clear, if only inadvertently, that he defended decolonization not because of an ethical commitment to the right of self-determination of colonized countries but rather because he shared with other NATO members, most vehemently of all the United States, the view that Portugal was economically and politically backward because it clung to an arcane ideology of empire. Spínola was giving voice to the same idea that Hannah Arendt notes in her preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism, notably, that Portugal’s exceptional backwardness was a direct result of its longstanding role as a colonial power and its refusal to embrace modern Europe. What concerned Spínola, in sum, was how the old myth of the Portuguese empire was an impediment to economic modernization and U.S.-style capitalism. What he wanted to implement in Portugal in the aftermath of the revolution—and hoped would incite a counter-revolution—was a quick passage from fascism and imperialism to neoliberal economic reform. What happened instead was the onset of the Processo Revolucionário em Curso (PREC, or Ongoing Revolutionary Process), characterized by labor movements, occupation, appropriation, and the nationalization of the private sector, which led to the exodus of bosses and the technocratic business class from the country.

However, this period of countering Spínola’s right-wing coup was short-lived, ending after the failed left-wing coup d’état on November 25, 1975. Spínola’s counter-revolution aspired to implement an economic doctrine identical to what Friedrich Hayek proffered during his visit to Chile under General Pinochet in 1977. Hayek’s famous dictum that he would prefer a “liberal dictator to a democratic government lacking liberalism” encapsulated Spínola’s ideological “great swing to the Right,” to borrow Stuart Hall’s cogent phrase.⁴ It meant training one’s expertise in the fluid manipulation of contraries: authoritarian limited government, free market tyranny, regulated privatization, and deregulated trading, which shaped what we now clearly see rising, globally, as neoliberal, authoritarian governance. It is this contact between “night” and “day,” a crossroads between two seemingly opposite worlds, that today renders apparent what, for Pasolini, was already clear in the 1970s. Pasolini’s promise of a “fascism that would be even worse than the traditional kind,” because “it would no longer be precisely fascism,” perhaps begins to make some sense in this context. Implicit here is an operational solidarity between authoritarianism and neoliberalism. The likely success of that cooperation requires a mutual mitigation of sorts, a sinister reflexivity, a bizarre arithmetic: authoritarianism becomes an imprecise fascism; neoliberalism becomes an imprecise deregulation.

This mutual imbrication is precisely where the right’s strength lies today. Time and again, it shows us that its greatest ability is to deny what it embraces in order to distract the left. If we take this fact into account, then perhaps we can better grasp why it is that the people who deny climate change, who ignore and even deride its catastrophic impact on particular geographies and certain populations, are the same people who are preparing for a gloriously enrapturing exit from the world—one sanctioned by biblical visions—whether to an island, another planet, or the bottom of the ocean. It is a peculiar form of eschatology in plain sight, an eschatology without ends, that we are witnessing today. For the right, the reasoning is not that the end is forthcoming, but that it is already here—in the ongoing extreme middle.⁵ And the time that remains is merely for making that end-that-is-already-here ever more explicit.

Composed of several essays, Pasolini’s Scritti corsari warn of this odd dance between opposites, between the old and the new worlds, where the opposite of fascism is not always anti-fascism, since it is in the nature of fascism to breed its own anti-language and thereby immobilize the left. Again, this is not to suggest that, for Pasolini, fascism does not apply on the right. On the contrary, it is to highlight the gelatinous flexibility of an ideology that we still tend to equate with rigidity. As Pasolini writes in another text:

The old fascism, even if only through its rhetorical degeneration, stood out: while the new fascism—which is something else entirely—has no outstanding qualities at all: it is not rhetorical …, it is pragmatic in the American style. Its goal is the brutally totalitarian reorganization and homogenization of the world.⁶

Pasolini’s Scritti corsari draw attention to the fundamental question today: how, in a moment when the left seems to have lost its political grammars and political imagination, can it be sure that it is not adopting the very language of antagonism against the right that the right itself brought into being? How can we be sure that the left is not redundantly doing the work of the right? The imprecise form of fascism that Pasolini describes is, then, characterized by the pragmatic malleability that the right masters in the midst of its expansionist agenda and its ongoing wars. It mimics the features of the dusk (imprecisely) only to accelerate the advent of what it seems to deny—a firefly-deprived world.

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Escritos corsários, translated by Maria Betânia Amoroso (Editora 34, 2020), 77 (emphasis added). [↩]
2. Pasolini, Escritos corsários, 162. [↩]
3. Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Sorcerer and His Magic,” in Structural Anthropology, translated by Claire Jacobson and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (Doubleday Anchor, 1967), 175. [↩]
4. Bruce Caldwell and Leonilda Montes, “Friedrich Hayek and His Visits to Chile,” The Review of Austrian Economics 28, no. 3 (2015): 298; Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show,” Marxism Today (January 1979): 14. [↩]
5. For a development of this idea in another context, see Maria José de Abreu, The Charismatic Gymnasium: Breath, Media, and Religious Revivalism in Contemporary Brazil (Duke University Press, 2021). [↩]
6. Pasolini, Escritos corsários, 83. [↩]