Excerpted with permission from The Politics of Corporations in ‘New’ India, published by Cambridge University Press.Fascist elements exist in all modern societies, but usually as fringe phenomena. They move centre stage only when supported by big business, and this happens when the economy gets submerged in a protracted and insurmountable crisis that poses a threat to the existence of the system. In such a situation, fascist elements become useful to big business for several reasons. First, their ruthless commitment to authoritarianism comes in handy for suppressing working-class organizations and workers’ struggles. Second, they target some hapless religious, ethnic, or linguistic minorities, and foment hatred against them within the majority group, to completely move the discourse away from material living conditions towards obtaining revenge for some imagined wrongs committed by these minority groups against the majority in the past. Third, this very campaign divides the working people and helps prevent any united struggles on issues of material deprivation generated by the crisis.Big business forms an alliance with the fascist elements because of the ‘benefits’ these elements bring to it in a period of insurmountable crisis (in fact the crisis itself is often blamed on such a vilified minority group, for example, unemployment being blamed on immigrants). It promotes these elements through financial and media support and helps them come to power in exchange, not just for general security against working-class militancy in the face of the crisis but for tangible gains for enrichment which become otherwise elusive in a period of crisis.We are witnessing such trends in contemporary India, where there is a corporate–Hindutva alliance which has led to the creation of an authoritarian regime and growing fascistic trends. The features of the Hindutva–corporate regime are (a) an authoritarian suppression of dissent, (b) the fomenting of hatred against a hapless minority group, (c) the conferring of massive benefits on big business generally and on certain favoured elements within it in particular, and (d) the combination of reliance on state institutions with the use of fascist thugs, for unleashing repression.As long as neoliberalism had ushered in high growth, even though this growth was accompanied, as we have seen, by an increase in absolute poverty of the working people, it still enjoyed a degree of general support, as it held out the hope that it would eventually bring benefits to the suffering people, that the fruits of this growth would eventually ‘trickle down’ even to those experiencing material deprivation at the moment. With the onset of the crisis, however, this hope disappears; the system requires a new prop for its viability and this is provided by neo-fascism (P. Patnaik 2021).There is a tendency among liberals to see the ascendancy of Hindutva–fascistic trends entirely in sociopolitical terms, such as the use of religious symbolism by the liberal bourgeois political formations, the lack of any concerted fight against ‘communalism’, and so on. This sees the Hindutva agenda of the fascist RSS in complete isolation from neoliberalism. Marxism alone links the two, which is why it can also see the connection between the emergence of neo-fascism in India and similar tendencies in other parts of the world. While the ascendancy of neo-fascism is extremely dangerous for the working people, it is also indicative of the weakness of neoliberal capitalism, the fact that it can no longer proceed in its old ways. This ascendancy in short is the potential harbinger of a fundamental change.There is a crucial difference between the old fascism of the 1930s and contemporary neo-fascism. Unlike the earlier cases, the crisis cannot be overcome even by neo-fascism today. The old fascism had got the countries where it had come to power out of the Great Depression, as soon as it came to power, through borrowing-financed military expenditure that it undertook in preparation for war. Japan was the first country to come out of the Great Depression in 1931, followed by Germany after the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933 (Kalecki 1972b). There was even a brief period when unemployment had been overcome but the full horrors of the war had not yet been unleashed, during which the fascists had acquired a degree of popularity in the countries where they held power.Neo-fascism, however, is incapable of overcoming mass unemployment, because the same constraint that hampers liberal bourgeois governments, namely the dictate of international finance capital to refrain from either taxing the rich or resorting to a fiscal deficit for garnering resources that can raise government expenditure to stimulate aggregate demand, also holds for a neo-fascist government. Such a government, therefore, cannot expand aggregate demand, unlike the old fascist governments in whose case finance capital was basically national and hence amenable to state persuasion.This means that the neo-fascist government could conceivably be voted out of office: its incapacity to overcome the crisis will at some point affect its popularity, and it also retains the shell of democratic practices like elections despite making democracy hollow. But even if it is voted out of office, since the succeeding liberal government too cannot overcome the crisis within the confines of neoliberalism and would earn public disapproval for this, neo-fascism will soon make a comeback. Neo-fascism, in other words, will be with us for a long time because of the lingering crisis of neoliberalism, vitiating the atmosphere and causing, over time, a progressive ‘fascification’ of society.To overcome neo-fascism, it follows, we have to overcome the conjuncture that produces it, the conjuncture of the crisis of neoliberal capitalism. Since this crisis cannot be overcome within the confines of neoliberal capitalism itself, its resolution requires going beyond neoliberal capitalism. And since neoliberal capitalism represents the very latest stage that capitalism has reached, a world beyond which even bourgeois theorists cannot imagine, going beyond it must entail a transition, through stages, towards socialism.In other words, unlike what the liberal thinkers imagine, the struggle against neo-fascism is not just a matter of forming a united front with other political forces to restore the status quo ante; that would only bring neo-fascism back to office after a short while. The struggle against neo-fascism can succeed only if it puts an end to the crisis unleashed by neoliberalism, and the measures for doing so will necessarily set up a dialectic that will carry us beyond capitalism, not immediately, of course, but through stages.The dead end of neoliberalism constitutes historically the potential harbinger of a socialist order. Progress towards such an order would be complex, drawn out, and fraught with difficulties, but a theoretical awareness of this historic potential is essential for praxis.Prabhat Patnaik is professor emeritus of economics at Jawaharlal Nehru University.