Fighting Monopoly Is Fighting Fascism

A reflection on our moment, and the political economy that led us here

Image via Minneapolis Star-Tribune

Happy new year gang. I’m very thankful for the readers this still-very-new Substack has attracted in the short time I’ve been writing it. I’m excited to continue tracking resistance to corporate power in communities across the country — resistance that keeps growing by the day. Thanks for being here.

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I’ve been thinking a lot during this sad and disturbing week about the things that prop up and embolden a fascist state. We know of course, both from the industrial history of nazi Germany and from our current economy, that monopolies are key to making authoritarianism work and often serve as the industrial wing of fascism. I wrote about this back in 2019, a year so spiritually distant from today as to feel quaint in retrospect. But the picture was clear even then: If America is to descend into fascism, the state will require the acquiescence of, and often partnership with, corporate power.

Concentrated corporate power allows fascism to more easily exist and function because the interests of a fascist state and industrial monopolies are precisely aligned. The state needs corporations to do a lot of the nitty-gritty work required to carry out population control. The state requires a media willing to amplify and confirm its propaganda. It needs firms willing to produce the tools of surveillance and violence needed to control and imprison citizens. Meanwhile, monopolies are happy to use federal dollars to boost profits, so shareholders and executives keep quiet while they carry out the fascists’ agenda. When I say monopoly is the industrial wing of fascism, this is what I mean.

As antitrust scholar Daniel Crane (along with many, many others) have observed, a series of industrial monopolies and cartels propped up the Nazi regime in Germany. As Crane wrote in his 2020 paper Fascism and Monopoly, “the extreme concentration of market power during the Weimar period enabled Hitler to seize and consolidate totalitarian power through a variety of mechanisms.” The realization that monopolies helped Hitler carry out his agenda inspired a post-war dedication to antimonopoly policy at home. During a debate over strengthening American anti-merger policy, Rep. Emmanuel Celler, for whom the Celler-Kefauver anti-merger act of 1950 is named, pointed out that “monopolies…brought Hitler to power” and could do the same at home. This wasn’t a statement about Germany; it was a vision of a much darker possible future in America. If we don’t stop monopolization, concentrated economic power will lead to concentrated political power because they both want the same thing: to rule without question or opposition.

As monopoly capital regained its grip on the economy throughout the 1980s and 1990s, political leaders in both parties led us astray. Rather than fearing monopolies for their desire to concentrate wealth and power, we were told to embrace them with promises of convenience and cheap stuff to buy. Powerful corporations and the policymakers who supported them have made life significantly worse for many Americans — shuttering factories, crushing unions, moving company headquarters from the Heartland to coastal superstar cities, and making opening and running a small business increasingly unsustainable. The widespread anger at this fracturing of the American Dream pushed many voters toward Trump. Celler’s vision of an America in which an authoritarian rose in the wake of industrial monopolization came to fruition.

And here we are now, in which the fascist street violence happening in front of our eyes is emboldened and given cover by a handful of industrial, big tech and media monopolies. Would opposing these monopolies have stopped some ICE goon from killing Renee Good in Minneapolis? Of course not. But would a steadfast adherence to the political goals of antimonopoly over the past half-century have prevented the anger and desperation that allowed fascism to take power in America? I would argue yes, it would have, and as dark and bleak as things feel now, that understanding makes the importance of antimonopoly work clear today. Things are bad, but the fight is never over.

That’s really what’s at stake when we show up to oppose data centers, the privatized surveillance state of Amazon, the decimation of small businesses and community banks through monopoly tactics, and every other exploitative, extractive corporation. The more power and wealth we can strip away from corporate monopolies and redistribute to communities and working people, the weaker the fascist state becomes and the less likely it is to rekindle from its ashes in the future. To say that we have a world to win isn’t hyperbole. It’s very literally the stakes of our struggle against corporate control. But we’re here, and we’re fighting. Keep your heads up.